Earnings Call Transcript - ASGN Q2 2025

Operator, Operator

Greetings and welcome to the ASGN Incorporated Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Kimberly Esterkin, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Kimberly Esterkin, Vice President of Investor Relations

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for ASGN's second quarter 2025 conference call. With me are Ted Hanson, Chief Executive Officer; Shiv Iyer, President; and Marie Perry, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that our commentary contains forward-looking statements. Although we believe these statements are reasonable, they are subject to risks and uncertainties, and as such, our actual results could differ materially from those statements. Certain of these risks and uncertainties are described in today's press release and in our SEC filings. We do not assume any obligation to update statements made on this call. For your convenience, our prepared remarks and supplemental materials can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website at investors.asgn.com. Please also note that on this call, we will be referencing certain non-GAAP measures, such as adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, and free cash flow. These non-GAAP measures are intended to supplement the comparable GAAP measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures are included in today's press release. I will now turn the call over to Ted Hanson, Chief Executive Officer.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Kim, and thank you for joining ASGN's second quarter 2025 earnings call. ASGN reported solid results for the second quarter. Revenues of $1.02 billion were above the high end of our guidance range, while adjusted EBITDA margin of 10.6% was at the top end of our expectations for the quarter. Our IT consulting revenues continue to grow, reaching approximately 63% of revenues for the second quarter, up from 57% in the year-ago period. Macroeconomic uncertainty remains, impacting discretionary spending. Still, clients are focused on staying competitive, driving demand for cloud and data solutions to modernize legacy systems and capitalize on AI. According to the ISG Index's second quarter 2025 call, the demand for AI is overcoming macroeconomic distractions, with companies actively investing in generative and agentic AI, deploying cost savings from other areas of their operations. We are experiencing this trend in our commercial consulting bookings, where we are seeing continued demand in data, AI, and digital engineering, including custom applications and development. Commercial consulting bookings for the quarter totaled $417.5 million, translating to a book-to-bill of 1.2x on a trailing 12-month basis. While bookings remain weighted toward renewals, we are increasingly winning larger, more complex, multi-capability deals as we advance our commercial practice areas and technology partnerships. Our technology partnership with Workday is progressing very well, and TopBloc, which continues to perform above our expectations, contributed to the growth of our commercial consulting bookings for the second quarter. In our federal business, new contract awards totaled $72 million for the second quarter or a book-to-bill of 1.1x on a trailing 12-month basis. Contract awards were challenged as anticipated, reflecting a slowness in award velocity and the impact of DOGE on procurement and approval processes. New federal contract backlog was over $2.9 billion at quarter end or a coverage ratio of 2.4x the Federal segment's trailing 12-month revenues. Despite lower federal quarterly bookings, our core solution capabilities in AI, cybersecurity, and digital modernization remain well aligned with the administration's efficiency cost savings priorities. In addition, the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill represents one of the largest single-year increases in U.S. defense spending in modern history. Much of this funding focuses on our primary competencies, including AI and automation, cloud migration, secure communications, and threat intelligence platforms. Ultimately, a constant among this ongoing transformation is the critical need for skilled IT professionals. Case in point, ISG estimates that in the next year, 60% of enterprises plan to expand their IT resources to accelerate the capture of AI benefits. ASGN's distinctive model, which delivers a broad spectrum of skill sets just-in-time on a contingent basis, continues to set us apart and will enable us to serve as an excellent partner to enterprises and public agencies seeking to achieve their IT modernization goals. We are uniquely positioned to identify the right skill sets for our clients, and, with an industry-led focus, we deeply understand the nuances of each sector's IT needs. With that, let me turn the call over to our President, Shiv Iyer, to discuss our industry and solution performance in the second quarter.

