Ci&T at JPMorgan Conference: AI Strategy Boosts Growth

On Wednesday, 14 May 2025, Ci&T Inc (NYSE:CINT) presented at the 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference. The company reported a strong start to the year, driven by an innovative AI strategy, while acknowledging challenges in the macro environment. The discussion highlighted both the positive growth metrics and the competitive pressures in the tech industry.

Key Takeaways

• Ci&T reported a 13.7% year-over-year growth in constant currency for its CNG metric.
• The company reaffirmed its revenue guidance of 9% to 15% growth, with an adjusted EBITDA margin expected between 18% and 20%.
• A 30% increase in the sales pipeline was attributed to the adoption of the CINT Flow platform.
• 85% of employees are now using AI tools daily, with a focus on reskilling through the "Nextgen" program.
• M&A remains a long-term strategy, focusing on companies with strong US client relationships.

Financial Results

• Q1 Performance:

- CNG grew 13.7% year-over-year in constant currency.

- Revenue growth guidance reaffirmed at 9% to 15%, with a midpoint of 12%.

- Adjusted EBITDA margin guidance maintained at 18% to 20%, with a midpoint of 19%.

• Pipeline Growth:

- Sales pipeline increased by 30% compared to the previous year.

Operational Updates

• AI Strategy:

- The CINT Flow platform is now used by all customers, with 7,000 employees engaging with AI tools daily.

- Over 3,000 AI agents are operational within the platform.

• Employee Training:

- 85% of employees are actively using AI tools.

- The "Nextgen" program aims to train a new generation of AI-native coders.

• M&A Strategy:

- Focus on acquiring US-based companies with robust client relationships to enhance AI capabilities.

Future Outlook

• Growth Strategy:

- Leveraging AI to solve previously unaddressable problems and increase demand.

- Developing custom AI-driven solutions tailored to specific industries.

• Talent Development:

- Emphasis on reskilling current employees and investing in AI-native talent.

• Market Focus:

- Targeting industries where customer experience is crucial for competitiveness.

• Reporting Improvements:

- Transitioned to reporting financial results in USD for better peer comparison.

Q&A Highlights

• AI Productivity:

- Clients assess AI productivity by comparing Ci&T’s performance with previous vendors.

- Focus on tangible productivity improvements rather than abstract metrics.

• Vertical Focus:

- Successful AI applications identified in financial services and customer experience sectors.

- Potential growth in consumer goods and retail industries.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed account of the conference call.

Full transcript - 53rd Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Communications Conference:

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: My phone here. Yeah. I’m joined currently. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Finally, they got it. It’s live now. Alright. Good afternoon.

My name is Puneet. I’m from JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team. Glad to have here with us Cesar from CINT. And Eduardo, who’s sitting here in audience, is also with us. So the format of this presentation is going to be fireside chat.

I’ll start with a few questions, and then we’ll open the floor from questions from audience. And for people who are dialing in virtually, feel free to use the portal to send questions our way. So Cesar, welcome. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it.

You reported your first quarter results Yes. So if you can quickly recap like big picture, like what themes, what trends you are seeing in market.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Sure. Sure. Thank you, Puneet. Thank you for having me. We reported our first quarter last night.

I think it was a very solid result. We beat our guidance. CNG is growing consistently, 13.7% in constant currency growth year over year. I think also we present a very solid bottom line and EBITDA margin that speaks with the guidance for the year. We are by the way, we are reaffirming our revenue guidance of growth of 9% to 15% with midpoint of 12%, and I think we are very confident on that.

And also the EBITDA adjusted EBITDA margin for the year between 1820%, midpoint 19%, that is, I think, a solid profitability. So I think it’s we we also present some evidence, especially pipeline commercial activities is is doing good this year. We have 30% pipeline that is 30% higher than the same in the same period last year. The conversion rate are good. So basically, we credit that to our AI strategy in the way we organize our positioning and our offerings around the opportunities on efficiency, on customer experience, and data decision making around AI.

