Good afternoon, and welcome to Huron Consulting Group's webcast to discuss financial results for the third quarter 2025. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. Before we begin, I would like to point all of you to the disclosure at the end of the company's news release for information about any forward-looking statements that may be made or discussed on this call. The news release is posted on Huron's website. Please review that information along with the filings with the SEC for a disclosure of factors that may impact subjects discussed in this afternoon's webcast. The company will be discussing one or more non-GAAP financial measures. Please look at the earnings release and on Huron's website for all of the disclosures required by the SEC, including reconciliation to the most comparable GAAP numbers. And now I would like to turn the call over to Mark Hussey, Chief Executive Officer and President of Huron Consulting Group. Mr. Hussey, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and welcome to Huron Consulting Group's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. With me today are John Kelly, our Chief Financial Officer; and Ronnie Dail, our Chief Operating Officer. Our third quarter performance was strong, driven by growth across all three operating segments. Company-wide revenues before reimbursable expenses, or RBR, grew 17% in the third quarter, including 10% organic growth, reflecting a robust demand environment for our services and strong execution by our teams. We're also pleased with our continued margin expansion and earnings per share growth in the third quarter, consistent with our financial goals. The combination of our deep industry expertise and breadth of capabilities has positioned us as a partner of choice for our clients as they continue to face persistent financial challenges and regulatory disruption. We believe strong demand across our core end markets positions us well to achieve our full year 2025 RBR and earnings guidance while establishing a solid base for continued growth in 2026. I'll now share some additional insights into our third quarter performance. In the Healthcare segment, we achieved record RBR during the third quarter, growing 20% over the third quarter of 2024. Organic Healthcare segment RBR grew 19% over the third quarter of 2024, excluding the results of our recent acquisition of Eclipse Insights, as well as the Studer Education business, which was divested at the end of 2024. The increase in RBR in the quarter was driven by broad-based demand across the entire segment, including our performance improvement, financial advisory, revenue cycle managed services, strategy and innovation, and digital offerings. Third quarter RBR for our healthcare consulting and managed services capability grew 27% over the third quarter of 2024. Demand for our performance improvement offerings remains robust across the market, and we believe this is the strongest environment for our performance improvement offerings we have seen. In addition to record revenue growth, we've also seen continued strong pipeline and sales conversion, continuing at high levels in the third quarter and through the first month of the fourth quarter. The primary driver of demand for our healthcare offerings is continued margin pressure for our healthcare provider clients. Our proven track record of delivering demonstrable ROI for our clients sets us apart from our competitors and positions Huron as a go-to trusted partner for organizations experiencing financial strain. Our performance improvement solutions have consistently delivered improved revenue and cash flow yield, reduced operating costs, and improved patient experience among key operating and financial metrics in addition to those. Increasingly, our performance improvement engagements have a broader scope, integrating our strategy, financial advisory, and digital offerings to better and more uniquely address our clients' challenges. This has led to an increase in the average size of our healthcare engagements. Hospitals and health systems continue to prepare for reduced funding and decreases in insured patient volumes, driven by shifts in the Medicaid reimbursement model. At the same time, pressures persist to improve access and evolve care delivery models in the face of workforce shortages. The combination of these factors creates an unsustainable operating environment for many organizations. With these challenges, healthcare providers are increasingly turning to Huron to evaluate their strategic, financial, and operational options to strengthen their competitive positions. We continue to expand the use of AI and automation across our offerings to drive value creation for our clients and increase the efficiency of our service delivery. We're increasingly advising our clients on how to govern and deploy the rapidly expanding array of AI and automation solutions available to them while partnering with them to deploy solutions that will yield demonstrable results and value. We highlight an example within our revenue cycle managed services business, which has delivered 20% RBR growth in the first three quarters of 2025 compared to the year-to-date Q3 period last year. Revenue cycle managed services can be delivered in conjunction with our consulting offerings or sold as a standalone offering, depending on the clients' needs. Revenue cycle managed services drive improved revenue cycle yield and cost savings for our clients, and they are complementary to our revenue cycle consulting capability. Among many other AI and automation use cases, we've established and deployed machine learning models that have helped lower our costs while boosting collections for clients. The breadth of our offerings and our strong reputation in the market, along with our ability to deliver tangible results to our clients, positions us well to capitalize on robust market demand as our clients address the ongoing financial pressures on margins and the changing regulatory and technology landscape. Turning to the Education segment, RBR also achieved a record, growing 7% in the third quarter of 2025 over the prior year quarter. The