Sadasivam Iyer, President

Thanks, Ted, and it's great to speak with everyone this afternoon. Beginning with our Commercial segment verticals, consumer & industrial accounts performed the strongest in the second quarter and were up mid-double digits year-over-year. Improvement in this vertical was driven by mid-teens or better growth in materials, utilities, industrials, and consumer discretionary accounts. Our healthcare vertical was relatively flat compared to the prior year as a result of double-digit growth amongst our pharmaceutical and biotech clients. Financial services, business services, and TMT accounts declined compared to the year-ago period. On a sequential basis, we achieved growth in four of our five commercial industry verticals, with consumer & industrial accounts again leading our performance. Our consumer & industrial clients have been leveraging our nearshore delivery center in Mexico as a cost-efficient and capable alternative for application development and data modernization. In the financial services vertical, we saw double-digit growth amongst our wealth management and insurance clients, both of which were active with our cloud and infrastructure teams in the quarter. In our TMT vertical, we saw mid-single-digit growth in telecom, e-commerce, and software and services. For clients in this vertical, we supported enterprise platform implementations, including integrating new AI capabilities into existing cloud platforms and developing solutions to help clients harness the power of their data, AI, and advanced analytics. In our federal business, we track our revenues across four end customers: defense and intelligence, national security, civilian, and other clients. Defense, intelligence, and national security accounts comprised approximately 72% of our total government revenues. Growth in national security accounts was largely driven by work for the Department of Homeland Security, examples of which I will share shortly. As anticipated, our civilian business for the quarter was impacted by DOGE, the impact of which was unchanged and consistent with expectations. Defense and intelligence revenues, though up sequentially by mid-single digits, were down year-on-year due to budget constraints. We remain bullish on the long-term positioning of our federal government business, particularly with the recent expansion of the defense budget. To provide greater clarity on the dynamics driving bookings across our commercial verticals and government clients, let's turn to our solutions capabilities. For the quarter, consulting engagements across the company focused on four major areas, including: cloud and data infrastructure, cybersecurity, enterprise platform advisory and implementation, and AI services. Let me provide a few examples of each, beginning with cloud. For a global financial services company, we were engaged to assess the current state of their cloud operations, evaluate a newly procured FinOps tool, and build a multi-year cloud roadmap. As a result of our advisory services, our client will be able to improve its cloud governance, taxonomy, capacity, and consumption across its wealth management lines of business. Importantly, this framework provides our client the confidence to accelerate their cloud migration. For a Fortune 500 life insurance and retirement company, our consultants were engaged to determine if migrating to Amazon's cloud-based system would provide cost savings, operational efficiency, and improved scalability for the company. Our team delivered a viable migration model in just 8 weeks, resulting in query execution 3x faster and generating significant cost savings for the client. By deploying this model, our client will be able to accelerate their data center exits and mainframe retirement while simultaneously unlocking the AI capabilities provided by migrating to AWS. We also work side-by-side with AWS as a premier partner and managed services provider in the federal space. Similar to the commercial market, federal agencies are looking to modernize legacy infrastructure. In the second quarter, we partnered with AWS on behalf of national security and defense agency clients to secure scalable cloud migrations and continuous compliance in AWS GovCloud. Alongside cloud support, our cybersecurity expertise was another solution area in