TaskUs, Inc. (TASK) Q3 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the TaskUs Third Quarter 2026 Investor Call. My name is Arie Bowling, and I will be your conference facilitator today. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to introduce Trent Thrash, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Trent, you may begin.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's TaskUs earnings call. Full details of our results and additional management commentary are available in our earnings release, which can be found on the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.taskus.com. We have also posted supplemental information on our website, including an investor presentation and an Excel-based financial metrics file. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the following discussions contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including, but not limited to, statements regarding our future financial results and management's expectations and plans for the business. These statements are neither promises nor guarantees and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed here. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. For details on the uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in our forward-looking statements, see the Risk Factors section of our most recent annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and other documents filed with or furnished to the SEC. These filings, which may be supplemented with subsequent periodic reports are accessible on the SEC's website and our Investor Relations website. Any forward-looking statements made on today's conference call, including responses to questions, are based on current expectations as of today, and TaskUs assumes no obligation to update or revise them as a result of new developments or otherwise, except as required by law. The discussion throughout today's call contain non-GAAP financial measures. For a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP metric, please see our earnings press release, which is available in the IR section of our website. Now I'll turn the call over to Bryce Maddock, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Bryce?

Thank you, Trent. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. In the third quarter, we delivered $314.7 million in revenue for year-over-year revenue growth of 5.4%. We outperformed the top end of our revenue guidance by $12.7 million or 4.2%. This result set a new record for the highest level of quarterly revenue in TaskUs's history. The business generated $59.1 million in adjusted EBITDA or an adjusted EBITDA margin of 18.8%. This was approximately 10 basis points above our margin guidance, reflective of our strong focus on operational and overhead expense discipline. During Q3, we again strengthened our balance sheet by delivering $23 million in adjusted free cash flow. We improved our net leverage ratio to 1.25x, providing us the flexibility to invest in the AI transformation of our business. These investments are paying off. In Q3, we maintained strong momentum by capitalizing on the key growth opportunities in artificial intelligence services and AI-enabled digital customer experience. We remain firmly committed to our core financial objective, delivering long-term expansion in revenue, EBITDA and earnings per share that consistently outpaces our peers. Next, I'll provide some highlights from Q3, along with an update on our 2026 outlook. Then I'll hand it over to Rishabh to walk through our financials in more detail. Again, Q3 revenue was $314.7 million, an increase of 5.4% on a year-over-year basis. Our top client share of revenue declined to 17% in Q3 of 2026 compared to 27% in Q3 of 2025. This was driven by the previously anticipated year-over-year decline in revenue from our largest client, offset by exceptional growth across the rest of the business. Revenue from this client was impacted by their automation and cost optimization initiatives. We continue to have a very strong relationship with our largest client and believe we are well positioned to benefit from their vendor consolidation efforts in 2027. The rest of our business performed exceptionally well in Q3. Excluding our largest client, revenue grew nearly 20% year-over-year, fueled heavily by a 37% surge within our top 2 through 20 client cohort. Notably, this diversified growth accelerated sequentially from the previous quarter, demonstrating the fundamental strength of our business. At the risk of sounding repetitive with our last update, our sales and