Julie Sweet: Yes, what I’d say is, this is this is more about — like we think of this as like prior technology waves. Right? Each one has been a little bit faster in terms of that, but especially when you look at kind of where our clients are on the continuum of building out that digital core, there is a lot to go and you really need that to fully realize it. So we see this is more like our prior kind of the way these things have evolved in the past. Right now, that’s what we see.
Bryan Bergin: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Dave Koning from Baird. Please go-ahead.
Dave Koning: Yes. Hey guys. Thanks so much. I guess my question, are you seeing your clients probably having much lower attrition, just like every company has low employee attrition, right now. Are you seeing them take their own employees, their own IT employees and just do more internally right now? And is that a little bit of just the demand issue right now?
Julie Sweet: We certainly are seeing — obviously, our clients have invested in more technology internally at our advice. Right? We’ve said to them during the pandemic with technology being so important, they should be building up their technologies. So there is clients, they’ve got a lot of clients, not all of it, because it really depends on your positioning to some of our clients, that’s really not the differentiator. So they want a smaller IT and they’ve got others who built it up and it really depends on where they are. But sure, I mean, we certainly got clients doing more — doing more in-house as part of it and we’ve got other clients outsourcing more. So like, it’s really all over the map, because it’s very company specific as to what makes sense for their strategy.
Dave Koning: Yes. Okay, thanks. And just one quick follow-up for KC. The tax rate, clearly you lowered guidance just on the tax-rate itself. Is that something one-off to this year or is that something now that just seems more normalized?
KC McClure: Yes. So, there’s really four things that every year are the same, that really influence our tax rate. And just really is how those things come together. There are geographic mix of income, any settlements from previous years, any increase that we need to do on prior year tax liabilities, and lastly, the impact of our equity on our tax rate. So these four things really are confluences the same every year, depending on how they fall. That’s going to influence where we land on our tax rate. And so, we — this year we saw them favorably in aggregate. So we’re able to keep our 2 point range, but drop by 1%.
Dave Koning: Okay. Well, thank you guys.
Julie Sweet: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jamie Friedman from Susquehanna. Please go-ahead.
Jamie Friedman: Hi. Good morning, everyone. I have a really big picture question. I’m curious, Julie, how you feel about Accenture’s role in the broader context of technology like software and cloud? And I realize in your prior very thoughtful answer about technology architectures. That was a great structure as was your innovation session back on February 16th. But it does seem like other parts of tech are doing better than services. So I’m just interested in your perspective on services in the context of broader tech spending?
Julie Sweet: No, absolutely. It’s a great question. Services are where you can dial back more easily than when you’re signing-up for licenses for technology that you need. So you’d imagine and just what we’re seeing that, when you are constraining overall spending, your discretionary spending, you go to like service providers where you’re saying, I can pause for that. I can wait for that. And at the same time you’ve got in other parts of it, like with software where you’ve got to fix things you really need to invest in and you’ve got different licenses. So it’s really not different than other cycles. Services have a bigger opportunity to say, it’s a little more discretionary, let’s wait. Even if I bought the licenses, I’m going to wait to actually incur the costs, because a lot of times the cost of the services can be significantly higher than the software licenses, because you’ve got all the change that you’ve got to do and all that around.
So again, we don’t see anything sort of different than when you’ve got an uncertain macro you look around for your discretionary spending and you cut that. And that’s why, of course, you’re seeing still the big transformations happening because it’s not discretionary and they really got to re-platform in that. So it’s like nothing mysterious about is kind of what I consider kind of normal in this kind of a macro.
KC McClure: That’s right. An. I think just as a reminder, even with all that we still have the record spend with us with $40 billion of bookings for the first half of the year.
Jamie Friedman: Yes, those are great things. All right, I’ll jump back. I’ll jump back in the queue. Thank you, Julie. Thanks KC.
Katie O’Conor: Operator we have time for one more question and then Julie will wrap-up the call.
Operator: Okay. That question comes from the line of Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citi. Please go ahead.
Ashwin Shirvaikar: Thank you. Hi, Julie. Hi, KC.
Julie Sweet: Hi, Ashwin.
Ashwin Shirvaikar: Going back to — Hey. Going back to the question of bookings, are clients actually visiting existing bookings ones that they sign maybe last year and at times prior, relooking at them using the lens of applying sort of rapidly evolving GenAI capabilities. To what extent is that happening and then that kind of implies, obviously — can we can reuse those past bookings and backlog as an indicator of future growth and how soon that can layer-in?
Julie Sweet: Yes. I’ll take that. Just maybe more just the financial kind of mechanical part of it. We have not seen a change in us working the work that’s already been contracted, what we would call our backlog and what we talked about was really spending on new sales, new services and their smaller projects and that’s the dynamic that we have factored into our guidance for the year.
