The Hackett Group, Inc. (HCKT) Q2 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good evening, and welcome to The Hackett Group Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised the conference is being recorded. Hosting tonight's call are Mr. Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO; and Mr. Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Ramirez, you may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss The Hackett Group second quarter results. Speaking on the call today and here to answer your questions are Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of The Hackett Group; and myself, Robert Ramirez, CFO. A press announcement was released over the wires at 4:08 p.m. Eastern Time. For a copy of the release, please visit our website at www.thehackettgroup.com. We will also place any additional financial or statistical data discussed on this call that is not contained in the release on the Investor Relations page of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that in the following comments and in the Q&A session, we will be making statements about expected future results, which may be forward-looking statements for the purposes of the federal securities laws. These statements relate to our current expectations, estimates and projections and are not a guarantee of future performance. They involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict and which may not be accurate. Actual results may vary. These forward-looking statements should be considered only in conjunction with the detailed information, particularly the risk factors that are contained in our SEC filings. At this point, I would like to turn it over to Ted.

Thank you, Rob, and welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss The Hackett Group's Second Quarter 2026 results and more importantly, to review the progress of our AI transition strategy. Our business is undergoing a powerful AI transition. We have been aggressively moving from a traditional consulting and implementation delivery model to a fundamentally different AI-enabled platform-led model that we believe will create a structurally stronger, more scalable and highly differentiated Hackett Group. Over the past 2 years, we have systematically built an integrated suite of proprietary platforms, starting with with AI XPLR, which focuses on AI solution ideation design and build and more recently with XT, which focuses on enterprise transformation solutions and AIX, which focuses on software implementation solutions. All of our platforms are uniquely informed by our Hackett benchmarks and process best practice intelligence IP as well as our domain-specific Hackett Solution Language Model, or SLM. When we guided our Q2 results, we believe that as more clients were exposed to our new XT and AIX platforms, the more differentiated and competitive our primary go-to-market offerings would become. That became clearly evident towards the latter part of the quarter when we successfully closed several significant proposals totaling over $30 million, which are expected to drive improving sequential revenues and year-over-year earnings per share growth in the third quarter. This represents a significant operational and financial inflection point in our AI-enabled transition and earnings trajectory. The positive market response to our platform reinforces our conviction that enterprises are seeking trusted outcome-oriented solutions that accelerate value realization while reducing transformation risk, positioning Hackett to drive operating results and long-term shareholder value. As platform adoption scales across our clients throughout the balance of the year, we expect a favorable impact to our Q4 results and also to set up a very strong 2027. Our new XT and AIX platforms are at the heart of our aggressive adoption of our AI-enabled sales and delivery model at the beginning of the year. They allow us to leverage and deploy AI-enabled acceleration and enhanced value realization to our clients which utilize our primary offerings and generate over 90% of our current lead flow. This is strengthening our ability to compete and realize higher gross margins. We also continue to innovate. We are scheduled to release a more powerful XT Version 2, which also integrates a significant portion of AI XPLR this coming Friday. Additionally, we have also launched a new platform, XTA, which focuses on data assurance and quality, an offering that aligns strongly with all of our primary offerings and delivery platforms. For the second quarter, we reported revenue before reimbursements of $68.3 million with adjusted diluted earnings per share of $0.34 was at the midpoint of our guidance. But more importantly, we continue to demonstrate the earnings resilience and strong cash flow generation of our model despite what we consider to be a thoughtful demand environment and the ongoing transition activity across our entire organization. We continue to see strong client interest in AI adoption and broad digital transformation initiatives defined by the reimagination of critical business processes and new operating model considerations as well as the modernization of existing enterprise application footprints, all of which facilitate or can extend into AI enablement. Perhaps most insightful is how clients are opting to pursue AI adoption strategies. Most are becoming more cautious about deciding to pursue -- most are becoming more cautious by deciding to pursue extended AI initiatives that emanate from broader enterprise transformation and application implementation engagements rather than through stand-alone AI-first, tech-driven adoption strategies. This is allowing us to pursue well-established relationships that drive broader revenue opportunities while also increasing the number of our AI engagements. Clients are including or extending the AI scope in nearly all of our new engagements, which is increasing our AI adoption opportunities while decreasing our reliance on channel partners. We are encouraged by 3 developments. First, our AI-enabled delivery platforms are beginning to improve the outcome and economics of how we sell and deliver work. We are seeing our platforms increase delivery productivity, expand scope and create more compelling client value propositions. Second, we are aligning our resources and expertise to the clients that are moving their attention from AI experimentation to measurable enterprise value realization, which plays strongly to our enterprise transformation and application implementation capabilities. And third, our outlook reflects the operating and financial inflection impact that we have been working hard to achieve. This expected revenue and margin improvement will drive up -- is driving a step-up in Q3 adjusted EPS, which is important. It also supports the early benefits of the actions we have taken to reposition the business, improve delivery productivity and align our operating model with AI-enabled future consulting and digital transformation activities. As part of and in addition to our broad enterprise transformation and enterprise application pursuits, we continue to help organizations architect and execute their agentic enterprise transformation plans and actively support their AI centers of excellence. Partnerships can play an important role in expanding our reach and helping organizations accelerate AI adoption initiatives. In March, we executed and launched a global go-to-market collaboration with IBM to jointly serve existing and new client pursuits. While IBM has chosen to defer joint go-to-market activities at the moment, we continue to expand our channel strategy and expect ServiceNow, TCS and Genpact as well as other partners to contribute to our pipeline and Q3 performance. On the balance sheet, we expect to continue to generate strong cash flow from operations, supporting our dividend and share repurchase program or pay down debt. With that, let me ask Rob to provide details on our operating results, cash flow as well as outlook. I will then return with additional strategy and market commentary following Rob's remarks. Rob?