client services teams delivered another solid performance, seamlessly carrying our Q2 momentum into Q3. This quarter, our signings again reflected the strength of our existing client relationships with nearly 88% of our wins coming from clients that have been with TaskUs for at least a year. Additionally, our geographic delivery mix for new wins remained more heavily weighted towards offshore delivery. Next, let's look at our service line performance for the quarter in more detail. Digital customer experience delivered $175.9 million in Q3 revenue, representing 7.1% year-over-year growth. This expansion was primarily driven by clients across our technology, mobility, logistics and travel, retail and e-commerce and entertainment and gaming verticals. Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we expect year-over-year DCX growth to once again accelerate. As experts continue to insist that AI will automate all of customer care, our business is growing at an accelerating rate. We believe the future of customer care is a seamless blend of AI and human talent resolving complex interactions, and our sustained growth proves this strategy is working. Turning to AI services. Revenue increased 27.7% year-over-year to $75 million, making it our fastest-growing service line once again. This marked the eighth quarter in a row of growth in excess of 25%. It also marks the first quarter of AI services being our second largest service line. The primary engine of this expansion is the continued ramp of our mobility, logistics and travel vertical, specifically within the autonomous vehicle, autonomous delivery and robotics industries. This exceptional strength more than offset revenue declines in our social media vertical, which were driven by the conclusion of specific AI automation projects for our largest client and other partners in that space. These results reinforce our strategy of making targeted investments in our AI offerings that support the world's leading foundational models, hyperscalers and autonomous vehicle, autonomous delivery and robotics companies. Our strategy has us well positioned to continue establishing TaskUs as a premier partner for scaling complex AI infrastructure. We expect our year-over-year AI services growth to meaningfully accelerate in Q4, supported by expansions within our autonomous vehicle and robotics clients, positioning our AI services business for a great 2027. In Trust and Safety, we generated $63.9 million in revenue, a 15.8% year-over-year decline. This decrease stems primarily from our largest client in our social media vertical, offset slightly by our growth in our technology vertical. As noted previously, this client shift towards automated content moderation continues to impact this service line, and we anticipate a larger year-over-year revenue decline in this service line in Q4. Encouragingly, however, we have made progress on vendor consolidation and new work streams with this client. Next, I'd like to share an update on our progress to transform TaskUs for our AI-driven future. The first pillar of the strategy is strengthening our AI services offerings through differentiated solutions. Here, we saw continued momentum this quarter in our physical AI and robotics practice as well as in AI safety. In physical AI and robotics, we recently expanded our partnership with a leading consumer robotics developer, moving past traditional egocentric data collection into collection in our new physical AI lab. Additionally, we are now building proprietary high-fidelity data sets by utilizing short-term rental properties as dynamic real-world testing grounds. This innovative approach allows us to train complex autonomous systems for highly unstructured everyday tasks. Additionally, we secured a significant new win to provide support for one of the world's leading technology companies' next-generation last-mile delivery robots. Here, we're providing critical remote teleoperation support, facilitating true autonomous delivery to our clients' doorstep. These milestones demonstrate that TaskUs has become a trusted partner of choice for scaling physical AI deployments as the industry pushes automation out of the warehouse and into the real world. During the quarter, we also made progress in AI safety through a natural extension of our industry-leading trust and safety expertise. Here, TaskUs is uniquely positioned to bridge the AI safety gap created by emerging forms of artificial intelligence. With the rapid proliferation of frontier models and AI companions, ensuring user safety, especially for vulnerable