So a very, very solid start and we are very confident.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: So one thing that surprised us, like, so going into this earnings cycle, like after liberation day, we were worried like how like the just the macro shock then might have impact on certain clients, especially folks in like retail, CPG industries. And from your guidance, it didn’t look like there was like much impact, like even in those industries, it didn’t look like there were many delays that you experienced. So can you help us understand, like, why, like, the macro news and all didn’t have, like, the impact that people feared?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Sure. Sure. I think the cohort of clients, of the main clients of C and T are very, very large companies, very solid companies. And we are working on very critical digital initiatives. So I think as what we are doing is very strategic, they will not stop investing because of short term volatility.

So I think I would grant the main reason why we are not feeling this downside is because of the cohort of clients and the kind of problems we are working with them.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Can you give us examples of like the digital projects or AI projects that are continuing or that clients are kick starting in this environment?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Sure. For example, in Brazil, all the large financial institutes and especially large banks are in a very competitive moment regarding customer experience, customer engagement. And I think this is driving a lot of demand because it’s resonate with our capabilities of looking this journey end to end and add a lot of value around, innovate a lot around customer experience. If you look at different markets, also see huge opportunity on finally address legacy systems. And with AI and our legacy modernization studio, we can really address this long term challenge of large companies.

They migrate their legacy systems to the cloud, they will start moving faster, be more cost effective, and at the end of the day, create better customer experience for their customers. So this is also very critical, and now it’s even feasible with much less risk and in a different equation of return on investment. So this is also driving a lot of demand. And we credit that to the way we organize our capabilities, our AI agents, CI and G flow towards a set of very important challenges our customer have, and we are fulfilling our growth with that.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Can you elaborate on CI and T flow? From what I’m hearing is there is demand for certain AI core modernization, those projects, and you have to have capabilities to benefit from that. So what is it that you are doing? And there, talk about CINT flow that differentiates you from other companies.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Sure. I think since we realized, I think the milestone for our industry is the launch of GPT 3.5 in late November twenty twenty two. From that moment on, we realized that we would have a great opportunity if we embrace AI in a in a, I would say, in a very comprehensive way. And the first step would be how we create a safe environment for CI and peers and our clients to really start learning, how to reinvent software engineering based on the exponential growing of AI, generative AI capabilities. And then we launched it.

We worked in the first half of twenty twenty three. And by July, we were launching the first version of CINT Flow, a robust end to end platform, already connected with all the relevant foundational models, already with co creating with five of our 10 largest customers. So we were working in a very enterprise setting environment with security, with privacy, with all the reliability that are non negotiable for our cohort of clients. So from that, we start retraining our teams. Now we have 7,000 people using AI and Flow daily.

And also we have the opportunity to create a growing number of AI agents for different domains and problems. Now we have more than 3,000 AI agents in the platform. And now we are connecting these agents in the agentic way. So it’s an exponential curve of gain, efficiency, productivity, and really the ability not only address the legacy problems, but also the new challenges that our customers are facing. So I think that was a very smart move, very early bold move from CINT and our customers.

And now we have 100% of our customers take advantage of CINT flow and our AI boosted teams.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Now I remember you’ve been talking about flow, CINT flow for a while. And it’s beginning to see the results of all those investments. You mentioned AgenTik AI. Obviously, has the latest buzzword in Gen AI era. So we hear the same concept, like services as a software.

So increasingly more services work will be delivered as software or a platform. So, why are IT services companies broadly the right type of firms who will address that opportunity? Why couldn’t it be the software companies or pure play companies, private companies, which lead with the platform less people, more platform based solutions.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Puneet, what I see now is because of the equation of return on investment is changing dramatically because of hyper productivity. I see the build versus buy equation changing in favor of custom development. And we are just in the beginning of this radical curve of hyper productivity. So what I see is as we evolve this, the capabilities of the model, the latents, even with more diversification of foundational models, and including the advent of the open source models as a relevant part of this puzzle, I see tremendous opportunity on innovation around AI solutions. And I believe this will replace a lot of things that now are considered part of the buy side of this equation.

