Innodata Inc (INOD) 2022 Q1 法說會逐字稿

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  • Operator

  • Good day ladies and gentlemen. And thank you all for joining us for this Innodata First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, today's session is being recorded.

  • And now for opening remarks and introductions, I am pleased to turn the floor over to Amy Agress. Please go ahead.

  • Amy R. Agress - Senior VP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary

  • Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Our speakers today are Jack Abuhoff has CEO of Innodata; and Marissa Espineli, Interim CFO. I -- we'll hear from Jack first, who will provide perspective about business and then Marissa will follow with a review of our results for the first quarter. We'll then take your questions. First, let me qualify the forward-looking statements that are made during the call.

  • These statements are being made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, any statement that may predict, forecast, indicate or imply future results, performance or achievements.

  • These statements are based on management's current expectations, assumptions and estimates and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, the expected or potential effects of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and the responses of governments, the general global population, our customers and the company there to impacts resulting from the rapidly evolving conflict between Russia and Ukraine that contracts may be terminated by customers, projected or committed volumes of work may not materialize; acceptance of our new capabilities continuing Digital Data Solutions segment reliance on project-based work and the primarily at nature of such contracts and the ability of these customers to reduce delay or cancel projects.

  • The likelihood of continued development of the market, particularly new and emerging markets that our services and solutions support; continuing Digital Data Solutions segment revenue concentration in a limited number of customers, potential inability to replace projects that are completed, canceled or reduced; are dependent on content providers in our agility segment; a continued downturn in or depressed market conditions, whether as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic or otherwise; changes in external market factors; the ability and willingness of our customers and prospective customers to execute business plans that they rise to requirements for our services and solutions.

  • Difficulty in integrating and driving synergies from acquisitions, joint ventures and strategic investments; potential undiscovered liabilities of companies and businesses that we may acquire potential impairment of the carrying value of those will and other acquired intangible assets of companies and businesses that we acquire.

  • Changes in our business and growth strategy the emergence of new or growth in existing competitors are use of and reliance on information technology systems, including potential security breaches, cyber attacks, privacy breaches or data breaches that results in the unauthorized disclosure of consumer, customer employee or company information or service interruptions and various other competitive and technological factors and other risks and uncertainties indicated from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission including our most recent reports on Form 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K and any amendments thereto.

  • We undertake no obligation to update forward-looking information or to announce revisions to any forward-looking statements, except as required by the federal securities laws, and actual results could differ materially from our current expectations. I will now turn the call over to Jack.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Good afternoon. Thank you for joining our call. Starting this quarter, we've shifted our earnings releases and investor conference calls to after market close. We trust that this will prove to be more convenient for investors. Just 8 weeks ago on our Q4 call, we shared some important new wins, expansions and partnerships.

  • Since that time, in just the last 8 weeks, we have had even more wins and more expansions. I'm excited to share a few of those with you today as I believe they clearly illustrate our market positioning and our land and expand strategy delivering results.

  • We're pleased to announce a strong first quarter with revenue up 33% year-over-year, exhibiting an acceleration in revenue growth over the 20% we experienced in fiscal 2021. In the current quarter, Q2, one of our largest customers is reallocating data and attention supporting 2 of its more mature models to less mature AI models that it wants to ramp up.

  • The impact of this transition is that a portion of revenues from this program shifted into the first quarter in anticipation of this transition, and we expect a portion of revenues from this program to shift into the third and fourth quarters as the reallocations ramp up. Therefore, Q2 may have a lower growth rate likely in the range of 18% to 24%, but it is not expected to change the revenue expectation from this customer for the year or our overall revenue expectations for 2022.

  • Consequently, we reiterate our 2022 target of 30% year-over-year revenue growth and our long-term 2025 target of approximately $200 million in revenues and approximately 30% adjusted EBITDA based on the continued momentum we see in our business.

  • In the quarter, we added 121 new logos across our segments. This is a 96% increase over the 62 new customers we added on average per quarter in 2020 and 30% increase over the 93 new customers we added on average per quarter in 2021. The momentum in just the last 8 weeks since we last spoke, in terms of landing new customers and expanding business with existing customers has been quite exciting.

  • One of the more notable new logos we signed in the last 8 weeks was with the leading multinational consulting firm to provide an ongoing feed of annotated AI data. We expect this win to result in approximately $800,000 or more of recurring revenue per year. And from a strategic perspective, we believe this validated for us the opportunity to partner with large consulting firms.