populations like minors, is a critical priority. Today, we're in the process of partnering with one of the world's leading developers of large language models to deploy novel, clinically grounded solutions designed specifically to monitor, detect and help mitigate incidents of suicide and self-harm. By pairing our deep expertise in human-in-the-loop moderation with AI safety protocols like multimodal red teaming and adversarial stress testing, we will be helping our clients' platforms identify behavioral red flags, emotional dependency and harmful conversational patterns before they escalate. This proactive approach to user safety will further position TaskUs as a critical operational partner for responsible AI deployment. Moving to agentic AI and AI consulting, the second pillar of our strategy, we recently secured commitments from 2 existing clients to leverage our agentic AI solutions. For one of our largest clients in our mobility, logistics and travel vertical, we will soon begin implementing an agentic voice sales solution supporting the acquisition and onboarding of new restaurants. Within retail and e-commerce, we will begin rolling out a customer support AI agent for a leading global house of fashion brands. Across all industry sectors, demand and sales momentum for these offerings remain strong, positioning us for continued adoption of these critical solutions. Finally, the last pillar of our AI strategy is integrating artificial intelligence across our entire service delivery and support ecosystem to drive efficiency, quality and cost improvements. Here, we continue to advance our commitment to AI-enabled innovation by prioritizing the deployment of our proprietary and third-party solutions into production environments. We're driving efficiency into how we deliver on behalf of our clients and how we manage our own back-office operations, both critical elements of our strategy for the AI era. We now have nearly 100 deployments of these production-ready AI-enabled tools across our client base, allowing us to enhance and automate critical stages of the customer experience and management of our teammates. Before handing it over to Rishabh to provide more details on our Q3 results, I want to touch on our Q4 and full year 2026 outlook. In light of our strong results, sustained sales momentum and the continued strength of both our digital customer experience and AI services offerings, we're raising our full year revenue outlook to between $1.249 billion and $1.251 billion. This updated range fully accounts for the continued headwinds we anticipate at our largest client. At the $1.25 billion midpoint, this guidance represents 5.6% year-over-year revenue growth. We continue to expect a full year adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 19%. Furthermore, for the third consecutive quarter, we're increasing our outlook for full year adjusted free cash flow to between $115 million and $125 million, an increase of $5 million at the midpoint. For the fourth quarter, we expect to set another record with revenue between $319 million and $321 million, roughly 2.3% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. While we will have a very difficult year-over-year growth comparison at our largest client, we expect the rest of our business to maintain growth of nearly 20% in Q4. We expect Q4 adjusted EBITDA margins of 19.5%. As a reminder, Q4 benefits from some operating leverage due to seasonal revenues. As we look ahead to 2027, we plan to increase our investments to support the rapid growth we are seeing within the physical AI and autonomous vehicle spaces, while also investing more to support the AI transformation of our DCX business. These investments will naturally impact our ability to expand margins in the near term, but we believe they will support our ability to grow revenue and EBITDA faster than our competitors over the medium to long-term. We are exceptionally proud of our year-to-date performance, which has consistently surpassed expectations despite a volatile macro backdrop and ongoing transitions at our largest client. Looking ahead, our conviction in the business is resolute. We're inspired by the enduring strength of our DCX service line, our continued innovation in AI services and our unique ability to support rapidly emerging high-growth markets such as autonomous vehicles and robotics. I look forward to updating you on our Q4 results and providing our 2027 guidance during our call early next year. With that, I'll hand it over to Rishabh to go through our financials in a bit more detail.