Thank you, Ted, and good afternoon, everyone. During this portion of the call, I'll provide some context around our second quarter performance, and then I will spend some additional time on the financial and operating implications of our AI strategy, our AI transition strategy. I will then conclude with a detailed discussion on our financial outlook for the third quarter of 2026. For the purposes of this call, I will comment separately regarding the revenues of our Global S&BT segment, our Oracle Solutions segment and our SAP Solutions segment and the total company. Our Global S&BT segment includes the results of our North America and international Gen AI consulting and implementation and licensing revenues, benchmarking and business transformation offerings, executive advisory programs and our OneStream and e-procurement implementation offerings. Our Oracle Solutions and our SAP Solutions segments include the results of our Oracle and SAP offerings, respectively. Please note that we will be referencing both total revenues and revenue before reimbursements in our discussion. Reimbursable expenses are primarily project travel-related expenses passed through to our clients that have no associated impact on our profitability. During our call today, we will also reference certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe provide useful information to investors. Specifically, all references to adjusted financial measures will exclude reimbursable expenses, noncash stock-based compensation expense, all acquisition-related cash and noncash compensation reversals and expenses, amortization of intangible assets and other nonrecurring items, including our AI transition charge. We have included reconciliations of GAAP to adjusted non-GAAP financial measures in our press release filed earlier today and will post any additional information based on the discussions from this call on the Investor Relations page of the company's website. As Ted mentioned, our second quarter revenue before reimbursements improved sequentially to $68.3 million from $67.8 million last quarter and came in slightly below the low end of our range, while adjusted earnings per share of $0.34 was at the midpoint of our guidance. On our first quarter call, we described Q2 as a sequential improvement quarter and indicated that Q3 was expected to be the more meaningful inflection point for adjusted EPS growth. That remains our view, and therefore, we are emphasizing sequential improvements as we continue to transition our sales and delivery model. We expect sequential revenues, along with gross margins to improve due to the impact of the increasing number of new projects benefiting from value delivered and productivity enhancements from the transition to our AI delivery platforms as well as headcount actions taken to reflect productivity improvements. Correspondingly, based on the current outlook, we expect revenue before reimbursements of approximately $68 million to $70 million and adjusted diluted earnings per share in the range of $0.37 to $0.39. The expected sequential EPS increase reflects several primary factors. Firstly, we expect modest sequential revenue improvement across the business despite lower available days and lower software sales revenues. More importantly, we are beginning to realize the benefit of actions taken to align our resource base with the current demand environment and with the productivity potential of our AI-enabled delivery model while we continue to embed AI into our delivery platforms. This is changing how work is staffed, priced, managed and delivered. Let me now discuss some revenue highlights from a segment perspective. Total revenues before reimbursements from our Global S&BT segment were $35.6 million for the second quarter of '26, a sequential decrease of 2% as clients continue to question the underlying value of AI and are also confused by the return on investment of AI-first adoption strategies. Total revenues before reimbursements from our Oracle Solutions segment were $15.3 million for the second quarter of 2026, a sequential decrease of 1%. More importantly, however, we expect both revenue and gross margins for both the S&BT and Oracle segments to sequentially improve as the differentiation and acceleration by our AIX and XT platforms is fundamentally changing our ability to attract new clients. Total revenues before reimbursements from our SAP Solutions segment were $17.4 million for the second quarter of '26, a sequential increase of 9%. This increase was primarily driven by increased volume of software sales as compared to the prior quarter as well as the implementation of services that correspond to the software sales and the historical ones we experienced throughout 2025 and during the first 6 months of 2026. Total company adjusted gross margin on revenues before reimbursements was 44.1% in the second quarter, up from 42.3% in the previous quarter. As expected, we reported sequential gross margin improvements across all segments. More importantly, we expect further margin improvements in the third quarter, consistent with our guidance. Adjusted SG&A was $17.4 million or 25.5% of revenues before reimbursements in the second quarter of 2026. This compared to $16.1 million or 23.7% of revenues before reimbursements in the prior quarter with the sequential increase primarily due to the timing of marketing-related events and movements in foreign currency. Adjusted EBITDA was $13.9 million in the second quarter of '26 as compared to $13.8 million in the prior quarter, both representing 20.3% of revenues before reimbursements. GAAP net income for the second quarter of 2026 totaled $4.4 million or diluted earnings per share of $0.18 as compared to $4.3 million or $0.17 in the previous quarter. The company's cash balances were $14.2 million at the end of the second quarter of '26 as compared to $6.1 million at the end of the previous quarter. Net cash provided from operating activities in the quarter was $15.2 million, primarily driven by net income adjusted for noncash activity and decreases in accounts receivable. The strong cash flow provided from operations allowed us to reduce our net debt position by $6.1 million, buy back company stock and continue to pay dividends to our shareholders. During the quarter, we repurchased 377,000 shares of the company's stock for an average of $10.58 per share and a total cost of approximately $4 million. Our remaining stock purchase authorization at the end of the second quarter was $18.1 million. Given the increase in VAR-related revenue over the last 2 years that carry multiyear terms and consistent with last quarter, we revised our DSO calculation to exclude those revenues and receivables. Our DSO was 56 as compared to 67 in the previous quarter. Our accounts receivable balances decreased by $8.4 million from the previous quarter as expected. At its most recent meeting, subsequent to quarter end, the company's Board of Directors declared the third quarter dividend of $0.12 per share for its shareholders of record on September 18, 2026, to be paid on October 2, 2026. The balance of the company's total debt outstanding at the end of the second quarter was $81 million. Subsequent to quarter end, the company amended and restated its credit facility to extend the maturity date and increase its borrowing capacity to $125 million. I'll now discuss a little more detail around our guidance for Q3. Consistent with seasonal third quarter trends, we expect the impact of the additional U.S. holiday and the typical increase in time off due to summer vacations in the U.S. and in Europe to unfavorably impact available days by approximately 2% on a sequential basis. As previously noted, the company estimates total revenues before reimbursements for the third quarter of 2026 to be in the range of $68 million to $70 million. We expect both Global S&BT and Oracle Solutions segments to be sequentially up from the second quarter. We expect SAP Solutions segment revenue before reimbursements to be sequentially down due to expected lower VAR software sales revenues. As a result of the continued transition of our business to AI platforms related delivery, the company expects to incur an APAC transition charge in the third quarter of approximately $1 million. These charges will primarily relate to severance costs due to headcount reductions and will be excluded from our non-GAAP financial results. We estimate adjusted diluted net income per share in the third quarter of 2026 to be in the range of $0.37 to $0.39, which assumes a GAAP effective tax rate on adjusted earnings of 26.5%. At the midpoint, this would represent modest sequential revenue growth from Q2 and adjusted earnings per share growth of approximately 11.8% from Q2 to the midpoint of the Q3 range of $0.38. We expect the adjusted gross margin as a percentage of revenues before reimbursements to be approximately 46% to 47%. We expect adjusted SG&A and interest expense for the quarter to be approximately $19 million. We expect third quarter adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of revenues before reimbursements to be in the range of 21.5% to 22.5%. At this point, I'd like to turn it back over to Ted to review our market outlook and strategic priorities for the coming months.

