ICF International, Inc. Jefferies Global Industrials Conference 2026
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All right. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for this fireside chat with the leadership team at ICF International. We are pleased to have them here at our industrials conference, and thank you all for joining. We are going to cover a number of topics today about ICF, both background on the business, trends, and what we are seeing in the market today and looking forward. Before I go too far into questions, I am going to pass it over to John and David to quickly introduce themselves, and then we will dive in.
Okay, great. I am John Wasson. I am Chairman and CEO of ICF. I have been at ICF for 39 years, so I have seen every corner of the business, and I am really pleased to be here. I appreciate the invitation from Jefferies.
Great. All right. David Birken, Senior Vice President.
I run our technology modernization and digital experience business, and been at ICF 21 years, as LinkedIn was so kind to remind me.
Like. No. Great. ICF, a really interesting business, an integrated business with a lot of different business lines across federal, state, and local, energy, digital modernization transformation. Maybe it would be helpful just to start high level, and John, I will probably start with you, to give a little bit of the ICF story. What makes you unique and different?
Well, sure. As you said, we're a professional services and technology services firm, about $2 billion of revenue, 9,000 employees. We're coming up on our 20th anniversary on the NASDAQ next week. I think in terms of ICF and our differentiation, first, since the founding of the company in 1969, we've always been known for the deep domain expertise, so the subject matter experts in the firm, in the verticals we operate. They allow us to provide first-rate advisory, consulting services, so strategy, program design, policy and economic analysis research. That's been a strong differentiator for many, many years. In the last 20 years, what we've done with our clients is also, in addition to providing those advisory services, we've developed a set of cross-cutting capabilities to help our clients implement the advice, and that gets at technology services, complex program management, change management.
We do both of those for clients. One of the things we can do, given we do both the advisory and the implementation, is connect that white space between them for clients, which I think allows us to do those types of activities very efficiently. We also have a very multidisciplinary staff. We're really known for the breadth of capability and our ability to bring together these interdisciplinary teams to solve very complex problems, very collaborative. The other thing about us is we work across multiple markets. We work on the commercial side, and we work on the government side, and we're able to bring commercial and government perspectives to those clients, which they really value. I think those are the key differentiators. I would also say in this environment, we deliver measurable outcomes for our clients.
So our contracts now are increasingly either fixed-price or outcome based, both for commercial clients or government clients. We deliver on that, and that's how we get paid and make our fees, and I think that we've really leaned in hard on that.
Yeah. Great. You mentioned the federal business, which obviously had disruptions over the changing administration in the last couple of years. That's a lot in the rear view mirror, and you've emphasized some of the changes and how those made you stronger over the last 18 months. Can you elaborate on that?
Well, sure. I think about 40% of our business today is in the government sector. We did see a lot of disruption and change in 2025 from that. I think the way we managed that is because of our diverse portfolio, the other 60% is in commercial, state and local, and international. We shifted a lot of the staff capabilities out of the federal market, given this disruption, into the commercial and state and local, and international markets, which grew quite nicely Right on the last several years.
Part of it was just re-pointing that staff into markets where we saw growth and opportunity, and that's the beauty of having a diversified portfolio. We're a little different from many of our peer companies in that we are diversified across both commercial and government, and that helped us a lot. With that, the other shift we had to make is, how you go about winning commercial business and state and local business, it's different procurement, it's different velocity, it's different speed than the federal government business. With that, we had to pivot and speed up and adjust our internal processes to win that business. I think we did a very good job of that. We've really leveraged AI to help us improve cost efficiency and improve innovation within the company.
I think those are three areas where we really did a nice job in terms of pivoting the business in the last year.
That's great. Dave, maybe I'll jump off that last point on AI and technology modernization. Maybe if you would give us a quick overview of the business that you lead within ICF.
Sure because I think it's going to weave its way into many of our next questions.
Sure. Absolutely. Our modernization business makes up about half of our federal business, a little more than half our federal business. It is a lot of what it sounds like, and sometimes it's not very exciting, but it is modernizing what we would consider core government systems. So things that are required statutorily by law, so you think of this like grant systems, payment systems, fraud, waste, and abuse, Medicaid and Medicare payment systems. We've recently just completed a project on modernizing a commercial driver licensing program. So, these are systems that are required by law, by Congress. That's why they came through the cuts in 2025. That business, we've built it out over the last six, seven years. It's growing quite nicely with the introduction of AI and now working in the AI fabric layer and the data layer.
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