So what I foresee is much larger market for solutions, custom solutions, but in a very different fashion. I think companies will have to verticalize their capabilities to be really aggressive on design, the best solutions for a specific problem, you need to know the business, the industry, only the technical part of it. So I see more potential differentiation on verticalization. That is CIT strategy, going from vertical to vertical and create a specific custom AI driven solutions compared to the game of a very horizontal play of the large IT consulting business where they go to A to Z, but with very standardized solutions. So I see a tailwind in favor of what we are doing.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Got it. And that’s very interesting. So it’s like that got me thinking like, so it will be like so back in the days, like how there was like software companies would provide ERP and IT services company will do customization, bring that industry knowledge and expertise. Now that IT services companies will add like a platform or a solution that is more industry focused, that sits on underlying software.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Yes. I I think it’s it’s it’s a trend, and and it will be a big opportunity for companies that move fast in this direction.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Yeah. No. Very good. That’s great. Other question, other concern that we hear from investors around AI is about all those spend new projects, whether it’s cloud migration, core modernization, agent tech platforms.

What’s the source of funds for all those projects? Like, are clients cutting back on their operations, like the business process, because they don’t need as many employees, paralegals, admins, and AI is doing those jobs. Or are they just moving funds from other discretionary projects into this?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: I think the equation for legacy modernization is more regarding return on investment. So the kind of speed and flexibility you’re going to have as soon as you modernize your legacy system for getting more customers, increase your client acquisition strategy, improve your customer experience so you get more customers and more business. I think it’s more about competing with other companies that are also challenging. They stop school regarding customer experience than moving from one IT bucket to another. Of course, there is a lot of opportunities of automation that will free some investment capacity.

But specifically for when you are talking about mission critical platforms, it’s it’s kind of urgent that you migrate these platforms to to to the cloud where you you have another another level of scalability, flexibility, and so on. So this is just a foundation of the digital transformation. Really, it’s it’s when we we say that we are in the in the second chapter of the digital revolution with AI. This is a backlog from the first chapter, right? Yes.

It’s still there. The majority of large companies are still dealing with very old, 30 years old, legacy And it’s almost to compete in the dynamics of the current market because of the new technology possibilities and new consumer behaviors if you not surely address this legacy.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Yeah. And AI will make it easier to take care of this technical debt.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Yeah. So and finally Yes. This is the good news. Yep. Something you would spend, I don’t know, seven, eight years and and hundreds of millions.

Now you can do in two or three years in a completely different cost equation. So I think this is the opportunity.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: And that’s also like when we talk to some investors who worry about feature of IT services or outlook for companies like even yourself, like they ask us about this developer productivity, that AI will the lot of work that’s being done manually can be done using AI, right? And what does that mean for IT services companies because naturally project size on like to like basis goes down. So is that the response? Or like, how would you make us feel confident that the incremental work that will come from AI will more than offset or at least offset incremental productivity?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: I think if we look the history of computing on earth, I started in 1946 with the ENIAC

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Let’s go. Let’s start.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: The first general purpose digital computer. In the last eighty, eighty years, the productivity has been increased a lot. Yes. And and this equation, every time we have a leap in productivity, we have an increase in demand. Because there is a lot of problems for two reasons.

First, the return on investments increase. So a lot of things you were not considering to automate or to add technology now makes sense because of this equation. Another thing that’s happened, especially now with AI, there is a class of problems that we before AI, we were not considering to use technology to address, now are addressable using technology. So the number of challenges and problems that we will be able to solve is much, much higher than to consume this this new jump in productivity. So this equation is is always you need to look at as a as a two part equation.

Productivity means demand.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Got it. Got it. And then you talked about your 7,000 people who are trained, who use AI tool solutions every day. Last night on your earnings call, you talked about 85% of employees that use AI.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Daily.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Daily. So talk to us like the effort required in getting people and the training effort and why your peers cannot catch up or replicate what you have been doing in training your employees?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: I think our strategy was a very comprehensive one. First was creating a vision, a purpose. Why CINT is doing this? Why we are creating flow? Why this is important for our clients?

And for the future of our clients and for the future of CINT. So we have a purpose. Purpose. We want to be a serious protagonist in this AI revolution. We want to be the first IT service company that will really handle this in a very aggressive way.

And then we create a lot of opportunities for for the CI engineers to learn, to deep dive on on AI, on flow training, formal training certifications, a lot of incentives in career, bonus for executives. We measure every single day who is using, who is not using, why. So it was a full period of radical PDCA around. We need to put our teams inside this trend. And six months later, was clear that we were winning.