  • It also validated the opportunity to create native AI offerings by combining capabilities. So for this customer, we are combining the output of our agility infrastructure in which we intake and tag billions of news items each year with our financial services domain subject matter experts and our new data annotation platform. The result is an integrated solution for automatically identifying certain trends in business news that are important to this consulting firm and its customers.

  • We're winning new customers continually. Just yesterday, as I prepared these remarks, we signed a brand-new customer with whom we anticipate approximately $250,000 per year of recurring revenue to start. We view these new logo wins like planting seeds. We nurse and tended them carefully, provide outstanding quality data and product along with the culture of service and we get to watch as they grow.

  • In the first quarter, we saw lots of our seeds germinate, booking business expansions with dozens of our existing customers. I'll briefly describe several expansions that occurred in just the last 8 weeks. A Fortune 500 life insurance company increased its go-forward annual projected spend from about $1.3 million per year to approximately $2.4 million per year.

  • We significantly expanded our scope with 1 of the world's largest social media companies. A company that we announced in our last earnings call had become a new subscription customer for our media intelligence platforms and solutions. At the time of signing, we estimated the revenue value of their subscription to be about $200,000 per year.

  • Based on expansions over the last 8 weeks alone, we now estimate the value to be approximately $500,000 per year. The social media company has been ranked as 1 of the fastest-growing brands in the world over the last 2 years. It shows our product to monitor how their brand is being depicted globally in news and in social media. A key area of focus for us strategically is on AI in the enterprise.

  • In the last 8 weeks, we've seen a number of our enterprise seedlings germinate and flower. A large billion dollar e-commerce website has agreed to sign with 30% additional scope over the 300,000 initial commitment they made in the SOW we signed with them last year. We can tell similar stories of business expansion over the past 8 weeks with respect to a leading credit agency, a large ad tech vendor, a startup mortgage processor and a large research organization. And again, I emphasize all in the last 8 weeks.

  • We've talked before about the great strides we're making in expanding our services and solutions across a number of Silicon Valley big tech companies. We have pilots underway for potentially large programs at these companies. We estimate that they collectively spend billions of dollars on products and services that we believe we are well positioned to provide.

  • Here's what we believe is working in our favor. First, we provide the highest quality data engineering, which results in AI models that perform better, faster. Encouraged by the result, customers often agree to start new programs to create new AI models to help their businesses in other ways.

  • For each existing AI model, our work is not done. Maintaining the AI models require continuous training given data drift, which is the tendency for real-world data to change over time. From a business perspective, we believe the cycle of success results in recurring engagements that build over time. I can think of at least 2 customers that told us recently that they extensively evaluated the vendor landscape before deciding to go with us. and that their technology groups have tried unsuccessfully to duplicate our capabilities in house. And these are both multibillion-dollar financial services companies.

  • We're feeding the strong momentum by continuing the investment in sales and marketing that we started last year. In 2021, we increased our sales and marketing spend by $7.4 million or 116% year-over-year. And in 2022, we anticipate further increasing sales and marketing spend by approximately $10.4 million or 75% year-over-year. This year's investments are designed to accelerate our growth in 2023 and beyond.

  • As we mentioned on our last earnings call, we target the long-term value of new customers from these investments to be 3 to 5x our customer acquisition costs. Two weeks ago, we had our President's Club trips for high performers in our sales team. The enthusiasm in energy were palpable, and I heard about a number of new exciting pipeline opportunities. It becomes clear to me all the time, well positioned we are to help businesses through their AI journeys, which is doubly exciting because AI is still very much in its earliest innings.

  • On the product front, we also made great progress in just the last 8 weeks. We launched our AI-enabled document intelligence platform in late March as planned. This new customer-facing platform uses our proprietary Golden Gate AI technology to automatically extract meaning from complex documents, it can be utilized across domains, from healthcare to financial services to media and entertainment, essentially any business that employs people to read or manage complex documents.

  • Initial feedback from our customers has been positive, and we are in the late stages with 2 opportunities, which taken together, we believe will be worth approximately $1 million per year in likely recurring revenue. Our annotation platform embodies what is becoming increasingly known as data-centric AI. It solves the data curation, annotation and introspection challenges rather than trying to compete with [Tensor Flow], Torch or [Piano] Algorithm.