increase in RBR was driven by strong demand for our strategy and operations, research, and digital offerings. Our education team has done a terrific job supporting our clients and sustaining our growth trajectory during this unprecedented time in the higher education industry. Many colleges and universities are managing the impact of declines in research funding and lower enrollment of both domestic and international students as well as overall policy uncertainty. Net tuition pricing pressures persist as students and parents seek affordable education and job training alternatives. Similar to our healthcare clients, our education clients are navigating through disruption and a strained financial environment. As a result, we are turning to Huron for help. Our comprehensive set of offerings, including performance improvement, spans the entire university, making Huron a trusted partner of choice for clients looking for a partner who can comprehensively address these issues. We continue to see robust demand for digital transformation projects and have been very pleased with our team's win rate in this area throughout the year. Our clients' investments in digital transformation are driven by the need to modernize their data and technology foundations and take advantage of newer technologies, including AI and automation. One area that's particularly ripe for AI and automation is research administration. We've seen this validated by the success of the solutions we've developed to date that enable administrative staff to focus on greater value-added activities, such as research compliance or managing more awards. Let me share an example. We developed an AI offering to automate the input and processing of data across thousands of grants, drastically reducing the setup time and freeing up research and administration capacity. While we're actively delivering these AI solutions to our clients directly, we can also incorporate the functionality into our research managed services offerings to optimize our delivery and support growth. Improving credentials, breadth of offerings, and deep client relationships have positioned us very well to serve our education and research clients as they navigate this period of heightened disruption. We believe our strong positioning and competitive advantage in this industry will drive continued growth, consistent with the goals that we discussed at our Investor Day earlier this year. Now let me turn to the Commercial segment. In the third quarter of 2025, we also achieved record RBR. Commercial segment RBR grew 27% over the prior year quarter. The increase in RBR was driven by our acquisitions of AXIA and Treliant as well as continued organic growth from our commercial digital business. This growth was partially offset by lower demand for our strategy and financial advisory offerings during the quarter. I will note that for both our strategy and financial advisory offerings, we've seen an inflection point in market demand and saw improved sales conversion over the course of the third quarter and into October. Our commercial digital business has continued to grow despite a more challenging demand environment. We further integrated our strategy and operations expertise across our consulting and digital capabilities, which has strengthened our competitive advantage and positioned us to drive above-average growth during the quarter. During the quarter, we acquired Wilson Perumal & Company, a leading strategy and operations consulting firm serving the commercial markets. We believe the combination of Innosight's long-term strategy and innovation offerings and Wilson Perumal's strategic execution and operations-focused offerings creates a more comprehensive platform for our clients to realize more immediate financial savings that can help drive transformation while they refine their strategies to deliver sustainable growth. As we shared at our Investor Day, another pillar of our commercial strategy was to further integrate our commercial offerings to enhance our go-to-market strategy. We've seen significant advancement in this area, including several key wins that demonstrate our competitive advantage. We are one of the leading partners focused on helping CFOs transform their finance organizations to become more impactful strategic partners in their businesses, through our advanced enterprise performance management capabilities. We built upon these competencies by aligning our strategy consulting, data, AI, and automation expertise with our cloud EPM offerings to compete and win against some formidable incumbents and competitors. We're also leveraging AI and advanced analytics to further enhance our competitive advantage while delivering increased value to our clients. For example, we're combining our deep manufacturing expertise with our data, AI, and broader technology capabilities to leverage predictive modeling for preventive maintenance, which has resulted in significant savings for one of our manufacturing clients. While we remain at the early stages of execution of our integrated commercial strategy, our industry and capability strengths are already proving to be differentiated in our key end markets and offerings of focus. Now let me turn to our outlook for the year. Today, we're updating our annual guidance by narrowing our RBR guidance to a range of $1.65 billion to $1.67 billion, affirming our adjusted EBITDA guidance range of 14% to 14.5% of RBR, and increasing our adjusted non-GAAP EPS to a range of $7.50 to $7.70. The midpoint of our RBR guidance reflects strong year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter, as we expect the underlying demand for our offerings across all segments will continue. In 2025, we demonstrated our ability to sustain accelerated RBR growth and margin expansion despite a more challenging macroeconomic and regulatory environment. Our market-tested strategy and durable balanced portfolio of offerings, coupled with disciplined execution, continues to deliver strong financial performance for our business and our shareholders. Now let me turn it over to John for a more detailed discussion of our financial results. John?

Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. Before I begin, please note that I will be discussing non-GAAP financial measures such as EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, adjusted EPS, and free cash flow. Our press release, 10-Q, and Investor Relations page on the Huron website have reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures, along with the discussion of why management uses these non-GAAP measures and why management believes they provide useful information to investors regarding our financial condition and operating results. Before discussing our financial results for the quarter, I'd like to discuss several housekeeping items. First, our third quarter 2025 results in the Healthcare segment exclude the operating results from the Studer Education business, which was divested on December 31, 2024. Our Healthcare segment results do include a full quarter of operating results from our acquisition of Eclipse Insights, which had closed in June of this year. And finally, we closed on the acquisitions of Treliant and Wilson Perumal in July and September of 2025, respectively. Now I will share some of the key financial results from the third quarter. RBR for the third quarter of 2025 was a record $432.4 million, up 16.8% from $370 million in the same quarter of 2024. Organic RBR, which excludes the RBR generated by all acquisitions completed subsequent to the third quarter of 2024 and the RBR generated by the Studer Education business in the third quarter of 2024, grew 10.2% over the prior year quarter, led by 18.6% organic RBR growth in our Healthcare segment. As Mark mentioned, we achieved another quarter of record RBR, which reflects robust market demand for our offerings and is a testament to our highly talented and dedicated teams and their ability to deliver high-quality, innovative offerings to our clients. Net income for the third quarter of 2025 was $30.4 million or $1.71 per diluted share compared to net income of $27.1 million or $1.47 per diluted share in the third quarter of 2024. As a percentage of total revenues, net income decreased to 6.9% in the third quarter of 2025 compared to 7.2% in the third quarter of 2024. Our effective income tax rate in the third quarter of 2025 was 28.7%, which was higher than the statutory rate, inclusive of state income taxes, primarily due to certain nondeductible expense items. We now expect an effective tax rate in the range of 23% to 25% for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA was $67.4 million in Q3 2025, or 15.6% of RBR compared to $54.9 million or 14.8% of RBR in Q3 2024. The increase in adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was primarily due to increases in Healthcare and Education segment operating income, excluding the impact of segment depreciation and amortization and segment restructuring charges, partially offset by an increase in unallocated corporate expenses, excluding the impact of the change in the market value of our deferred compensation liability and transaction-related expenses, and decreased commercial segment operating income. Adjusted net income was $37.4 million, or $2.10 per diluted share in Q3 2025, compared to $31.1 million or $1.68 per diluted share in the third quarter of 2024, resulting in a 25% increase in adjusted diluted earnings per share over Q3 2024. Now I'll discuss the performance of each of our operating segments. The Healthcare segment generated 51% of total company RBR during the third quarter of 2025. This segment posted record RBR of $219.5 million, up $36.4 million or 19.9% from the third quarter of 2024. The third quarter of 2025 included an inorganic contribution of $6.5 million of RBR from our acquisitions, while 2024 included $3.4 million of RBR from the Studer Education business, which was divested in 2024. Excluding the impact of these items, our organic growth rate in the Healthcare segment was 18.6% in the third quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in the prior year. The increase in RBR in the quarter was driven by broad-based demand across all of our offerings in this segment, and led by strong growth in our performance improvement, financial advisory, and revenue cycle managed services offerings. Operating income margin for health care was 30.9% in Q3 2025 compared to 27.1% in Q3 2024. The increase in margin was primarily due to revenue growth that outpaced an increase in salaries and related expenses for our revenue-generating professionals and a decrease in salaries and related expenses for our support personnel. We now expect full year operating income margin for the Healthcare segment to be in the 29% to 31% range. The Education segment generated 30% of total company RBR during the third quarter of 2025. The Education segment posted record RBR of $129.4 million, up $8.4 million or 6.9% from the third quarter of 2024. The increase in RBR in the quarter was driven by strong demand for our strategy and operations, research, and digital offerings. The inorganic RBR contribution from our acquisitions was $2.2 million in the third quarter of 2025. The operating income margin for Education was 25.7% for Q3 2025 compared to 24.1% for the same quarter in 2024. The increase in margin was primarily due to revenue growth that outpaced an increase in compensation costs for our revenue-generating professionals. The Commercial segment generated 19% of total company RBR during the third quarter of 2025, and posted record RBR of $83.4 million, up $17.5 million or 26.6% from the third quarter of 2024. The increase in RBR was driven by $19.6 million of incremental RBR from our acquisitions of AXIA, Treliant, and Wilson Perumal. Operating income margin for the Commercial segment was 15.4% for Q3 2025 compared to 24.5% for the same quarter in 2024. The decline in margin in the quarter was primarily driven by increases in salaries and related expenses for our revenue-generating professionals and contractor expenses as percentages of RBR. The decline in margin is reflective of an increased mix shift toward our digital offerings during the quarter, as well as the transition period for certain acquisitions that we expect to become accretive in 2026. We expect our operating margins in this segment to be in a range of approximately 16% to 18% for full year 2025, reflecting these factors. As Mark mentioned, for both our strategy and financial advisory offerings, we've seen an inflection point and saw improved sales conversion over the course of the third quarter and into October. Corporate expenses not allocated at the segment level and excluding corporate restructuring charges were $56.5 million in Q3 2025 compared to $46.8 million in Q3 2024. Unallocated corporate expenses in the third quarter of 2025 included $2.7 million of expense related to the increase in the liability of our deferred compensation plan, compared to $2.3 million of expense in the third quarter of 2024. These amounts are offset by the change in market value of the investment assets used to fund that plan, which is reflected in other income. Excluding the impact of the deferred compensation plan and restructuring expense in both periods, unallocated corporate expenses increased $9.3 million in the third quarter of 2025, primarily driven by increases in salaries and related expenses for our support personnel, software and data hosting expenses, and legal and third-party professional expenses related to our programmatic acquisition activity during the quarter. Now turning to the balance sheet and cash flows. Cash flow from operations in the third quarter of 2025 was $93.8 million. During the quarter, we used $8.5 million to invest in capital expenditures, inclusive of internally developed software costs, resulting in free cash flow of $85.3 million. We expect full year free cash flow to be in a range of $165 million to $185 million, net of cash taxes and interest and excluding non-cash stock compensation. DSO came in at 76 days for the third quarter of 2025 compared to 78 days for the second quarter of 2025, and compared to 86 days for the third quarter of 2024. The decrease in DSO reflects the impact of collections on certain larger healthcare and education projects alignment with our contractual payment schedules. Total debt as of September 30, 2025, was $611 million, consisting entirely of our senior bank debt. We finished the quarter with cash of $23.9 million for net debt of $587.1 million. This was a $9.7 million decrease in net debt compared to Q2 2025, which incorporates the share repurchases and acquisition payments made during the quarter. Our leverage ratio as defined in our senior bank agreement was 2.3x adjusted EBITDA as of September 30, 2025, compared to 1.9x adjusted EBITDA as of September 30, 2024. We continue to expect our year-end leverage ratio to be approximately 2.0x full year adjusted EBITDA. In the third quarter, we used $18.6 million to repurchase approximately 147,000 shares, bringing our total year-to-date share repurchases to $152.5 million and approximately 1,085,000 shares, representing 6.1% of our common stock outstanding as of December 31, 2024. As of September 30, 2025, $112.6 million remained available for share repurchases under the current share repurchase authorization from our Board of Directors. Finally, let me turn to our guidance for the full year 2025. As Mark mentioned, today, we are updating our annual guidance by narrowing our RBR guidance to a range of $1.65 billion to $1.67 billion, affirming our adjusted EBITDA guidance range of 14% to 14.5% of RBR and increasing our adjusted non-GAAP EPS to a range of $7.50 to $7.70.