Thank you, Rob. As we look forward, let me share our view of the near and long-term demand environment and the growing opportunity it creates for the Hackett Group. Although the demand for digital transformation initiatives remain solid, clients' decision-making continues to be impacted by macroeconomic and ROI return uncertainty. From a broader market perspective, we are finally seeing the first tech providers, AI-first tech providers start to acknowledge that high-impact ROI solutions require complex process expertise and IP to properly reimagine and validate client-specific requirements in order to accurately execute and determine the ROI of AI initiatives. Forward delivery engineers are important, but they require the critical forward delivery business expertise that our consultants possess. These new developments play strongly to our expertise, brand permission and trusted client relationships. Our message to the market and to clients is clear. Do not simply deploy AI tools. Real ROI requires that organizations reimagine how work gets done and clearly understand the value of strategic IP or so-called alpha. We are applying these principles internally to build our own strategic competitive advantage. We believe that we are early leaders in this consulting services transformation, helping define an emerging category of platform-enabled solution services that industry analysts increasingly describe as service as a product. AI is not technology first. It is process first, domain-specific and orchestration-driven. Without validated company-specific enterprise process context, AI value realization remains limited while true transformation value is truly substantial. A key challenge in a major market opportunity is ensuring that clients and strategic partners fully understand the importance of capturing and analyzing and validating this business process context. As I said, there is limited AI value realization without this detailed understanding of the client's real end-to-end process execution without assessing AI enablement opportunities at a detailed level. This is foundational to AI success. We believe our platform-enabled delivery strategy will create meaningful revenue growth opportunities with attractive and improving margins while helping clients capture large enterprise transformation opportunities. We also believe that The Hackett Group is uniquely positioned because we are not simply advising clients on AI. We are leaders in embedding AI by designing and building our proprietary platforms to accelerate value realization. This, along with our AI and digital world-class benchmarks, best practice content, process expertise and enterprise data assurance model are allowing us to create a very differentiated foundation that will help clients improve performance in a measurable way. On the talent side, competition for experienced talent and experienced delivery and market-facing executives with strong technology agility continues. Overall turnover remained at acceptable levels during the quarter, and we expect that trend to continue. Finally, we believe we have the client base and offerings to grow organically. We will continue to evaluate acquisitions and alliances that strategically leverage our IP platforms and transformation expertise and will add scale and scope and acceleration to our pursuits. As always, I'll close by congratulating our associates on their continuous innovation and contributions and thanking them for their tireless efforts. Please remain highly focused on our clients and our people. These conclude my comments. Operator, please open the call for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] The first question in the queue is from George Sutton with Craig-Hallum.

