CI&T Inc 2026 Q2 Earnings Call

Thank you for joining us for CI&T second quarter of 2026 earnings call. I am Eduardo Galvão, director of investor relations. Joining me today to discuss our quarterly results are Cesar Gon, our founder and CEO, Bruno Guicardi, founder and President for North America and Europe, and Stanley Rodrigues, our CFO. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements. These statements, including our business outlook, are based on the management current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We caution you not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as they are valid only as of the date when made. Additionally, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. We believe these provide a more comprehensive view of our underlying operational performance.

For a full reconciliation of these measures to the most directly comparable GAAP metrics, please refer to the tables in our earnings release. Today's session is being recorded and all participants are currently in a listen-only mode. Following our presentation, we will host a Q&A session. To participate, please submit your question via email to investors@cint.com. The full presentation deck is available on our investor relations website, and a replay of this call will be posted shortly after we conclude. With that, I am pleased to hand the floor over to our founder and CEO, Cesar Gon.

Thank you, Eduardo, and good afternoon, everyone. Global AI spend is projected to hit $2.6 trillion this year, up 47% year-over-year. Yet, according to MIT, roughly 95% of AI initiatives still show no measurable business return. That gap is where I want to begin today. We published two papers this quarter that get at why. The first argues that most companies are optimizing the wrong variable, chasing incremental task efficiency instead of asking where AI can return 10 times rather than 10%. The second paper calls it organizational hallucination, the confident belief that a company is transforming when it is actually just experimenting. In both cases, the constraint was never the technology. It is the organization's capacity to absorb it. That gap is exactly where CI&T plays, and it is why we build our business around two things.

AI deployment, installing real capability inside a client's core, and AI monetization, capturing, together with our clients, the productivity gains and business impact that AI deployment creates through value-based commercial models rather than headcount. Everything you will hear from us today, the robust and sustaining revenue growth, and the increase in our sales investments to foster momentum given the AI opportunity, is the same thesis playing out inside our own business. This quarter's numbers reflect that opportunity and the deliberate choices we are making to capture it. We delivered record revenue of $142.8 million, up 21.9% organically and above our guidance. Broad-based across geographies, industry verticals, and client cohorts. Growth was increasingly fueled by new client wins and by initial engagements scaling into large partnerships. Our new commercial models are also letting us capture a greater share of the value we create.

That shows up directly in adjusted gross margin, which expanded from 30.6% in the first quarter to 32.4% as this model scaled. In the first 6 months of 2026, 30% of new engagements were under new value-based pricing models, and we project this gross margin expansion to accelerate in the coming quarters. Our adjusted EBITDA margin in the quarter was 13.3%, reflecting our deliberate choice. 2026 is a transition year, one where we invest in our commercial engine to turn this AI deployment opportunity into durable, profitable growth in 2027 and beyond. As a result, our commercial pipeline is now 40% larger than in the first half of 2025. In short, our top line shows the demand is solid, our gross margin shows monetization is working, and this year's commercial investment is what lets us compound that advantage going forward. Here we go again. The second quarter of 2026 marks our seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit organic growth.

At a time when parts of our industry are consolidating through acquisitions, buying growth rather than building it, we have extended this streak without a single M&A deal, prioritizing our capital allocation toward our own transformation and our sales effort and growth engines. This embodies one of our cultural tenets. We play the infinite game. We are not optimizing for a single quarter. We are building a company designed to keep compounding for decades. This consistency reflects a structural shift in client demand and CI&T's ability to capture it. The case studies that follow show how this AI deployment momentum is translating into tangible business outcomes.

These case studies demonstrate how our agentic SDLC and CI&T Flow are resetting the baseline for enterprise productivity and speed to value. I will now hand over to Bruno to discuss how we are scaling this hyper-productivity through our global delivery model and our evolved talent strategy.

Thank you, Cesar. Good afternoon, everyone. I am glad to share our operational and talent progress for this quarter. We closed Q2 2026 with roughly 8.1 thousand professionals. With voluntary attrition at 10.1%, continue to trend towards some of the healthiest levels in our history. At the center of this workforce are our 6,700 AI builders, the result of reskilling 100% of our professionals to work AI natively. That matters right now. Recent independent research mapped a widening gap in the market for AI deployment talent, with demand for engineers who deploy AI at the enterprise scale growing roughly 50% year over year. Most of our industry is racing to hire into an increasingly scarce pool of talent. We did not have to. We built it from within ahead of the market.