  • Many experts in AI now clearly say that the neural network architecture is basically a solved problem and that for many practical applications, it's now more productive to hold the neural network architecture fixed and instead find ways to improve the data. Taking this exact approach, our platform will include tools to enforce data consistency and learnability. Tools to analyze blind spots, bias and noise, tools to unmet data and collect data more efficiently and tools to select the best data to annotate NEXT in order to maximize system accuracy while minimizing annotation costs.

  • The last 8 weeks, also saw a good progress on a new platform that we are on track to deliver by the end of June that will be sold as an extension to our existing Agility platform. Its purpose will be delivering deeper analytical insights into social media.

  • It will be the first of 2 related platforms to be launched with a second plan for the end of the year. Both platform releases are expected to support our strategic drive toward increased initial average selling price for Agility subscriptions and offer new entry points for new customers. You may have seen on our website that a few weeks ago, we launched an e-commerce portal where users can purchase on-demand data sets to accelerate AI ML model building and training.

  • At the same time, we partnered with Snowflake, a leading data warehousing company to provide access to some of our synthetic data through its marketplace. These initiatives are designed to increase our brand awareness and lead generation. Perhaps saving the best for last because it's something I'm particularly excited about, we launched the initial version of our new banking industry platform on March 31, on time and on budget.

  • Our Charter customer, 1 of the world's largest banks has committed to $11 million subscription spend with us over 5 years and already has 65 people using the product and giving us valuable feedback. The bank's leadership is very excited by how we're able to augment their existing teams work through our AI-enabled products. We hired a new product manager with extensive experience in financial services to lead the charge on bringing this product to a wider market next year.

  • We've made and this year are continuing to make strategic investments in product development to expand our SaaS platforms and our industry solutions. This year, we plan to take 6 new platforms to the market. In 2021, we increased our product development spend by $2.4 million or 65% year-over-year. And in 2022, we anticipate increasing product development spend by approximately $7.2 million or 115% year-over-year.

  • We expect these investments to significantly increase our addressable market and high-margin recurring revenue. Because our book of business is cash generative, we can fund these substantial investments from our internal resources. Based upon current assumptions and expectations, we are budgeting to be cash flow positive by the end of 2022 with significant increases in cash flow expected thereafter with $15 million of cash and no debt we do not presently expect to need external financing to execute our plan.

  • What's particularly exciting is to see our products and services within the marketplace against our competition. And we feel that our 3-tiered product service architecture is helping us intersect with enterprise customers regardless of where they are in the AI adoption cycle. If they have data science teams, we can provide the highest quality data annotation and related data engineering services across multiple domains.

  • If they do not, we can provide applied AI services in the form of custom-trained models or API access to our models for companies that want to do their own data annotation, we now have a licensable platform. For others, we have domain experts on hand. For companies that want to manage their own AI models, we now have a document intelligence platform that enables them to do so. And lastly, for companies with discrete workflows that can benefit from AI, we provide end-to-end platforms that embed AI to augment their knowledge workers.

  • We invested in building out agility and our agility just last month was recognized for a fourth consecutive quarter as a momentum leader by software review site G2, this latest time in its spring PR software report. We're continuing to invest in the product to increase its ASP and the value that it delivers to customers. As a result of the expansion of the social media company, I spoke about a few minutes ago, -- we now have a new largest agility customer ever. And in Q1, we enjoyed a 127% year-over-year increase in subscription bookings and a year-over-year increase in our average selling price.

  • Let me say a few words on the macro environment since that is top of mind for a lot of investors. There was talk of recession stagflation capital markets dislocation, the great resignation, et cetera. We believe we are well positioned to withstand these evolving economic challenges for 2 main reasons: One, our service is lower cost for our customers, which becomes a core focus in tough times; and two, we make our customers more efficient, enabling them to tackle the labor shortages they are experiencing.

  • The increased momentum we see in our business is a testament to the growing secular demand for our offerings in these challenging times. The growth of our Synodex business is illustrative of this phenomenon. We're putting our Golden Gate eye to work within our Synodex medical data extraction product that changes the way underwriters work.

  • They need many fewer underwriters than they used to. This is a good thing because underwriters are expensive and hard to find. Indeed, large life insurers are becoming increasingly focused on digital transformation of underwriting and embracing AI and concluding that the Synodex platform is an ideal tool for enabling this transformation.

  • As a result, our Synodex year-over-year growth of 64% in Q1, and we anticipate this accelerating to over 100% and in 2022 over 2021. With our new document intelligence product, we enable businesses to use this AI capability, not just for medical records, but for virtually any kind of document. We believe we changed the game in terms of both enabling people to avoid having to read large documents, even by producing summaries or generating structured data feeds that are then fed into decision engines.