Ted, I wonder if you could address the IBM deferral reasoning and you mentioned for the moment. So just curious what that means. And you separately mentioned programs with TCS and Genpact. I wondered if you could go into those a little bit.

First, look, the IBM, if you want to call it, hold, caught us a little bit by surprise. However, we know that their priorities were changing throughout the quarter. So beyond that, we'll continue to wait for any guidance that they may have going forward. With that said, we did launch our ServiceNow alliance and are pursuing a list of clients that have been identified by both sides. We are currently actually closing a meaningful engagement with TCS and have another one that is currently being pursued as well. And we're launching a new initiative with Genpact that will include a list of joint clients that we believe we should be jointly pursuing. Critical part about that, George, is twofold that we found out in the market in the -- during the quarter is that we're seeing more AI project opportunities from our traditional or primary entry points, business transformation and enterprise application initiatives, than we are by going directly to AI-related initiatives. I believe this is probably similar to other providers, and it really requires a partnership where that collaboration allows the client to accelerate their decision-making, which we believe we make available to all of the partners we're currently working with.

So you mentioned $30 million in deals. I wondered if you could just kind of explain what that means in terms of deliverables or timing, how you're pricing these opportunities? And any sort of sense of the pipeline behind that?

Well, first of all, the win rate on the deals that we have -- where we have utilized our platform to lead our effort is very high. Yes, it led to several very significant engagements, and our pipeline continues to include opportunities at similar levels. So what do we know? And we found out during the quarter that clients really are impressed not only by the way we've structured our platforms, but that we've created capabilities that, again, appear to be pretty unique to us, especially the way we integrate our IP and the way it allows us to accelerate the execution of engagement, but also the way it allows us to pursue new areas for them, like I mentioned, the capability, the new capability around data assurance and quality, which is a new platform we call XTA, which also becomes a core component of both a transformation or and software implementation initiative. So, look, we know the clients are looking for innovation. We know the clients are looking for organizations that can demonstrate, I'll call it, AI agility and capability. We think we've demonstrated that both in the way we've continued to develop our people, but nothing is more evident than when we actually demonstrate to them a go-to-market that they find to be absolutely modern and powerful and has allowed these very significant brands to make very significant decisions against, I'm going to call it, top-of-the-line competition. So, very encouraging for us. It's that same impression that we have been getting directly from AIX, which was the very first platform that we started going to market with in late last year to now really do a very significant upgrade to XT, and we're relaunching -- we're not relaunching, but we're launching XT version 2 to make sure it has the similar capabilities and qualities of AIX so that it can not only impact the delivery of our product and the scope that we cover and how we cover it, but also allow us to really impact the way we compete and win business, which has been so successful with the AIX platform.

The next question in the queue is from Jeff Martin with ROTH Capital Partners.