demand this past quarter. For DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA, we were awarded incremental work to deliver essential technical and digital engineering services vital to protecting critical infrastructure and enhancing national cybersecurity. We also partnered with Elastic, a leading platform for search-powered solutions, to add AI search capability into CISA's continuous diagnostics and mitigation dashboard, thereby enhancing cross-domain visibility of the agency and reducing national security vulnerabilities. Collaboration with our alliance partners is critical to our success. Our strategic alliances with partners like AWS and Elastic enable us to deliver cutting-edge technology solutions tailored to our clients' unique business needs. The value of our technology partnerships is particularly evident in enterprise platform implementations, which represented a third area of focus. As an example, TopBloc, a leading high-growth tech-enabled Workday consultancy, recently partnered with a global provider of insurance solutions to leverage the full Workday suite across 11 countries. For this client, TopBloc provided end-to-end implementation of the Workday human capital management and payroll modules, full-service change management, managed testing services, and post-go-live support. A new win for the quarter, this initiative was designed to centralize our client's HR operations, streamline its internal processes, and enhance the company's ability to attract and retain top talent. TopBloc was also engaged during the quarter to develop a custom-built Workday application for a national mechanical contractor. This application enables the company's foremen and site managers to enter time on behalf of their crews in real-time, aligning with the unique needs of the construction environment, and showcasing TopBloc's ability to support complex, unionized work environments across multiple implementation phases. Our ServiceNow implementations are also on the rise, particularly as the company makes a push to become the AI platform for digital business. In the quarter, we assisted a prominent global video game and entertainment company with deploying ServiceNow's GenAI capabilities within the HR service delivery environment. This consulting project focused on increasing automation and improving user experience by implementing GenAI to automatically classify HR cases, auto-generate resolution summaries, and enhance case documentation and audit readiness. In addition to platform-driven implementations, we are helping drive to a smarter future for our clients by providing a comprehensive suite of AI services, ranging from advisory and literacy to developing and building agentic architectures, powered by our assets and accelerators. In the advisory space, one of the world's largest professional services firms engaged our team of consultants, architects, and cross-capability solution leaders to rethink the process and technical design of some of their key knowledge management workflows. These workflows are currently conducted manually and involve the complex task of updating governing policies in thousands of downstream documents and systems. The advisory phase of the engagement was successful, and we are now moving into delivery, a collaboration between our U.S. consulting team and our Mexico delivery center. We are also leveraging our AI capabilities to improve data management and accelerate model deployment within the federal space. During the quarter, our government team used advanced analytics and machine learning to support the U.S. Navy in processing vast amounts of maritime data. By training and deploying AI models on their behalf, we are helping the Navy enhance its situational awareness, safety, and operational efficiency. Beyond AI advisory, we are growing our agentic AI practice by architecting and building agents to support a myriad of client use cases. Just last week, we published an agentic AI customer service tool on the new AI Agents and Tools storefront in the AWS marketplace. This agent is one of the many AI accelerators being built by our teams. Ted will discuss more about our AI accelerators and investments shortly, but first, I'll turn the call over to our CFO, Marie, to discuss ASGN's second quarter segment performance and third quarter guidance.