  • So simply stated, people reading complex documents too expensive, our platform solves this. People that read complex documents, hard to find or hard to attain. Again, our platform can be an answer to this as well. We are quite pleased with our execution, product validation and the tailwinds from the growth in our markets.

  • We believe more firmly than ever the blue sky growth opportunities in front of us and remain laser-focused on execution and shareholder value creation.

  • I'll now turn the call over to Maris to go over the numbers, and then we'll open the line for questions.

  • Marissa Espineli

  • Thank you, Jack. Good afternoon, everyone. Allow me to briefly recap our Q1 2022 financial results. Revenue for the quarter ended March 31, 2022, was $21.2 million, up 33% year-over-year. Net loss for the quarter ended March 31, 2022 was $2.8 million or $0.10 per basic and diluted share compared to a net income of $0.4 million or $0.02 per basic share and $0.01 per diluted share in the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $1 million in the first quarter of 2022 compared to adjusted EBITDA of $1.3 million in the same period last year. Cash and cash equivalents were $15.4 million at March 31, 2022 and $18.9 million at December 31, 2021. Again, thank you, everyone. Operator, we are now ready for questions.

  • Operator

  • (Operator Instructions) we'll hear first from the line of Tim Clarkson at Van Clemens.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Jack, great quarter, obviously. Pleased with the revenue growth. And then obviously, there's lots of exciting things going on. Wanted just kind of a technical question. When you talk about 30% EBITDA what kind of net margin are we talking about? I know this is down the line a little bit, but are we talking about 10%, 15%, 20% net. What kind of number are we looking at there?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • So you're talking about?

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • 30% EBITDA, what are we looking at on an after-tax basis?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Tim, I'm going to come back to you with that. I guess, I need to check to see if that's something that we want to put out there at this stage. And if it is, I'll start to include that in our next call.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Yes. I'm guessing it's somewhere between 10% and 20%. I just haven't calculated.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • I think it's safe to say it's on the high end of that range.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Okay. Sure. Okay. And just in terms of -- you mentioned in your letter to the shareholders that you're doing business, it sounds like this developmental business so far with some cloud players. I guess, proverbially probably Microsoft and Amazon. I know you can't lose these names. I'm not so much interested in the names as what -- how does Innodata's accuracy and proficiency, how would it play out with companies like that? Can you give us a little more color on exactly what would be the skill set that would make them want to do business with you?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Sure, Tim. Well, I think there's a lot. And it starts with kind of a fundamental appreciation for the fact that AI algorithms are essentially programmed with data. and they perform better and they perform better, faster, meaning you get to better performance the higher the quality data is all other things being equal.

  • So we were able to provide AI training data to any company that is of higher quality than they're accustomed to receiving or able to get some other places, what they do experience is that their AI performs better and it gets there faster, and that enables them to begin new initiatives. It enables them to obtain the results of the algorithm faster. So there's a pretty significant return for them there.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Right. And from a negative point of view, since apparently, 80% of the failures are from bad data, it's an insurance policy that they're not wasting money on these projects.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Yes, for sure. I mean that's an excellent point. And I think what we're seeing in the market, too, and I made this point just a few minutes ago, is that the technology is becoming more stable, becoming more available, better tested. People are now seeing the early adopters are seeing how potentially these technologies could be used within their businesses.

