CINT CI&T Inc.

NYSE
$3.33

CI&T Inc. Q3 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript

AI Conference Call Analysis

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Eduardo Galvao
Director of Investor Relations
AI is transforming how work gets done, but the way we pay for that work hasn't kept up. When AI reduces 10 hours of work to two, traditional contracts see fewer hours to bill. What looks like efficiency can quietly become a barrier to innovation. The problem isn't the technology, it's the incentive behind the contract. At C, I, and T, we believe the next era of AI demands a different commercial mindset, one that rewards outcomes, not just effort. From augmentation to coordination and orchestration, AI can multiply productivity by two, five, and up to 20 times. But sustaining that progress requires partners who can reinvest in the people, agents, data, and workflows that make it possible. The choice is between extracting savings and building shared value. Because the future of AI isn't about paying less for the hours technology eliminates. It's about sharing the value it creates. Explore the full paper online. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for CIMT third quarter of 2026 Earnings Call. I am Eduardo Galvao, Director of Investor Relations.
Eduardo Galvao
Director of Investor Relations
Joining me today to discuss our quarterly results are Cesar Gon, our founder and CEO, Bruno Guicardi, founder and president, 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's 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'll discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. We believe these provide a more comprehensive view of our underlining operation 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'll host a Q&A session. To participate, please submit your question via email to investors at 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'm pleased to hand the floor over to our founder and CEO, Cesar Gon. Cesar, please.
Cesar Gon
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Eduardo, and good afternoon, everyone. This quarter, we delivered record revenue, our 80th consecutive quarter of double-digit organic growth. In a year of investment and transformation, that growth is now reaching our margins. Adjust gross margin up 420 basis points and adjust EBITDA margin up 220 basis points sequentially. Investors often ask us, why is CINT growing when most of our industry is not? For reasons, working together. First, founder-led execution. We run the company through autonomous growth units, close to our clients, with no layers of bureaucracy. That's how we move fast. Second, deep client context. Our largest clients have trusted us for decades, and that trust gives us what AI needs to work in production, deep knowledge of their business and operating model. It's hard to replicate. Third, we are a rare scaled AI player and nimble. All our offerings are built around AI deployment, delivered by 6,800 AI builders with no legacy service lines to protect. Fourth, early to AI, multi-model by design. We launched CI&T Flow in the first half of 2023, then re-skilled our teams and redesigned our career tracks around AI. So the way we develop talent matches the way we now deliver. Flow orchestrates the leading models, so our economics do not depend on which model wins. You will see these four reasons in our numbers today. Broad-based growth, a commercial model that pays us for what we deliver rather than for ours, and operating profit growing again, quarter over quarter. C&T puts AI into production at enterprise scale with measurable business outcomes. We delivered record revenue of $146.3 million, up 14.9% year-over-year, all organic, ahead of our guidance. The growth is broad-based. Clients outside our top 10 grew 17.1%, faster than the 12.2% from our largest accounts. So our momentum does not depend on a few clients. What changes this quarter is how growth turns into margin. Adjusted growth profit margin reached 36.6%, up 420 basis points from the second quarter and 270 basis points year over year. The main driver is AI monetization. In the third quarter, 40% of our new engagements were signed under value-based commercial models, up from 30% in the first half. More and more, we are paid for what we deliver, not for the hours we bill. Operating profit follows. Adjust EBITDA grew 19.1% sequentially, with margin expanding from 13.3% to 15.5%, even as we step up investment in our commercial engine. That was a deliberate choice for 2026. New offerings, new verticals, and scaling a gigantic SDLC across our clients. It's already showing in our pipeline. 50% larger than a year ago. Stanley will walk you through the details later in the call, including the Curran's effect. Two years of double-digit organic growth at Custom Currency. More important than a streak is what produces it. First, what we sell. We put AI into production in two ways. Services with AI built-in, like agent software development, and AI transformation, modernizing legacy systems and data and redesigning how business runs with agents. Second, who we grow with. Existing clients are expanding and new logos are ramping across industries and regions. The best proof is in production. Here are a few examples with numbers attached.