I wanted to just start on performance improvement and really consulting within the Healthcare segment this quarter, really seems to have popped quarter-over-quarter. So I know you hit on it a little bit in your prepared remarks, but just a little bit more color on all that's going on in that business, what's driving it, how the pipeline looks, how you're hiring there? And maybe somewhat relatedly, if there's anything one-time in nature or unsustainable in the quarterly print. I think you mentioned larger-sized engagements, but just more insight into just how well that business did in this quarter?

Yes. Andrew, this is Mark. I'll start and then John can provide some additional color commentary. The comment I made was that this is perhaps the strongest market that we've ever seen, and it is really broad as well. What we've seen is really just a reaction to collective margin pressures. If you take a step back to the macro, what's driving that is very simply and a continuing trend: reimbursements from the government and from commercial payers are not keeping pace with cost increases and challenges. This situation is hard to fix on a sustainable basis without some pretty deep transformation of your business and your operations. Finding ways to continue to grow is critical because you can't cost reduce your way out of that. This leads us to better resonate with clients of many sizes in many markets from AMCs to regional national systems. It is giving us a time to shine for the integration that's happened over the last several years. It's all founded in, as I said before, demonstrable ROI. If you don't get real results for clients, you're not going to get rehired. In this market, word of mouth is essential, and that's propelling us; we've been able to deliver results for our clients. We have a team of people who are incredibly passionate about serving clients and care deeply about healthcare, and the culture plays into that as well. So I think right now has been a time that you've seen the best of what we could ever have hoped to see out of our healthcare team. It continues not only in just the performance improvement area, but you're seeing that in managed services as well, where that offering continues to grow and resonate within the market. There's significant broad-based support and demand.