Everyone was excited. And we started to see a lot of innovation coming from this reinvention of process or workflows that we could do in a different way. Another thing I think we got right was we did it for our clients and for our production teams, but we also create a program we call U prompt for all the supporting areas of CIT. So if you are CIT in our market, in our financial, in our HR area, you also need to embrace flow. If you are coder or if you are a non there’s a lot of things to learn and to do.

The idea of design the future of CINT, CINT is a reinvention of our business, combined with the reinvention of what is to be a professional in this future powered by AI. I think that that connection was was was the main flywheel that allow us to to move so fast during this last two years.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: And do you have to, like, hire, like, different type of people now? Are you hiring, like, the different

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Basically, the first the first step was were basically reskilling. Now we are doing a very, very strong bet around fresh grads. Probably heard, we just on board more than 400 trainees.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Yep. So

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: And and we we prepare a training, a very specific training. We want to create the first AI native generation because in the last two years, we learned that more senior you are, more hard is to change.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Yes.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: More young, more in the beginning of your career, you are more open for to really reinvent your capabilities or skills the way you see this opportunity. So Nextgen, that is the name of the program, is our huge experiment on creating the first generation of AI native coders. It’s just for coders now, but and we are very happy with the early early results we are getting.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: No. That’s great. At this time, like, are there any questions from people in the room?

Unidentified speaker, Unspecified: Yeah. Could I just first of all, thank you so much for being here, Cesar. Appreciate you. Could you elaborate on kind of folks you’re hiring and what it takes to sort of train an AI native developer? Maybe if I could ask a follow-up built into there.

How would you expect that to keep changing over the next couple years? Thanks.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Sure. These are basically people that are graduating on computer science or things like software engineering or some math, especially for data, some testis, math background. And and and basically, our our training progress is six months to, let’s say, in room deep dive on AI and flow, and then four months on the job in real challenges, real engagements we have being coached intensively. That’s, so basically we believe that this very young, fresh professional can add value after six months of very intensive and focused training. For the future, what I think is, what I see is we are still decoding the new capabilities or behaviors of this new generation of tech talents or professionals.

But basically, less emphasis on hard skills and more emphasis on soft skills relate to curiosity, to being innovative, being less attached to one way to solve a problem and so on. We are decoding that, but I figured this is the future of our, a good chunk of our cohort of employees.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Let me ask about margins. So your guidance for this year is 18% to 20% on adjusted EBITDA margin basis, which is quite wide range. Like maybe talk to us like what are the levers in the model like that can push margins higher above this range or even like towards the high end of this range? Like how should we think about margins? You had some margin headwinds in Q1.

Like why some of those headwinds will not continue beyond Q1? Sure.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: I think in the short term, as we are growing fast, just the dilution of our G and A is something we can leverage. But we are using that leverage also to increase our sales investment because we see a lot of opportunities. We have an edge in terms of offering and differentiation. So it’s a good moment to increase our investment on sales and go to market strategies. So it’s natural.

I think another leverage is we are seeing less effort to onboard new employees because of AI. We can speed up this process to billability and also reduce the overhead of our senior people having to stop to really help someone that is arriving in a new business or project context. We can use AI for that. You can really solve 90% of your questions with a model, not with a person. That helps a lot in the business in the onboarding process.

In a more strategic way, I think the commercial model will evolve. We are doing a lot of experiments, not only migrating time material for fixed price, but also creatively testing new commercial models where potentially we can capture more margin. This is early stage, but I think in a measure in twelve, twenty four months, we probably will have a portfolio of commercial models that can help in the long term to increase margins too.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: And, like, you’ve about, like, how much, like, productivity you can extract using AI, like, in typical, like, the coding effort. Right? Your peers, like, we hear numbers twenty, thirty, 40, like numbers like that, x percentage of productivity using AI. My question is, like, when you bid for contracts, when you go to a client, do they care about that number at all? Like, one vendor saying we can do it using 20%, other 30%.

Like, how are they taking those decisions when everything is so new and so uncertain?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: We are doing something much more concrete. We get, let me get what your other vendor did in the last six months, and we measure that. And we say, well, this is with the standard AI boosting of CIT. We can do it in half of the time or half of the hours in a very concrete way, especially if they are already using CIT teams. They have these numbers.