Marie L. Perry, Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Shiv. For the second quarter, revenues totaled $1.02 billion, a decrease of 1.4% year-over-year, but above our guidance expectations. Revenues from our Commercial segment were $708.1 million, a decrease of 2.4% compared to the prior year. Assignment revenues totaled $382.4 million, a decline of 13.9% year-over-year reflecting continued softness in portions of our Commercial segment that are more sensitive to changes in macroeconomic cycles. Revenues from our commercial consulting, the largest of our high-margin revenue streams, totaled $325.7 million, an increase of 15.7% year-over-year, and included the contribution from TopBloc. Revenues from our Federal Government segment were $312.5 million, an increase of 1.1% year-over-year, including approximately $10 million of higher-than-expected license revenues. As Shiv noted, the impact from DOGE in the second quarter was in line with our expectations. Turning to margins. Gross margin for the second quarter of 2025 was 28.7%, a decrease of 40 basis points from the second quarter of last year. Gross margin from our Commercial segment was 33%, up 30 basis points year-over-year, reflecting a higher mix of consulting revenues as well as margin expansion in these revenues. Gross margin from our Federal Government segment was 19.2%, a decline of 140 basis points year-over-year, due to higher volume of low-margin software licenses. Gross margin was also impacted by the loss of higher-margin work under DOGE. Excluding the impact of client-driven license revenues that were outside of our guidance estimates, consolidated company gross margin was within our guidance range for the quarter. SG&A expenses for the quarter were $216.8 million, compared to $205.6 million in the second quarter of 2024. SG&A expenses included $8.3 million in acquisition, integration, and strategic planning expenses, inclusive of cost optimization initiatives. These items were not included in our previously announced guidance estimates. For the second quarter, net income was $29.3 million, adjusted EBITDA was $108.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin was 10.6%. Also at quarter end, cash and cash equivalents were $138.9 million, and we had $320 million available on our $500 million senior secured revolver. Our net leverage ratio was 2.46x at the end of the quarter. Our strong free cash flow provides a strategic advantage that enables ASGN to fund growth initiatives, opportunistically repurchase shares, and invest in strategic M&A, all while maintaining a healthy balance sheet. Free cash flow was $115.8 million for the second quarter, a conversion rate of approximately 107% of adjusted EBITDA. We deployed $9.5 million of our free cash flow to repurchase approximately 200,000 shares, at an average share price of $58.69. At quarter end, we had approximately $470 million remaining under our $750 million share repurchase authorization. Turning to guidance. Our financial estimates for the third quarter of 2025 are set forth in our earnings release and supplemental materials. These estimates are based on current market conditions and assume no further deterioration in the markets we serve. Guidance also assumes 63.5 billable days in the third quarter, which is the same number of billable days as the year-ago period and 0.25 more days than in the second quarter. Estimates do not include any acquisition, integration, or strategic planning expenses. With that as background for Q3 2025, we are estimating revenues of $992 million to $1.012 billion, net income of $35.8 million to $39.4 million, adjusted EBITDA of $108.5 million to $113.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA margin of 10.9% to 11.2%. Thank you, I'll now turn the call back over to Ted.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Marie. As discussed at the outset of today's call, despite ongoing macroeconomic uncertainties, our clients are continuing to invest in AI recognizing that maintaining a competitive edge requires staying at the forefront of technological advancements. With that in mind, I'd like to take this opportunity to further highlight ASGN's ongoing AI investments, and how, like our clients, we are strategically positioning our business amid rapid technological change. AI enables our consultants to work faster, smarter, and with more insight, driving a higher ROI for our clients. By leveraging our deep expertise in application development and managed services, we've been able to create relevant AI applications for our consultants' everyday work and ultimately share this IP with our Fortune 1000 and defense and intelligence customer base. As part of our commitment to unify our company-wide AI expertise, we launched the ASGN AI Innovation Center, a collaborative initiative between our commercial and federal businesses, designed to enhance innovation, optimize resource utilization, and promote AI-driven business growth for our clients. The innovation center offers development environments, a centralized repeatable IP repository, documented best practices, thought leadership, and new technology evaluation. At the core of our innovation center are the solution accelerators, proofs of concept developed to quickly solve specific business problems with the help of AI. By building out these accelerators, we create repeatable, lower-cost solutions that can be easily deployed for our clients' custom environments. Several accelerators have already been published and many more are in the pipeline for launch this year. Some examples of those already in use include financial services agents, rapid code discovery tools, network security assistants, and the AWS Agentic AI tool previously highlighted. Our AI University is also a crucial component of the ASGN Innovation Center. Our AI University provides resources for upskilling our sales and technical teams while serving as a launching pad for developing white papers, best practices, and training for our customers. We've found that by incorporating AI understanding and education into ongoing professional development, we can drive continuous innovation while ensuring that our professionals remain relevant in a rapidly evolving market. Through the establishment of our AI Innovation Center and our many centers of excellence, we are enhancing our solutions capabilities and positioning ourselves as a leading authority in all facets of commercial and federal IT modernization. Our diverse customer base has equipped us with a deep understanding of the distinct data and IT needs across a wide range of sectors, enabling us to effectively support each client's long-term IT roadmap. Speaking of long-term roadmaps, I am excited to share today that ASGN will be hosting an Investor Day in the fourth quarter. During this event, we will speak about our company's near- and long-term strategy to unlock the next wave of growth and value creation. We look forward to sharing more details in the coming weeks. That concludes our prepared remarks. I'd like to extend my gratitude to all of our employees for your unwavering commitment this past quarter. Your efforts have been invaluable to fostering our client relationships as we continue to evolve our business into higher-end, high-value IT consulting. With that, we'd now like to open up the call to questions.