Thank you, Bryce, and good afternoon, everyone. In the third quarter, we earned total revenues of $314.7 million, reflecting an increase of 5.4% compared to the previous year. This was $12.7 million ahead of the $302 million top end of our guidance for the quarter. Our results were again driven by stronger-than-expected volumes in AI services and digital customer experience. Approximately 65% of our growth came from clients that we signed within the last year. Despite headwinds from our largest client, our exceptional results again demonstrated the resilience of our business, our consistent operational and strategy execution and our ability to capture market share in a volatile macroeconomic environment. Excluding our largest client, revenue from the rest of our business grew approximately 20% on a year-over-year basis in Q3 compared to approximately 15% growth in Q2 of 2026, an acceleration in growth on a sequential basis for the fourth quarter in a row. Here, growth from both new and existing clients across a broad range of verticals during the quarter was reflective of the strong diversified momentum underlying our results. As Bryce mentioned, Q3 saw solid year-over-year growth in AI services, which grew a remarkable 27.7% and DCX, which accelerated for the third quarter in a row to 7.1% compared to the prior year. As contemplated by our Q3 guidance, trust and safety declined 15.8% on a year-over-year basis. In the third quarter, our largest client represented 17% of total revenue, down from 27% in Q3 of 2025, reflective of the automation headwinds Bryce discussed earlier. Our top 10 client concentration was 63%, up from 60% in Q3 of last year, and our top 20 clients accounted for 75% of our revenue, up from 71% in the prior year period. Looking at our geographic delivery mix in the third quarter, we generated 49% of our revenues in the Philippines, 18% in the United States, 13% in India and 20% from the rest of the world, primarily in Latin America and Europe. In Q3, we saw particularly strong year-over-year revenue growth in the United States and Egypt. We ended the quarter with approximately 64,700 global teammates, an increase of approximately 1,500 teammates from the end of Q2. This was primarily the result of increased headcount in India, the United States and the Philippines, offset by lower headcount in Colombia, where our operations were impacted by lower volumes from our largest client. Next, I'd like to provide additional details about our service line performance. In the third quarter, our DCX offering generated $175.9 million in revenue and year-over-year growth of 7.1%. This growth was well balanced between new and existing clients with both contributing approximately 50% of our year-over-year growth. Overall, DCX growth was primarily driven by strong broad-based performance from existing clients in our mobility, logistics and travel, technology, retail and e-commerce and entertainment and gaming verticals and by new clients in our technology vertical. This growth was partially offset by a decrease in revenue from existing clients in our financial services vertical. In terms of DCX signings in Q3, we again delivered a solid quarter that positions us well for continued growth in DCX during the fourth quarter of 2026. We saw broad-based strength in signings across most of our vertical markets, including technology, mobility, logistics and travel, financial services, healthcare and retail and e-commerce. In particular, we were pleased that high-value sales and lead generation solutions were strong again in Q3 at nearly 30% of total DCX signings. As Bryce mentioned, AI services demonstrated strong growth in excess of 25% for the eighth quarter in a row, resulting in $75 million in revenue. With this performance, AI services is now our second largest service line on a quarterly basis. Here, I'd like to pause and congratulate our teammates on achieving a milestone of more than $250 million in revenue for the trailing 12 months ended in Q3. AI service growth was primarily driven by expansion in services we provide to existing clients in our mobility, logistics and travel vertical, partially offset by a decrease from existing clients in our social media vertical. Overall, existing clients contributed approximately 3/4 of AI services total growth for the quarter. This was again led by one of our long-term autonomous vehicle clients in Q3. From a signings perspective in Q3, we saw demand signals from a diversified set of AI services clients, primarily within our mobility, logistics and travel, technology and social media verticals. As Bryce mentioned earlier, we are pleased that our strategic investments in industry-leading solutions for autonomous vehicle, robotics and developers of frontier artificial intelligence models are paying off. Our Trust and Safety offering, which includes our content moderation and financial crime and compliance services, declined by 15.8% compared to Q3 of 2025, resulting in $63.9 million of revenue. Here, the drop in revenue from our largest client more than offset our revenue growth, which was well balanced between new and existing clients in Q3. From a vertical perspective, the existing client revenue decline in Trust and Safety was primarily driven by social media and retail and e-commerce clients, partially offset by an increase from clients in our technology vertical. Notably, excluding the impact of our largest client, we saw year-over-year growth in Q3 from our other social media clients. Now moving on to the drivers of our income statement performance. In the third quarter of 2026, we earned adjusted EBITDA of $59.1 million and 18.8% margin, which compared favorably to the $56.3 million of adjusted EBITDA implied by the midpoint of our Q3 guidance. As a reminder, we anticipated flat sequential margins at 18.7% for the quarter based on several factors, including geographic mix shift to certain lower-margin U.S.