I think playing our favor in the last three decades, one thing that puts CINT apart is our discipline on measuring everything we are doing. And in particular, productivity is something we handle in a very concrete way. So and with AI, it’s very easy to assess the current productivity of one team and compare with what would be if this team was using a different methodology, a different set of platforms and AI agents like CNG flow. So it’s a very concrete. It’s not an abstract discussion about I’m 30 times 30% better.

It’s about what is your current baseline of productivity and when you can get in three or four months if you go in a different direction.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Talk to us about your use of cash. Like, you have used M and A. It’s been a while since you’ve done completed a deal. So talk to us, like how do look at think about M and A as one of the levers? Many of your peers have gotten very acquisitive in last one year compared to, like, you you haven’t done much.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Yes.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: So how do you think about M and A as driver for future organic growth?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: Sure. I think we see m and a as a long term strategy to accelerate our organic growth. But I think in the current moment of AI disruption, I think we we are we continue to scan scan the market, but we we I think we are looking in the market with a very high bar because what I see is smaller companies are facing a very hard time on handling the AI revolution. And if we acquire a company, and basically the main reason why we are acquiring a company is the portfolio of clients. But if these small companies do not have the kind of relationship that we can scale for an AI discussion, AI transformation discussion, we’re gonna destroy value.

So we are, but having said that, we continue to, our main geography is The US, and we continue to look for good companies with a good portfolio of large clients, but also checking if the level of relationship, the intimacy is enough for CINT to scale this relationship to be able to apply the AI concept and solutions we are talking about. So I think this is a very high bar. Having said that, we continue to look at the market. If we find a good target, we will execute another M and A and probably here in The USA.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Very good. Like, we have about three minutes left. Any last questions from?

Unidentified speaker, Unspecified: So you mentioned some success in financial services, particularly customer experience with banks. And would you say that’s like by far in a way your kind of most successful near term applications on this AI stuff, or would there be any other interesting vertical implementations or call outs you want to share with folks?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: I I think every customer facing industry will have to reshape the customer experience strategy. More competitive environment will move fast, where we have more digital natives participating in competitive game. The increments will have to move fast. So I think it’s more an equation competitiveness than the intrinsic characteristics of the specific vertical. So, and this is different from geography to geography.

As I mentioned, Brazil is a very interesting moment for financial services, but I see a lot of opportunities in consumer goods, especially when big, large companies want to really understand better their customer, the end customer, the direct to customer strategies, and or leverage hyper personalization to a more intense use of data and AI, so another vertical. Retail is always a battle among the traditional retailers and the marketplace. Very well designed for producing better customer experiences. So it’s a traditional retailers will have to move fast if they want to compete in this space. So I think you’re going to see this battle in every single industry where customer facing is important.

Unidentified speaker, Unspecified: That makes sense. Thank you, sir.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Let me quickly ask one more. You recently started reporting results in USD. It’s more Stanley question, so sorry about that. But the feedback you have gotten from investors on that, and what else you can do to drive investor interest here in The US?

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: I think it was important move. Now we’re reporting standard US dollars, easy to compare CID with our peers, the the vertical. Another thing is is I think we are a company with three decades, so thirty years of consecutive growth, but for the market, we have only four years like we Yeah. So we are new, and and but consistency in our ability to continue to expand, to grow, to adapt, to take advantage of moments like like this one where where there is a technology disruption, and also the big shift in consumer behaviors. I think this resonates with our track record.

One thing that I think is very important to understand is the fact that we are 7,000 or 7,400 now. It’s a big number for the kind of demand our clients have, but it’s small in terms of the whole IT services. So we can continue to grow aggressively without any bottleneck on the supply side, especially because we have a very comfortable position in Brazil. That is the largest tech talent pool in Latin America by far, and we are dominant force there. We are diversifying, now we are ramping up Colombia and other place.

But I think projecting CINT in a ten year high growth is more about how we’re gonna leverage demand than how we’re gonna manage the supply side of the equation.

Puneet, JPMorgan’s payment processing and IT services team, JPMorgan: Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Cesar, Unspecified, CINT: My pleasure. Thank you for having

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