Operator, Operator

Our first question comes from Tobey Sommer with Truist Securities.

Tobey O'Brien Sommer, Analyst

Wanted to start out and ask how TopBloc is performing relative to your expectations and maybe numerically what was the contribution to results?

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes. So Tobey, thanks for the call and the question. If you remember, we at the acquisition date said that TopBloc was going to contribute over the course of the year, $150 million in revenues for the full year. Mind you, it closed on the 1st of March. And then EBITDA margins in the high teens. And to this point, I'd say they're tracking just ahead of those numbers on revenue, just ahead of those numbers on bookings and kind of in the range on EBITDA.

Tobey O'Brien Sommer, Analyst

Okay. Perfect. You talked a lot about AI in your prepared remarks in terms of opportunities and described a lot of initiatives and actions that you're helping with customers. Could you talk about the more cyclical part of your assignment business, specifically sort of the Creative Circle piece? And what, if any, impact are you seeing from AI on that business? Or would you describe the top line softness as purely cyclical at this stage?

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, I'll let Shiv answer that. I'd say pretty stable, right? Shiv, and the cyclicality of it, it is one of the more cyclical pieces of the portfolio.

Sadasivam Iyer, President

Yes. I think that's spot on Ted. We're not seeing anything that would indicate that there's a massive impact of AI on that business. I think it's largely the macros and cyclicality at this moment.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

I think, Tobey, that going into the beginning of the third quarter, the business has been stable from quarter to quarter.

Sadasivam Iyer, President

It has been stable quarter-to-quarter. We expect that, and we also expect some parts of the consulting piece of that business to continue to progress, which we're seeing some uptick on.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes. If you think about the opportunity in that business, even though the discretionary piece of this is earning the results of the traditional staffing part, the opportunity in customer experience is definitely a growth area. We're seeing that to Shiv's point inside the business. And our consulting work in there is growing. It's not the biggest part of the business. I'd call it, maybe 25%, but it's growing, and we think there's big opportunity there as we go forward. So we'll continue to emphasize that. And at some point here, the discretionary spending is going to return, and we think both of those things will contribute to Creative Circle.

Tobey O'Brien Sommer, Analyst

And then within the government consulting area in the ECS business, a couple of topics on that. One, what is the long-term margin profile? Is it any different because of the high-margin contracts perhaps no longer being ongoing? And do you think you grow from here? We've heard some other dedicated companies that focus on this area of the market exclusively talk about perhaps an opportunity for calendar third quarter kind of a bigger than usual contract award period because of slow awards year-to-date in the federal fiscal year?

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes. I'll address the second part, and then I'll let Marie discuss the gross margins. I believe there's a lot happening for the third quarter. We're just a few weeks in, and we'll have to see how it unfolds, but it seems like we're returning to a normal cycle. The second quarter has been subdued, primarily due to the cautious approach of government contracting officials and agency leaders. However, the positive aspect is that there's a new bill, which will bring a substantial amount of new funding into the budget, particularly in defense, where we are involved. I see this as a promising sign for us. I'm optimistic about the third quarter and expect a strong bookings outcome as we progress, because the government will need to deploy that funding and compete with us and our peers to accomplish necessary initiatives in data, AI, technology modernization, cybersecurity, and other areas where we operate. Now, Marie will speak on the gross margin.

Marie L. Perry, Chief Financial Officer

Tobey. Yes, so you were really referencing kind of gross margin and what the long-term view is. And so when we think about the federal business, and you alluded this to as well, that the DOGE revenue that we're losing is higher margin. The reality is some of that is kind of toggling back and forth and so we'll see how that works out. But the leadership at our federal government is also looking at increasing direct labor. So there's opportunities down the road as we look at the gross margin for federal to increase our direct labor. And then as we've talked about just some diminishing impact on the license revenue or the balance of the license revenue that's embedded in our federal continues to get smaller and smaller.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

We have generally operated within a 20% to 21% range, and there are various pass-throughs that fluctuate, causing that range to move up and down. However, I still believe this is the range we can expect to remain in, Tobey.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Silber with BMO Capital Markets.

Jeffrey Marc Silber, Analyst

Sorry, just one more on federal government and then I can move on. You said that the DOGE impact was in line with your expectations. Can you remind us what those expectations were and what do you think the impact will be on the current quarter?

Marie L. Perry, Chief Financial Officer

Absolutely. Last quarter, we mentioned that the DOGE impact would be less than 2% of total revenues. As noted, this remains unchanged and is in line with our expectations for Q2, and we anticipate the same for Q3.