Unknown
Narrator
Kraft Heinz feeds millions of tables, but its sales team was hungry for more clarity. So CI&T built Data.Mate, a co-pilot where machine learning turns raw data into the next best move. Active users grew 371%, 527% of engagement, 88% of sales executives adopted it, the people who drive a third of all revenue. And in 2026, it took first place in AI at the Involves Awards. Because great sales, like great recipes, come down to the right ingredient at the right moment. CINT and Kraft Heinz, together.
Unknown
Narrator
The market keeps asking if AI actually works. We stopped answering in slides. We answer in production. More than 20 engagements, 15 industries across three continents, live at enterprise scale. Inside 40-year-old monoliths and greenfield builds alike. 84% lower cost per unit in mobility. 90% less human effort in legal tech. 14 days to 15 minutes in automotive. Configuration 20 times faster in energy. all reinvented with a Gentic SDLC. It's a structural change of delivery. We turn access into capability and capability into tenfold speed. The biggest numbers speak louder than the loudest market buzzwords. Explore more on our website. Seven days just to finish the financial close. Teams, systems, and data sources all waiting on each other. One calendar to tame. With us, GetNet, a global top 10 acquirer, planted Project Sequoia. Governed data at the roots. One control layer for the whole close. AI agents validate and document every step. Seven days became two. Up to 60% less operational effort. And the people? They step in only for the exceptions. Now expanding to seven countries. GetNet and CI&T. Deep Roots. Growing across borders.
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Narrator
Caldic is a global supplier of specialty ingredients to life sciences and industry. In Latin America, it grew by acquisition. Its data grew the same way. Fast. Just not in one place. Two ERPs. Scattered platforms. A month-end close done by hand. We built a data factory on Databricks. Governance in the formula. Close time dropped at least 30%. Finance stopped consolidating and started analyzing. Chemists call that a solution. So do CFOs.
Unknown
Narrator
A quick recap of our quarter. First, our own stages. At the New York Stock Exchange, we hosted Impact AI with Anthropic, AWS, Mars, and Sonos to talk about what it really takes to make AI work at scale. Then, a world first, the Lean AI Summit with Lean Institute Brazil. Ford, Itaú, Johnson & Johnson, and others shared AI-first cases built with CINT and Box 1824. Next came the AI deployment room. 30 plus sea levels on one question. How to deploy AI at scale? The answers came from people already doing it. With Fundação Dom Cabral, we launched the second edition of the AI Lighthouse Awards, recognizing companies whose AI maturity shows up in actual results. Now, the stages we stepped onto. At Big Data London, we moved the conversation from what AI can do to how to make it work inside the business. At Databricks World Tour in Singapore and Sao Paulo, we show data and AI running in production alongside great partners. And in a webinar with Craig LeClair, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, our co-founder Bruno Guicardi explored agents and the future of work, why most never escape proof of concept purgatory, and how a few trailblazers are leading the way out. That's our quarter. See more on our website.
Cesar Gon
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Bruno will now show you what this means in productivity, revenue growing faster than our team. Bruno, I hand it over to you.