I was curious, if you could give us some context around these large technology-driven wins that are there common applications? What parts of the organization are they focused on? I'm curious if you're seeing common denominators in those and also in the pipeline of business that you've got coming at you?

Well, we introduced it first with the OneStream version of AIX, and we had a very significant win early in the year with the platform. We immediately moved to fully adopt the AIX platform in the sale and delivery of our Oracle implementation offerings. And the several engagements that we mentioned, one was OneStream and two were Oracle, major brands that you would know against major firms that you obviously would know as well, where simply the capability that we brought to bear to deliver, execute and also extend AI-enabled capabilities, but also AI extended capabilities within their platforms. That both ability to execute a, I'll call it, a more traditional engagement, but also extend that engagement into AI-enabled capabilities and having that, call it, cradle-to-grave execution of an engagement in a platform drove some huge wins, and we hope and believe that should continue.

To follow up on George's question, what kind of time line is -- are these collective $30 million of wins going to take to play out over what period...

These will easily extend through the end of '27, not all of them, but at least a couple of them, and they'll be ramping up during the quarter.

Okay. And then it sounds like internally, there's a lot of work to do. A lot of work has been done. There's gross margin gains to be had here. To use the baseball analogy, what inning do you feel like you're at in the process of that and when might it be complete?

We spent a lot of time talking about that. We were -- I don't want to say early innings, but if you said what kind of potential are we capturing 20% at the moment, do we believe that we should be closer to 50% by year-end? Yes. What does that mean? Well, we're seeing pricing and margin improvements that are substantial and are being reflected in our sequential -- in our guidance. We saw it from Q1 to Q2. We're seeing it in a more meaningful way from Q2 to Q3. And in Q4, where we actually -- if you recall, last year had a very, very material and significant VAR sales. Look, we believe, again, that opportunity to exceed that Q4 related results with significantly fewer VAR sales, which are, as you know, higher margin, are an indication of both the ramping up of the engagements that we're closing and that we're obviously pursuing at the moment, but also both the margin improvements and scope expansions that we're experiencing from our new sales and delivery platform-led model.

Next question in the queue is from Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research.

Yes, Ted, has generative AI changed how customers are using your benchmarking data? Are you seeing increased demand for continuous benchmarking, for example, versus point in time?

The answer is, what it's changed is that people are asking and requiring for the market to provide AI world-class benchmarks. And as you know, we've been launching -- throughout the quarter, we launched our AI world-class benchmark capability. It's actually a stand-alone platform that takes not only our historic information across all of the industries that we serve that are in excess of 20. But more importantly, it's extending AI world-class benchmarks down to a subprocess level for all of those same industries. And we believe that capability can only be achieved by somebody who has a very strong foundational peer and digital world-class benchmark from which to launch from. But the only other way to determine or develop that -- those AI world-class benchmarks or calculate them is to be able to fully simulate the automation impact at those subprocess levels, which is what we've built in our platforms. So, one, is it valuable? Yes. Are clients demanding not only what you know, but a kind of, if you want to call it, AI world-class benchmarks with some time line associated with that achievement? Yes. Do we believe that it's influencing some of the enterprise transformation and software implementation engagements where people want to be able to use strong comparisons to not only evaluate the current, but also the future opportunities that are available to them if they make AI-related investments? The answer is, yes. So does it change the model from transactional to continuous? Yes, it has that potential. Has it done that -- is it doing that today? No.

And how many clients does the joint venture have? And is the pipeline there healthy? Can you give us an update there?

The licensing pipeline for the joint venture is limited. With that said, the opportunities and the engagements that drive into AI implementation, which is the services portion, which sits inside of the LeewayHertz component, which is inside of Hackett is incredibly active. And is, as I said, they're seeing now increased activity from nearly all of our primary entry points extending the scope into AI enablement. So remember, there was 2 components. The JV was to focus on licensing only. That continues to have a number of clients. But the volume of activity is on the services and implementation side, which is entirely in the Hackett four walls.

In terms of the launch of the ServiceNow Alliance, is there a pipeline there already? At what stage are you at?

There is a list of clients. It was launched. It started with targeting 15 and it's underway. It's underway with -- in pursuit of joint clients with both the go-to-market teams seem to know each other pretty well.

And similar question with the Genpact.

Just launching. Just launching. We actually have the first list of clients that are being reviewed tomorrow.

At this time, I show no further questions. I will now turn the call back over to Mr. Fernandez.

Let me thank everyone. Those are our comments and questions. Let me thank everyone for participating in this quarter's call. Look forward to updating everyone next quarter when we report the third quarter. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at this time.