Jeffrey Marc Silber, Analyst

Okay Great. If we can discuss commercial and possibly differentiate between your assignment and consulting revenues. I'm just curious about the tone; it seems like there's a lot happening on the consulting side, but I'm not sure if you're experiencing the same level of potential enthusiasm regarding the assignment side. Any insights would be appreciated.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes. I’ll let Shiv share more, but coming out of Q2, we had a strong bookings quarter that improved towards the end. In the first three weeks of this quarter, we're noticing a slight positive increase in four metrics within the assignment business, along with Shiv's insights from conversations with clients.

Sadasivam Iyer, President

No. Absolutely, Jeff. As you can see from our bookings numbers, we’re observing some positive signs in our commercial consulting business, particularly in areas like cloud, data, and AI. Different industries are performing quite differently, and our results reflect that some industries are doing significantly better than others. The reason we’re not declaring anything major is that we are still monitoring some of our larger sectors like banking, waiting for improvement in those areas. Overall, there’s enough positive sentiment for us to feel cautiously optimistic.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

If you consider where we have significant strengths, such as data and AI, application development, modernization, cybersecurity, and enterprise systems like ServiceNow and Workday, these are all areas in which we are developing strong capabilities. I believe we are well-positioned for progress as these elements start to take shape. While we are observing some positive indicators in the foreign metrics, we do require a major industry like banking to begin showing positive trends instead of remaining flat.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Surinder Thind with Jefferies.

Surinder Singh Thind, Analyst

Can you maybe talk a little bit about the AI investments that you're making? And more specifically from the perspective of just kind of building IP. One of the narratives more broadly as we see across IT services is that in this next wave of growth, I guess the idea is that firms will need to build more IP than they have in the past. Can you comment on that or your thoughts and views and how that fits into your business model, in which you use more temporary workers to provide some of the consulting services on the commercial side.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Right. Well, I think you're on the right track, Shiv.

Sadasivam Iyer, President

Absolutely. Surinder, that's very much part of our strategy and our evolution. We are making investments in AI that focus on developing intellectual property specific to accounts and deals. This doesn't mean we are neglecting broader platforms; we have initiatives like code discovery and open-source tools centered around that, which represent our own intellectual property. Additionally, we are applying AI to cybersecurity with open-source tools, which we are deploying for our clients. More importantly, we are partnering with companies like AWS and Workday to build intellectual property tailored to client needs, which often align with ours, allowing us to scale rapidly across multiple clients. This is a key pillar of our strategy. Another significant pillar is what we refer to as applying our own best quality ideas, where we start integrating agents within our own operations alongside partners, with the goal of monetizing them externally. You've accurately captured this as a major component of our strategy. While we are not claiming to have fully conquered this area, we are actively developing across all the avenues you've mentioned.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

And remember, our AI capabilities within the federal government, which was our first exposure here, are leading capabilities for many years. Bringing together our commercial and federal expertise in our AI innovation lab, training our people, and using that experience to advance us on the commercial side is really what's happening here. I think Shiv is right. While we haven't fully succeeded yet, the technology cycle is emerging. A significant amount of money has been spent on the compute aspect with the chips; now we're in the midst of the data center and power demands to support all this. You can already see the investments by big tech into software enterprise to integrate agentic AI into their products for the customer market. Our role is to embed these AI capabilities into our customers' technology environments, which we understand better than anyone since we've been supporting them for so many years. I would say this is developing. It's not completely realized yet, but it's playing out as we've discussed over the past quarters and a couple of years. Shiv, do you want to add anything?

Sadasivam Iyer, President

I wanted to mention that many of our clients are struggling with the best architectural approach to address these challenges. They are considering whether to build their own solutions or to integrate existing ones. Consequently, we are witnessing a significant increase in demand for advisory services related to these questions. This enables us to assist them not only in thinking about the architecture but also in how to build, deploy, and integrate it into their environments.

Surinder Singh Thind, Analyst

Got it. I appreciate the detail there. When we think about the Government segment, can we discuss what the appropriate baseline or run rate revenues are? We noticed an increase in the cost-plus segment this quarter. How much of this is truly incremental or specific to the quarter? There seems to be significant volatility in that segment. What is the right starting point or baseline of revenues?