-based solutions provided to developers of autonomous vehicles within our AI services service line and our strategic investments in emerging growth opportunities and AI capabilities. We slightly outperformed our guidance in Q3 due to disciplined cost management across our operations and overhead functions, which more than offset minor headwinds from foreign exchange rates. Our cost of service as a percentage of revenue was 65.4% in the third quarter compared to 62.1% in Q3 of the prior year. As noted in Q2, the year-over-year increase was primarily driven by several factors, including the impact of annual personnel cost inflation, geographic delivery and service offering mix shift and a pricing environment that remains competitive. These factors were partially offset by the run rate benefit of operating efficiency improvements made in 2025 and Q2 of 2026 carrying over into the third quarter. For the quarter, our SG&A expenses were $54.9 million or 17.4% of revenue. This compares to SG&A in Q3 of 2025 of $59.7 million or 20% of revenue. This decline as a percentage of revenue reflected lower personnel costs on a year-over-year basis, resulting from a reduction of stock-based compensation, lower expenses related to onetime transactions and cost-saving initiatives and our ongoing overhead optimization efforts. These improvements in overhead expenses were partially offset by the AI and growth investments mentioned earlier. Adjusted net income for the quarter was $31.3 million and adjusted earnings per share was $0.34. By comparison, in the year ago period, we earned adjusted net income of $39 million and adjusted EPS of $0.42. For the third quarter, the year-over-year decline in adjusted net income was mainly due to higher interest expense from our refinancing and higher cost of services noted above, compared to the prior year, offset by a lower income tax expense. Our weighted average share count was relatively consistent and therefore, not a material driver of our adjusted EPS performance. Now moving on to the balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents were $189.7 million as of September 30, 2026, compared with the December 31, 2025 balance of $211.7 million. Here, we are pleased that our strong year-to-date free cash flows of nearly $91 million significantly offset declines related to our onetime special dividend and refinancing activities of approximately $84 million and the negative translation adjustments related to fluctuations in foreign exchange rates. Our net leverage ratio continued to be healthy at 1.25x at the end of Q3. As a reminder, we calculate this ratio as total debt less cash divided by adjusted EBITDA for the trailing 12-month period. Our refinanced $500 million term loan maturing in March of 2031 bears interest at SOFR plus 2.75%. As a reminder, we began making principal payments on our term loan of approximately $6.25 million per quarter for the first time in Q3. Our $100 million revolver remains undrawn. Cash generated from operations on a year-to-date basis was $120.1 million through Q3 of 2026 as compared to $107.5 million through Q3 of 2025. This increase of nearly 12% was primarily due to the positive impact of changes in working capital. Year-to-date adjusted free cash flow was $101.6 million or 58% of adjusted EBITDA, giving us confidence to again increase our full year 2026 adjusted free cash flow guidance by an additional $5 million. Our Q3 year-to-date capital expenditures decreased to $29.4 million compared to $43.8 million through Q3 of 2025, primarily due to lower facility build-out costs, which were partially offset by increased investments in security infrastructure improvements. As a result, we expect CapEx to be approximately $45 million for the year, a reduction of $15 million compared to our initial 2026 outlook. In terms of our financial outlook for the remainder of the year, we are increasing our full year 2026 revenue range to $1.249 billion to $1.251 billion, resulting in a midpoint of $1.25 billion. We also expect to earn full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 19% at the midpoint of our revenue guidance. As mentioned earlier, we are increasing our full year adjusted free cash flow outlook to $120 million at the midpoint with a range of $115 million to $125 million. As a reminder, adjusted free cash flow excludes the impact of certain costs that are non-recurring and outside the ordinary course of business. For the fourth quarter, we expect revenues to be in the range of $319 million to $321 million, reflecting growth of 2.3% at the midpoint. As a reminder, our fourth quarter revenue will continue to be impacted by year-over-year declines at our largest client. We expect our adjusted EBITDA margins to be approximately 19.5%, including the benefit of overhead leverage we see as a result of seasonal revenues. As a reminder, our margin guidance is based on our current foreign exchange rates. Depreciation in the value of the U.S. dollar would put downward pressure on our margin performance. In closing, the TaskUs team delivered another outstanding quarter, exceeding guidance on both revenue and adjusted EBITDA margins, while once again growing our year-to-date free cash flow. As a result, we are raising our full year revenue outlook for the second consecutive quarter and adjusted free cash flow outlook for the third. While we continue to navigate headwinds at our largest client, the underlying engine of our business is performing exceptionally well. Our AI services growth is accelerating. Our premium DCX practice is winning share, and our pipeline and signings continue to build with strength and breadth. None of this is possible without the commitment and excellence of our global teammates every single day. We enter Q4 with momentum, conviction and a clear path forward. Now I'll hand it back to Bryce to close this out.

