Mastech Digital, Inc. 2026 Q3 Earnings Call

Please go ahead. Thank you, operator, and welcome to Mastech's Third Quarter 2026 Conference Call.

If you have not yet received a copy of our earnings announcement, it can be obtained from the Investors section on our website at www.mastech.com. With me on the call today are Nirav Patel, Mastech's Chief Executive Officer, and Kannan Sugantharaman, our Chief Financial and Operations Officer. I would like to remind everyone that statements made during this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our financial, growth, and liquidity projections, as well as statements about our plans, strategies, intentions, and beliefs concerning the business, cash flows, costs, and the markets in which we operate. Without limiting the foregoing, the words believes, anticipates, plans, expects, and similar expressions are intended to identify certain forward-looking statements.

These statements are based on information currently available to us, and we assume no obligation to update these statements as circumstances change. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including those listed in the company's 2025 annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on its website at www.sec.gov. Additionally, management has elected to provide certain non-GAAP financial measures to supplement our financial results presented on a GAAP basis. Specifically, we will provide non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share data, which we believe will provide greater transparency with respect to the key metrics used by management in operating the business. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to their comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings announcement, which can be obtained from our website at www.mastech.com.

As a reminder, we will not be providing guidance during this call, nor will we provide guidance in any subsequent one-on-one meetings or calls. I will now turn the call over to Nirav for his comments.

Thanks, Jenna. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us as we review our Third Quarter 2026 results. Before Kannan walks through the segment detail, I want to share some updates on our vision for Mastech and how we are investing towards building an indispensable moat that positions us well to deliver on our objectives. This quarter, we announced our vision of the Knowledge-first Enterprise and introduced a new positioning for the Mastech brand. We believe our differentiator is the ability to turn a client's own data and knowledge into practical, applicable, and scalable AI solutions that deliver outcomes. Early response to our launch from our strategic partners and customers has been very encouraging, and we hope to amplify the brand further over the coming year. We believe the moat for an enterprise is its knowledge and people, not an AI model.

Becoming a Knowledge-first Enterprise means bringing data, business context, and human judgment together so people and AI can work with the same understanding across the business. Today, knowledge is scattered across an enterprise's people, processes, code, tools, systems, and platforms. It includes tacit knowledge around how people exercise judgment when they make an exception and why a decision was made. Harnessing that knowledge requires a transformation in the operating model, a strong data foundation, knowledge infrastructure, the right Applied AI solutions, and AI-first talent and adoption working together to produce value and achieve outcomes. To deliver on this vision, we are aligning our offerings, capabilities, and assets around three core offerings: Applied AI, Modern Data, and AI governance, trust, and safety. Applied AI turns enterprise knowledge into solutions for targeted business problems.

In this offering, we combine agentic technology with our own engineering talent to move those solutions into production so they scale and are adopted rather than remaining pilots. We build across the leading frontier models our clients already use, including those available on Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Modern Data builds the data foundation for insights, analytics, and AI. In this offering, we modernize the data and make it usable at scale, supported by a governance layer that keeps it trusted and secure. We have built this offering anchored by our partnerships in the likes of Snowflake, Azure, and Databricks. Our AI governance, trust, and safety helps enterprises lay an AI foundation to scale AI responsibly. This offering focuses on core building blocks of security guardrails, governed data access, an enriched knowledge base, dynamic model routing, evals, and observability that move AI from pilots to enterprise-wide scale.

Together, we believe these offerings connect a trusted data foundation and enterprise knowledge with practical Applied AI solutions. Modern Data makes data usable at scale, AI governance, trust, and safety makes the data trustworthy, and Applied AI turns the foundation into business outcomes. We believe these offerings and capabilities are fundamental for AI transformation, and we plan to invest over the coming years to pivot and strengthen our play as we help companies become Knowledge-first Enterprises. Our partner ecosystem supports this direction by strengthening our delivery capabilities with the technology platforms our clients already use. We have expanded our Microsoft competencies to support Applied AI delivery alongside expertise in Snowflake, Azure, and Databricks to build a Modern Data foundation. We expect to continue investing in the talent, skills, and capabilities needed to turn competencies into solutions our customers can adopt at scale.

Turning now to our business segment performance during the third quarter, our talent segment continues to reflect the revenue quality discipline we have described on prior earnings calls. Our average bill rate reached another Mastech record high of $92.37 this quarter, up from $89.65 a year ago, even as we continue to work through insourcing activities from one of our top 10 clients and our own deliberate exit from certain low-margin, non-strategic positions. We are very pleased to share that our data and AI segment delivered a second consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth, up 4.7% from the second quarter, with bookings of $10.8 million, up 29% from $8.4 million in the same quarter last year. One engagement from the quarter worth highlighting is that we secured our largest AI deal, expanding our work with an existing client through a new initiative.

This is our Applied AI offering in practice, modernizing a highly manual vendor and invoice audit process through an agentic AI audit platform built on AWS. Leveraging AI to extract and reconcile data, human-in-the-loop controls, and a reusable data foundation, our solution is structured to deliver a secure and scalable platform that will streamline audits, support compliance, and help recover overpayments. The client expects significant savings from the first run alone. We believe this is an example of how we bring enterprise knowledge and Applied AI together to deliver a key business outcome. In summary, and in our view, 2025 was a year of reset. We evaluated our strengths as a company and began unlocking efficiencies through EDGE, while 2026 has been the year of putting those efficiencies to work through investments and building true differentiation.

We believe our brand positioning, offerings, strategic relationships, and investments are all aligned towards the vision of a Knowledge-first Enterprise. We remain focused on building differentiation through execution. I expect to share more details as we build on the momentum during the quarters ahead. With that, I will turn it over to Kannan, who will walk you through the financials.

Thanks, Nirav. Good morning, everyone. As Nirav mentioned, data and AI grew sequentially again this quarter. That is two quarters in a row, and the first time we have done that since 2024. I want to thank our team for the work behind it and our clients for their continued support. We believe this growth shows that EDGE is working. As a reminder, we launched EDGE, Efficiencies Driving Growth and Expansion, in Q3 2025 with two phases, an efficiency phase and an investment phase. Last quarter, we said that the reinvestment of those efficiencies into our leadership and talent, our competencies, and our market growth initiatives had started to accelerate. We believe that the growth we are reporting in data and AI today reflects that investment. It also connects directly to what Nirav shared about our new brand and our vision of the Knowledge-first Enterprise.

We believe EDGE is the foundation that makes that vision achievable. The efficiencies we have created are now being reinvested in the capabilities our clients need to turn their data into knowledge and their knowledge into decisions and outcomes. We plan to continue to invest significantly in talent, in building competencies, and in expanding our data and AI business. We believe EDGE positions us well to build differentiated growth around the Knowledge-first Enterprise. I will now discuss our third quarter financial results. During the third quarter, we delivered consolidated revenue of $42 million, a 13.4% decrease year-over-year compared to the prior year period. Our talent segment delivered revenue of $27.9 million, 16.4% lower than the prior year period, though our focus on revenue quality continues.