  • But they read statistics much like the ones you just cited, that are scary like, well, a lot of projects fail. Now why do they fail? If they try to -- if they read a little further into those studies, What they find is that they fail because the trading data isn't accurate. If you train AI with bad data, you will get bad results. It's a carve-out phenomenon. But even more so because you can't easily extract that bed training. It's like you pour a little bit of poison into a [challis], well, when you need twice as much to dilute that and it becomes invidious. So having consistent high-quality data is critical to achieving or exceeding the ROI expectations that people have of the technology.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Right, right. So on the social media deal, the agility. So I know that your initial quota and this is kind of a crude goal is $400,000 revenue annually per salesperson. And I'm just thinking, well, if you scale that back and say you get $200,000 and then you divide it into a quarter, $50,000, you multiply that by $50,000, $60,000 or a $2.5 million to $3 million and with 89% gross margins, that's what will bring that division closer to breakeven to profitability. I mean are my numbers correct? Or is that the way you're thinking about it?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Well, yes, I think that you can take a version of those numbers or get to where you're going even easier than that. I think -- if we look at the revenue increase in Agility this quarter, okay. But if you look at the -- and the reason I shared , if you look at the increase in bookings quarter-over-quarter, that was 130%, and bookings are an early indicator of revenue growth. have to book the business, you book the business and then you start billing for a subscription 1.12 per month of the value of that subscription. But that's booked business. So in the ability of business, we look very, very carefully at bookings we look at annual -- our backlog, our annual recurring revenue in the business, but bookings are the earliest leading indicator and I'm very happy with that 13% number.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Sure. And you've got a first class guy running that division, and you've got really good salespeople who are working on it, right?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Well, yes. And Martin is doing a phenomenal job. Martin is meeting the charge, of course. Tom, specifically is meeting the sales teams, and he's got great experience that he's brought to the table, and we're starting to see all the upside that we expected to see when we brought them on to the team. But I'll go even work on that. I've got a great executive team right now, and we're firing on all cylinders, and it's an exciting time at the company.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Right, right. Now I know you've got the right so far, the major relationship is with the proverbial social media company, I guess, Facebook does matter from my vantage point. But what's the key service that Internet is bringing to that company? Why are they doing business with Innodata.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • So we're working across several engineering teams working, I believe now in about 17 or 18 different specific AI initiatives and what we're bringing them is consistent high-quality data that's enabling them and we saw it just a week ago, they shared with us that the algorithms we're working on are performing better, faster than they expected and that exactly what we want to hear.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Right, right. Well, listen, that's as much as I need to know at this point. But a great quarter. It sounds like we're on plan. So keep going.

  • Operator

  • (Operator Instructions) we'll hear next from Dana Buska at Feltl.

  • Dana Buska

  • Congratulations on a wonderful quarter. It sounds like things are going extremely well for you.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Well thank you so much. They are indeed.

  • Dana Buska

  • I have just a question around -- or my first question is around the client that's switching between models, your services? Could you talk a little bit more about that? Is that something that you might expect happening going in the future that clients move from model to model with your services?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Sure. So I guess I can kind of conflate my answer to your question, what I just said to Tim, because it's -- it applies equally if we get to a level of accuracy and efficacy faster with less data in a model then we can start other initiatives arguably within the same recurring program within the customers' budget.

  • So you can imagine customers certainly embrace the idea of being able to do more for the amount of money that's budgeted around technology. So we view that in the medium and long term is a great thing as Brega writes that we will be talking to others of our customers about like, well, here's what they got to achieve based on working with our data. they exceeded their plans. They're able to deploy efforts and funds to other things and reallocate. -- that's a tremendous calling card for us.

  • Dana Buska

  • That's Yes, that sounds wonderful. Now 1 of the questions. You've announced a lot of in your press release, I had a lot of new customers. Could you talk a little bit of what percentage of those are like data annotation -- and what part of them are for like Agility and Synodex?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • I'd love to share that, and we'll probably add that as a metric that we will track that we will share going forward. I don't have that in front of me. What I do have in front of me is that we as I said, added 121 new logos in the quarter, 96% increase over Q1, 30% or excuse me, Q1 2020, 30% over Q1 2021. So goes along kind of what I'm saying about bookings. These are early indicators of revenue growth that we're very happy to share.

  • Dana Buska

  • Okay. Okay. Great. That's fine. A lot of those lines then, when we look at your business, how do you see the data annotation segment of the business going -- and in terms of -- is that where you're really excited about? Or is it like the whole all your different business lines? And can you talk a little bit more how the data annotation fits into all your other businesses.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Sure. So Yes. No. I mean I try not to choose what I'm most excited about that I'm faced with the problem of being excited about everything that we're doing right now. I'm even excited about some things we're talking about right now. So I can't really choose one over another. I think the way to think about what we do is as 3 tiers like you might imagine, a wedding cake having 3 tiers. So there's data annotation, which is programming AI models.

  • That's the first tier, second tier is deploying those models or building those models and managing those models for other people or enabling people to access our models. And that second tier, we think as enabling AI, applied AI, if you will. The third tier is we're building our AI algorithms that we've trained, deployed, managed.

  • We're building those into applications to help take kind of legacy workflows, things that people have done for lots and lots of years the same way they've always done it, but where we get to reimagine how they work and the way that their work can be augmented through this technology and where we see an opportunity that can go outside the single customer, but really across the market -- that's super cool, and we'll build what we call an industry solution around that.

