Innodata Inc. (NASDAQ:INOD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Dana Buska: You are welcome. Yes, thank you for taking my questions. My first question is with your new PR CoPilot. Is €“ you talked about your own technology, and I was just wondering if your technology is more than just accessing an API at OpenAI?

Jack Abuhoff: So it is. I mean it’s €“ basically, what we’re doing €“ and we’ve got a very exciting road map. We really believe we’ve only just got started with ChatGPT. But what we’re doing is we’re combining an API with prompt engineering that we’ve done behind our UI and behind the scenes. And in the future, what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be enriching the training data to more specifically perform within the domain. We’ve also done other things in terms of that, and we will be doing other things in order to further enrich the experience. So when you take the two fundamental use cases we’re addressing, one for writing press releases and one for writing media outreach, we’re looking at what goes on in someone’s head when they are looking to do either one of those things.

What connections are they making? Where are they having to go and research? And built into our product and built into our underlying data model are lots of connections that we’re able to harvest and bring them into the prompts in order to create a more precise level of output. So it’s very much a combination of these things. Now one of the reasons €“ so I’m excited for several reasons, but one of the things that it’s enabling us to do is to create a lot of value for PR but, at the same time, learn a lot about how do you integrate these technologies to create a superior customer experience. And we’re able to bring that experience in turn to the work that we’re doing for other customers. So it’s great fun and it really is a new frontier.

Dana Buska: That sounds wonderful. I was wondering if you were going to be able to apply your CoPilot technology to other industries or other companies or other applications?

Jack Abuhoff: So we’re certainly talking to other companies about this. We’re looking at some opportunities to apply large language models within our Synodex platform. That’s kind of early days though, so I wouldn’t €“ I’d encourage you not to expect anything out of that very quickly. We think the road map, though, for PR CoPilot is fairly extensive, and we’ve really only begun down that path. So we’re very excited about that.

Dana Buska: Excellent. With Agility, where are you projecting breakeven for that is going to be?

Jack Abuhoff: So I don’t think we’ve put out a number relative to that. But what we’ve said is that we think we are going to be getting that business to become an adjusted EBITDA positive business in the first half of the year.

Dana Buska: Okay. Excellent. And in the past, you’ve given out projections for the first quarter. And I don’t know if I missed it or not, but do you have any type of projection in revenue growth that you’re thinking for the first quarter?

Jack Abuhoff: So we’ve decided not to €“ this year, for the most part, we’re probably not going to provide forward-looking guidance only because of the level of activity that’s going on in the business. It’s so substantial and coming on so strong that being able to reduce these things to forecasts and know when something is going to close and know what it’s going to look like and how it’s going to ramp up is almost impossible. So the likelihood that we would be wrong and maybe even significantly wrong is pretty substantial. Therefore, we’ve gone the other direction, which is kind of €“ which I think is materially disclosing here’s what’s going on in the business. Here’s what’s coming our way. We are now working with four of the five largest technology companies who are fundamentally driving what will probably be the innovation of our lifetimes.