Thank you, Rishabh. Before we open for questions, I'd like to share another TaskUs teammate story. At TaskUs, our core value of Be Ridiculous isn't just about thinking big. It's about channeling our own personal passions to create extraordinary purpose-driven impact, both inside and outside our office walls. Take Wednesday, a trainer at our TaskUs Malaysia site, who's been with us for 4 years. Beyond her work as a trainer who spends her days developing TaskUs teammates, Wednesday is an accomplished artist who uses her creative talent as a catalyst for social change. Whether she's setting up booths at local art fairs or being featured in regional newspapers, Wednesday uses her art to spark conversations around empathy and social awareness. Together with her mother, Wednesday illustrated books that raised funds to build a school in India, which now educates hundreds of children while also creating resources to help former inmates rebuild their lives with dignity. Wednesday's story embodies the spirit that defines our people. When our teammates bring their authentic passions to work, they don't just elevate TaskUs. They create a ripple effect of positive change in communities around the world. With that, I'll ask the operator to open our line for a question-and-answer session. Operator?

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question comes from the line of Maggie Nolan of William Blair.

I'm wondering how much visibility you have into sustaining this impressive AI services growth into and throughout 2027?

Yes, I'll take that. Thank you so much, Maggie. So AI services has just been a tremendous story for TaskUs. If you think about the last 7-plus quarters, we've seen above 25% year-over-year growth in this. And it became the second largest service line for us with over $75 million in revenue in Q3, putting them on over $300 million revenue -- annual revenue run rate. A couple of things. I think first, I would just double-click on AI services and say that while we haven't quantified the revenue from AV and robotics specifically, we are pleased that over $100 million will come from those 2 sectors in this business. And that number is up more than 3x from 2025. So it's $100 million for the full year of 2026. As we look into 2027, we think that those growth rates are likely to sustain themselves. We've got large and diversified clients in the autonomous vehicle and robotics spaces. And so we're making big investments there and seeing a lot of growth. At this point, we expect AI services to continue to be the fastest growing of our service lines into 2027.

And then as you think about some of those AI investments, including in those areas, which -- great to hear a little bit of a sizing on those. How quickly do you think some of that AI investment spending translates into revenue? And to what extent before it does, would we see this pressure margins even as you're doing some of these cost-saving initiatives?

Yes. So AI services is one proof point that these investments are paying off. At the start of the year, we talked about increasing our investments in AI and other growth initiatives by $25 million. And we expect that, that number will meaningfully increase as we head into 2027. Clearly, that puts some pressure on our margins, but we believe that these investments are well worth it given the accelerating growth that we've seen in AI services and the resilience we've seen in our digital customer experience business. Our success in being part of the solution for our clients that are looking to both automate digital customer experience and move up the value stream in terms of the premium services that they're looking to outsource is what has kept our digital customer experience growing at 7% this quarter and continuing to accelerate as we look into 2024 and 2027 in terms of year-over-year growth. So we are continuing to make these investments. We do expect these investments will have a near-term effect on our margins, but we also believe that they will be what fuels the acceleration in our growth rates as we head into next year.

Yes. And maybe I'll add to that, Maggie. The -- as Bryce said, this will put some pressure on our margins in terms of the geographic mix that the AI services business comes at and an intentional step-up in our investments. But there are 2, 3 levers on the margin side that we are consciously working on to offset this impact. One is, Bryce talked about this, that the delivery efficiency we are seeing from adoption of our own AI tools, 100-plus production deployments in the services is a very encouraging sign. The other piece that we've been very conscious about is the spend on our SG&A. Every single SG&A tower is extremely disciplined from a cost perspective. So that overhead optimization as a percentage of revenue, SG&A has been going down. We continue to see that trend as we look into 2027. But as Bryce mentioned, all the extra dollars we get from these synergies and cost optimization, we would like to put it back into the business from an investment perspective as we see tremendous growth opportunities in AI services.

Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Lee of Guggenheim.

Good to see the outperformance in the quarter. I want to dig into Trust and Safety a bit, particularly around AI, given some of what we're seeing in the news. Can you help us size sort of the red teaming and adversarial testing opportunity within AI services today? And in Trust and Safety, how are you seeing that competitive landscape evolve over the last few quarters? And are you seeing sort of new entrants impact that or any sort of things from the Frontier labs as it relates to their demand environment for your services here?