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes. If you look at our release regarding the pass-throughs, which were around $10 million to $12 million for the quarter, and exclude that from the total, it brings us down to approximately the $300 million range. We also experienced an increase in direct labor billable work, contributing a few million to the quarter. So, I believe that the baseline should be considered in the mid $290 million to mid $295 million range going forward. Additionally, we have a 1.1 book-to-bill ratio, indicating that we are likely to see growth in our backlog in future quarters. Regarding the marketplace, we now have a bill, meaning more funding will be directed to the defense department and the sectors we serve. I don’t want to claim victory prematurely, but we have developing opportunities that may take a couple of quarters to fully materialize. However, I feel optimistic about our positioning in light of government initiatives.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Jason Haas with Wells Fargo.

Jason Daniel Haas, Analyst

I was curious if you could speak a little bit more about what drove the strength in the Consumer and Industrial segment since that saw a nice acceleration in the quarter.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Shiv?

Sadasivam Iyer, President

I can provide some insight into what contributed to our strong performance. As we mentioned in our earnings discussion, certain subsectors like materials and utilities played a significant role in that strength from a sectoral viewpoint. From a solutions standpoint, we are witnessing ongoing dynamic investments and demand from our clients in areas such as cloud, data, AI, and custom software development. This is where we are noticing the most significant growth. We were able to either acquire new clients or deepen our engagements in those areas.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

And I'll add like in the energy and utilities piece, subsectors of that category. Obviously, they have checks to write here to bring themselves forward and meet the needs of power generation, both for the people and for the data centers. And so there's kind of opportunity there that traditionally may be a little stoic as an industry, but it's a lot more dynamic now over the last year or two.

Sadasivam Iyer, President

And also in certain industries like energy, our partnership strategy is paying out pretty significant dividends where we've built some assets for very industry-specific questions on asset utilization, predictive maintenance, et cetera, with partners like Databricks. And that's allowing us to scale across the industry. So it's different parts of the strategy playing out, but it's essentially continued strength in our solution areas.

Jason Daniel Haas, Analyst

That's great to hear. That's great insight. As a follow-up, could you discuss how AI is aiding in revenue generation and assisting your clients in utilizing these tools? Additionally, I would like to know about your internal use of AI and whether you have identified any efficiencies in your own business through these tools.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, I think Shiv summed it up well. We aim to be an AI-driven organization for our productivity and the opportunities it presents, while also demonstrating this to our clients. In our enterprise software tools—whether front-office, back-office, or our digital layer with ServiceNow—we are starting to incorporate Agentic AI opportunities to enhance our own operations. As an IT staffing company, we have integrated AI techniques in our recruiting and sales processes to greatly increase our productivity. This has been a continuous effort for years. We are also developing tools to streamline the bid proposal and winning process, allowing us to present use cases more efficiently than before. Additionally, we cannot overlook cybersecurity, which has been a significant focus. Our work in cybersecurity has expanded from the federal government to the commercial sector, where the volume of threats is so extensive that processing them without AI capabilities is impossible. Some of these capabilities are provided by security software vendors, while others we have developed internally. These examples illustrate how we are actively pursuing AI opportunities that enhance our productivity, drive growth, and improve the quality of service for our customers.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Sinatra with Baird.

Alexander J Sinatra, Analyst

I've just got a quick one just because a lot of things were covered already, but I was just wondering, given this discussion around AI and this big initiative that you're undergoing with all these investments, I was wondering kind of what maybe the cost of that is on your end, especially for things like that code discovery, the cybersecurity like the agents, just what that will end up costing. Any color on that would be great.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Yes, I don’t think you’re seeing it. Let me put it this way: we’re not quantifying all these costs, but they are not affecting our margin profiles. In fact, we are considering where to make investments to accelerate returns for our clients. As a result, our margins are gradually increasing. While I can’t provide a specific number, I can say that these investments are enhancing our margin profile, and we will continue to see this as they mature.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the floor back to Ted Hanson for closing remarks.

Theodore S. Hanson, Chief Executive Officer

Great. Well, I want to thank everyone for being here this afternoon, and we look forward to speaking with you in October on our third-quarter earnings release conference call. Thank you and be well.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. And this does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.