Kyndryl Holdings, Inc. Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Wow, okay. First, we do run the systems that run the world. We run five of the seven largest airlines. We run 50 of the largest insurance companies. We run most of the big banks around the world, et cetera. Our point of view, my point of view, is going to reflect that big large company set of priorities. Our customers are increasingly focused on really three things. One is modernizing their infrastructure. Just based on the very quick description I gave you would guess that our customers are not the born-on-the-cloud crowd. Our customers have evolved their enterprise IT landscape over, many of them, decades. The new technologies that are now available to them, each of which they're keen to pilot and experiment with and then put into scale production, each of them needs to figure out how to modernize that infrastructure.

Sometimes it comes from the infrastructure, sometimes it comes from the application side, and sometimes it comes from a business process. But each of them needs to modernize because the technologies of today, if you use a metaphor, the technologies of today are a bullet train that can travel 200 miles an hour, but the tracks were built for 30 miles an hour. So number one priority, our customer base needs to modernize in order to take advantage of the new technologies. By the way, the new technologies are the ones that the new entrants are trying. The new technologies are the ones that are going to find their way into the fastest movers. So modernization, top of their list. Second, we live in an increasingly security risk world, so both cybersecurity and more importantly, the resilience that is required.

By and large, our customers, I think, would say that a security risk is not the existential threat, it is the resiliency characteristics that you need in order to come back online, in order to continue to provide services for your customers. So at a time of modernization, at a time of heavy investment to bring that infrastructure up to speed, they also need to be aware of an increasing threat environment. So cybersecurity and resiliency stay top of mind. Then third, this is different in different parts of the world, but our customer base, again, I gave you a brief description. You would speculate that many of our customers are in regulated industries, certainly which they are. So there is, even if regulated or unregulated, there is an increasingly complex geopolitical environment that they need to navigate.

When they are thinking about who do they trust and how do they partner with us, they are also thinking about longer-term decisions. They are thinking about something that is going to last five or six or seven years. So in an environment where some of the leading technology firms, some of the new AI firms are making really game-changing announcements every four or five or six weeks, where the regulatory environment is changing rapidly as geopolitics push politicians and others to create new regulatory regimes. Our customers have top of mind this whole new set of stakeholders now around how do I get comfortable that I have the right partner that I can stick with, that are going to bring me into the future when I know that in a week or a month or a year, a lot can change again?

The world is getting increasingly complex, and that is why they use their trusted partner for many, many years, like Kyndryl. That is why we are also signing a lot of new business. That is why we are also signing a lot of new scope with our customers, because we have the expertise, the engineering talent, the innovation that allows them to be comfortable that we can navigate those big priorities, modernization, cybersecurity and resiliency, in an ever-changing geopolitical landscape.

I think modernization will always be with us, right? Because today's technology is going to be stale in sometimes it's an hour, sometimes it's in a decade, right? Plus, because of, again, the geopolitical world changing, things come and go in and out of top of mind. As an example, we are seeing now a bit of a resurgence in private cloud, where 5 years ago, 6 years ago, 7 years ago, private cloud had started to not shrink. Public cloud was more important in certain ways. Private cloud's kind of coming back now. Again, in this case, it's because of the geopolitical and the private cloud providers, the people who can build the technology for private clouds, have brought a lot of innovation to market. I don't think the idea of modernization is ever going to go away.

I think it's always going to be with us. For us, it means that we have to continuously invest in where the world is going. We have to continually build skills that are relevant for today's times. Our view is that the half-life of skills today is probably 18 to 20 months. That's why we have such a heavy investment in skills and education and constantly creating new credentialing for our employees. Similarly, the idea of modernization is not just a technology idea, but we know our customers, employees, we know the workforce, because our customers tell us the workforce is not ready. There's a modernization element that's always going to be with the workforces that we help our customers with as well. I think the short answer is modernization is here forever.

Yeah. Sure. First, I would say arguably, the U.S. is probably the most competitive marketplace there is for a few reasons. One, everybody's here, every competitor is here. Market access is quite good, so everybody is here. That's one. Two, every technology is here. Either it's invented here or it's brought here very quickly. In that environment, it's my litmus test for how competitive are we? What are the value propositions that we're bringing? How deep are our industry skills, and how are we packaging all of Kyndryl together in order to deliver a compelling value prop for our customers? For us, it's very positive to see that the U.S. has returned to growth.

The U.S. has great signings performance because it tells us that what we're delivering to our customers in that arguably most competitive marketplace, where there aren't as many distractions as there might be in other places, tells us we're doing really well. We've won some very substantial new logos in the U.S. in certain industries. That was driven by our mission-critical expertise. It's driven by our Kyndryl Agentic Framework, which tells our customers how to use agentic in their systems. It's also driven by some new business process innovation that we're bringing to things like state governments, where we're running a number of DMVs, a number of divisions of motor vehicle, because they need to modernize the way they engage with the citizenry in order to provide a more positive experience.