Yes, Jonathan, great question. So we have seen our business in some ways transform. Obviously, this quarter, trust and safety revenues declined about 16% year-over-year. I'd note that if we excluded the impact of our largest client, our Trust and Safety business would actually be growing. We've seen resilience in the financial crimes work that we do in that service line and actually seeing growth amongst some other social media clients that are using our Trust and Safety services. But part of what's fueling the AI services growth is the transformation of Trust and Safety into AI safety. And as you mentioned, adversarial testing and red teaming is a big part of that. TaskUs performs those services for one of the leading foundational model developers and LLM labs for our large social media clients and for a number of other companies. And we're seeing companies be very deliberate about the type of work that is required here. It truly is a premium support service where you are going in and in advance of new model releases testing the model to ensure that it will act in compliance with the labs' expectations. And then also, in some cases, actively monitoring responses from the model and engagement from users to avoid delusional relationships and other risky user behavior. And so this is something that TaskUs has specialized in for over a decade with our Trust and Safety practice. And I think we're seeing it transform into growth in AI safety as well.

Just as a follow-up, can you walk us through some of the moving pieces in the 4Q outlook across the largest client in AI services and DCX? And when should we expect growth to reaccelerate as the largest client drag laps?

Yes. So consistent with our history, our goal is always to provide guidance that we're very confident we can meet or exceed. And we also thought this quarter, it was prudent to just remain cautious in our guidance given the reductions that we've seen at our largest client throughout the course of the year. As we're looking out into 2027, we expect to continue to see difficult year-over-year compares at our largest client. And so the just continued automation there is putting pressure, but the relationship is as strong, really as it's ever been. We're one of their largest and most strategic vendors, and we anticipate that we will be benefiting from vendor consolidation efforts. I'm also really happy to report that we've won opportunities to support their personal agentic AI efforts, which we expect to grow meaningfully in the next year. So as far as Q4 goes, we're feeling very confident about the quarter. And then in 2027, we're looking at a dynamic picture where the rest of our client base is continuing to grow very healthily, but the pressure from the largest client will remain for the next few quarters.

Our next question comes from the line of David Paige of RBC Capital Markets.

Congrats on the great results here. I wanted to just dig a little bit deeper on autonomous vehicles and delivery and robotics in the physical and AI space. It's a nascent industry, but growing. It's in the news a lot. So maybe you could help us think about what this business looks like over the next 12, 24, 36 months?

Yes. I'd say that it's the thing I'm the most excited about today at TaskUs. We are seeing the rollout of these instances of physical AI really starting with autonomous vehicles themselves and autonomous delivery robots. And at this point, I don't think any service provider in the world does more work in this space than TaskUs. I would be surprised if anybody does. We're working with a number of clients in the autonomous vehicle and autonomous delivery space. We're providing teleoperations and field operations to support these operations. And we're seeing this expand into humanoid and other robotic instances. Here, we're doing egocentric data collection, data annotation and even building out physical AI labs where we're working with products in a hands-on manner. So I'm very excited about the growth here. There's a huge amount of work that needs to be done to operationalize this. If you think about large language models, they had a basis to train, which was the Internet. There's not an equivalent for physical AI. TaskUs built a large business in the autonomous vehicle space by doing data collection and data annotation to teach self-driving cars how to drive. And now we're actually running live teleoperations for autonomous vehicles and autonomous delivery robots. I think the same thing is going to happen in the humanoid robotics space. So we're super excited about this. And as I said, we've seen this business grow to over -- well over $100 million in revenue in 2026, which is up more than 3x from 2025. So we're excited for this to be one of the biggest tailwinds to our business in 2027.

Our next question comes from the line of Puneet Jain of JPMorgan.

If we exclude like the top client, like your underlying business, it seems like it's growing at very healthy 15% plus rate this year, at least YTD. Can that business continue to grow at this level of healthy double-digit rates next year? It seems like you're firing on all cylinders in AI services. The remaining part of trust and safety has also some nice tailwinds behind it. So should we expect like the underlying business to continue growing double-digits in 2027?