Bruno Guicardi
Founder and President
Thank you, Cesar. Good afternoon, everyone. The clearest measure of our new model is revenue per AI builder. On a last 12-month basis, it reached $82,500, up 10% year-over-year, an acceleration from 7% last quarter. What drives it is simple. We closed the third quarter with about the same number of AI builders as a year ago, while revenue grew 14.9%, as our people now deliver more with AI. Our revenue no longer moves one-to-one with headcount. With our new commercial models, we are paid for what we deliver, not for the hours we bill, and that's what lifts our gross margin. and the team is stable. Voluntary attrition was 9.9% among the lowest in our history. Let me give you an example of one of our offerings that turns AI into measurable results. Decision intelligence. Our clients have built strong data and analytics foundations. Analytics tells them what will probably happen. Decision intelligence takes the next step. It turns that prediction into a decision made at the right time. It closes the loop. A model detects a signal Business rules shape the recommendation. A person approves, and the action runs directly into the client's operational systems. Every outcome feeds the next decision. And people stay in command. Clients start with a human approving every decision and give the system more autonomy only a trust builds, with every step auditable. To deliver outcomes like this, clients need the best model for each problem, not a model their provider needs to sell. That's why we are multi-model by design and why the model builders want to work with us. Three months after joining the Cloud Partner Network, we reached the preferred tier in the services track. That tier is earned with a certified delivery team, cloud use cases delivered for clients, and public customer references. We have more than 50 major projects underway with cloud across software engineering, customer service, and user experience for global clients such as Schedule and Vanguard. And we use it ourselves first. Cloud code runs extensively within Sanity Flow, so we bring clients lessons learned from our own adoption, integration, and scale. In October, we also became a launch partner in the SpaceX Super Intelligence Partner Network, adding rock to the models orchestrated by CINT Flow, alongside Mistral and the hyperscalers. Even the companies that build the models need partners to make AI work inside the enterprise. That's the layer where CINT operates. With that, I will hand it over to Stanley to help us through how our delivery engine shows up in our numbers.
Stanley Rodrigues
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Bruno, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue reached a record 146.3 million, up 14.9% year-over-year, entirely organic, and ahead of our outlook of at least 145.7 million. At constant currency, revenue grew 11.2%. For the first nine months, revenue reached 425.7 million, up 19.8% or 13.6% at constant currency. Let me show you where that growth came from. By region, Latin America led at 20%, followed by new markets at 17.6%. North America grew 8.7% year over year, and its momentum is building. Revenue in North America grew 3.9% from the second quarter, the fastest sequential growth among our three regions. By industry, financial services, our largest vertical, grew 26.1%, and technology and telecom, 40.2%. And by client, revenue from clients outside our top 10 grew 17.1%, ahead of the 12.2% from our 10 largest accounts. That is the third consecutive quarter in which our broader base grows faster than our largest clients. We are adding new clients and our offerings are reaching more of the accounts we already serve. Our growth does not depend on a few large relationships. Last quarter, we said AI monetization would expand our gross margin. This quarter, it did. Adjusted gross profit reached 53.5 million, up 24% year-over-year. and 15.8% sequentially, growing well ahead of revenue. Adjusted gross margin reached 36.6%, up 270 basis points year-over-year, our first year-over-year expansion of 2026, even with the stronger Brazilian real and the payroll tax resumption imposing headwinds. There is a concern in our industry that AI productivity challenges revenue when paid by the hour, but it is not how we are increasingly being paid. In our value-based models, we are paid for output and outcomes, so, instead of a discount, productivity becomes margin. That is why 40% of the new engagements we signed this quarter are value-based, up from 30% in the first half. And CINT Flow let us deliver more with the same team. Our cost of service grew 10.9%, below revenue growth of 14.9%. AI makes us more productive. Our commercial model let us and our clients share the value. Last quarter, we said we expected our adjusted EBITDA margin to improve sequentially. It did. Adjusted EBITDA reached 22.6 million, up 19.1% from the second quarter, with margin expanding from 13.3% to 15.5%. Year over year, adjusted EBITDA was 3.9% lower because of the stronger Brazilian Real. On a net-fax, neutral basis, it would have been 24.3 million, up 3.4% from the third quarter of 2025, with a 17.2% margin. Excluding currency, our EBITDA is already growing, while we keep investing in growth. This expansion came even as we stepped up investment in our sales engine. Selling expenses were 14% of revenue, up from 11.9% in the second quarter. That reflects the structural expansion of our commercial organization for new offerings and verticals and the targeted investment to scale our Agentech SDLC initiative, which we concluded this quarter. From here, we expect selling expenses as a percentage of revenue to decline from third quarter levels. Those investments are already paying off. Our pipeline is 50% larger than a year ago and we are adding new clients. At the same time, general and administrative expenses fell to 10.2% of revenue from 11.3% in the second quarter and 11% a year ago, delivering operating leverage across the rest of our structure. Moving to the bottom line, adjusted profit was $11.5 million up