  • So I'm excited about that architecture because I think it enables us to target enterprises regardless of the investment that they've made to date in AI and provide value to them that results from AI. Is that helpful?

  • Dana Buska

  • Yes, that's helpful. Just a clarifying question, where would you put Agility and Synodex in your whiting cake analogy?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • So timing Synodex are that third tier to their applications in which we've encapsulated AI to create a better outcome, a better value for our customers. The banking application that I referred to is going to be another industry solution, third-tier level thing sold by subscription. The AI is the engine under the hood but you're selling it holistically, you're selling it as an application. It's a cloud-based SaaS application that is -- performs as well as it does by virtue of the AI, second tier, which performs as well as it does by virtual of the first tier, which was the high-quality data that we use to train it. So these all 3 are very intimately related and benefit from each other.

  • Dana Buska

  • Okay. With your banking application, are we going to see that revenue in the digital data solutions? Or are you going to break out as a separate business unit? How are you thinking about that?

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • We'll see Bet and Digital Data Solutions.

  • Dana Buska

  • Okay. Okay. Great. Excellent. That does it for me congratulations again on a wonderful quarter.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Dana, thank you.

  • Operator

  • And we will take a follow-up from Tim Clarkson.

  • Timothy Clarkson - Partner, Top Producer, President of Investments & Stockbroker

  • Hey, jack, this is sort of more of a complaint than a question, but I was getting a rental car in Florida. And honestly, it was taking maybe 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes 15 minutes to process a simple rental car deal. And I got to believe there's got to be an AI way of turning that in.

  • It should be a 1-minute or a 2-minute deal where you ask the critical questions. What are the -- what's the critical questions that need to be asked and the rest of that should be able to be processed quickly. And I mean there's still so much inefficiency out there that just cost money and it disaggregates everybody.

  • So I mean, there's -- it's not -- it goes everywhere and things as simple as getting a rental car. So that's just a comment. But there's still tremendous inefficiencies out there that really are difficult. So with that, I'll -- I can comment on that or not.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Well, Tim, I'm sorry to hear about your experience, but I'm relieved that your complaint has nothing to do with the service or product that we're providing. But your point is absolutely well taken. And I'll respond with 2 observations, the first of which is that we're in the earliest of innings, we've got applications that are AI-based applications on our phones, our CRE is, in essence, an AI-based application. -- recommendation engines or AI-based engines, but we're at the very early stages of this. I'm firmly committed to the belief that AI is going to be in everything that we do in the next several years.

  • Now if we take your example, what -- how might you reinvent that experience with AI. I mean it's pretty obvious. You could have computer vision algorithms that are understanding who's in line, facial recognition. You could have robotics and applications that are bringing your car to you.

  • You could have the image recognition algorithms that are helping you check in that car to validate that there's no damage to make that seamless and of course, we're talking about an industry that itself might be supplanted when AI-based autonomous driving becomes more available.

  • So clearly, you're describing the experience that's there to be reimagined. And these technologies, I believe, will help do exactly that.

  • Operator

  • And Mr. Abuhoff. That does conclude today's question-and-answer session. Sir, I will turn it back to you for any additional or closing remarks.

  • Jack S. Abuhoff - President, CEO & Director

  • Thank you. Closing remarks. Well, there was a character on a mid-'19 AVs television show that I used to watch. You would regularly say, I love it when a plan comes together. In these days, that's exactly how we feel at Innodata. Our plan is to position our company kind of front and center for the data-centric AI paradigm, which is all about data engineering, our specialization.

  • We're ideally suited to help these leading businesses embrace AI to do more with less to carry on business with less dependency on human staff that we all know have become more and more difficult to retain and recruit. This aligns well with the economy and the challenges presented by what people are calling the great resignation. And of course, it aligns well with market projections and analysts declared AI to be at the heart of the next fundamental technology revolution.

  • And I just want to emphasize, it's been just 8 weeks since we last reported, but we literally had pages of progress to report, just from that 8-week interval. Our strategic position, coupled with these investments that we're making that I've described are showing the returns we saw when we committed to them.

  • So it's an exciting time, and again, thank you for joining the call today, and I will be looking forward to our next call.

  • Operator

  • Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's Innodata First Quarter 2022 Earnings Release Conference Call. We thank you all for your participation.

  • You may now disconnect your lines, and we hope that you enjoy the rest of your day.