Yes. Puneet, the answer is yes. If we look at our business today, excluding our largest client, we're seeing very healthy growth rates. As we said on the call, excluding the largest client, the business in Q3 grew by nearly 20%. We also said that we expect that rate of growth amongst all clients other than our largest client to continue into Q4. If we look at the top 2 to 20 client cohort, year-over-year growth accelerated to 37% in Q3. And that growth was broad-based. In fact, 7 of our top 10 clients grew at double-digit growth rates in Q3 and 5 of those clients grew in excess of 20% year-over-year. So I think that speaks to just the strength of the relationships that we have with our largest customers and across the entire business itself. Now obviously, we're not providing guidance on 2027. But as we look to 2027, we're really pleased with the strength of these relationships, and we expect this momentum to continue.

Got it. And as your growth drivers are changing compared to what they used to be, let's say, 5 years ago, how does the contribution margins like in some of these high-growth areas compare to what they used to be before? You mentioned some of the work is more on-site centric, but not sure if that is nearly like a near-term trend or is it expected to be like that for medium to long-term?

Great. Rishabh, do you want to take that?

Yes. So you're right, Puneet, that the current growth that we are seeing in AI services seems to be heavy on the onshore side, which comes at lower margins than what we make in our offshore business. And you're also right that in the medium to long-term, we do anticipate very similar to our Trust and Safety business that we saw earlier in the day that it would go to offshore with margins flattening and recouping for the levels that we used to operate at. But as we look into the next year, next few quarters, it's going to be a multiyear phenomenon, very similar to what you saw in Trust and Safety as well. But as I mentioned, in terms of the actions we are taking on the margin side, just making sure that we are continuing to adopt AI in our operations. We are continuing to making sure we optimize our overheads. We're also doing some concerted price increase conversations with our customers. So all of this is helping us offset the headwinds that we see in terms of the geographic mix shift that we have in the business because of the new growth coming in AI services business with lower onshore margins.

Our next question comes from the line of Jacob Haggarty of Robert W. Baird & Co.

Congrats on a good quarter. I just wanted to follow up on the largest client question real quick. Are they done with the automation? Is there incremental work that's going to come off? And I know you mentioned that you are sort of winning new work with them. Do we reach a point in '27 where the new work you're winning can actually put you in year-over-year growth mode with that client, especially if you get easier comps?

Yes. Thanks so much for the question. So as I said, the relationship remains very strong. We have seen the combination of reduced OpEx at this client and a focus on automating elements of their Trust and Safety workflows impact our business throughout 2026. And the size of that impact, both on a percentage and dollar basis is -- has expanded every quarter. We expect it to expand as we head into Q4. We do believe that most of the automation work has happened. There will be more automation in 2027, but we think it will be more modest than what we experienced in 2026. We also are really encouraged by the fact that our client has said to us that they plan to consolidate existing volumes across other lines of business, both Trust and Safety, customer support and other operational lines of business with TaskUs. And so we expect that to help our business in 2027. Plus we're winning new lines of business, supporting things like their new personal agentic AI initiatives. So those are good signs. I think when we look at the first couple of quarters of 2027, there are difficult comps, and so we don't expect year-over-year growth. But year-over-year growth is certainly possible as we head into the back half of 2027.

No, that makes sense. And then looking at AI benefits, are you guys seeing any benefits in digital customer experience from AI agents calling more or putting in more reviews or complaints or anything like that? And then, also kind of pertaining to your financial crimes and compliance business, any increased business from -- risk from AI there?

Yes, it's really interesting. Actually, last week, we had our user conference, which we call Forward, in San Francisco. And so we had well over 100 TaskUs customers come to San Francisco to hear from some of our largest clients. And we were talking actually about Meta's new Muse agent. And the person I was interviewing gave a really great example of using her Muse agents to file a customer complaint with a large hotel chain and Muse went back and forth with customer service reps having a phone call that ultimately led to a refund. And I kind of chuckled, because this is a perfect example of the point that I've been trying to make for the last 4 years, which is, while AI is absolutely going to automate large swaths of simple, repeatable workflows, it also creates entirely new work. And so we haven't seen a meaningfully increase in our DCX business because of humans having to take phone calls from AI agents, I think it's certainly plausible that, that will happen. And it will be certainly an interesting world in which human beings are answering phone calls and having to work with agents on behalf of their customer representatives.

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