I'll add some commentary just on the pipeline as well as its headcount within healthcare. From a pipeline perspective, even after some of the sales activity that we've seen so far this year and the strengthening revenue run rate, the pipeline still sits at record high levels at this point, which is really encouraging to us. We had a third quarter that reflected strong sales conversions. As we start the fourth quarter, that trend has continued during the first month of the fourth quarter. Digging a little deeper on that pipeline, consistent with Mark’s observations, I think it’s a mix of clients that are both going through current financial strain and clients that are looking ahead to prepare for upcoming regulatory actions or pressures related to Medicaid or research funding. Increasingly, we’re seeing scopes of projects that are larger than what we’ve seen in the past. This is not just performance improvement, but strategies and financial advisory are part of the larger engagements we're being asked to handle.

Perfect. John, maybe I'll pick up on the last kind of comments there. Just in terms of setting up for next year. Healthcare obviously has very good momentum. You have some deals that you've closed throughout this year that should help growth as well. Any comments that you'd make on '26 broadly? I know you gave kind of a multiyear target at your Investor Day earlier this year. Just wondering if we should expect anything meaningfully different from that framework next year or maybe puts and takes for us to consider as we think about '26.

Yes, Andrew. Obviously, we're still going through our planning process and considering next year, so we're not in a position to really guide to that yet, which I know isn't what you're asking. Generally speaking, I think I'd go back to that Investor Day and the framework we put out there. A favorable item is that we have seen increased demand over the past couple of quarters for the areas we've discussed. That gives us confidence in the model we put out at Investor Day. If you think about the range of outcomes for next year, continued execution on those types of projects may push you towards the higher end of that range, but the best course would be to reference the multi-year model we discussed in March.

Great. If I could ask one more question, you mentioned an increase in demand during the third quarter and into October. Can you provide more details on what is driving that improved conversion? Are there specific end markets you are seeing this change in?

Andrew, I'll take that one. I think if you look at our strategy in financial advisory—I'll take financial advisory first—it is clear that you've seen competitors witness an uptick in demand for restructuring and turnaround, which is now trickling into our business. This gives us strong confidence. The sales conversion on these opportunities is fast between when they come in and when we start executing. That’s certainly a momentum factor coming into Q4 that we were alluding to. On the strategy side, the combination of going to market with our new acquisitions has also resulted in positive momentum, changing the trajectory from some softness earlier in the year.

I want to start with a broad question. How is your hiring capability in the company's infrastructure from your perspective ahead of what looks like it could be a decently long period of rapid growth?

Tobey, this is John. I can start. Mark can provide any color commentary. We feel really good about that. I think you hear us talk a lot, Tobey, about the culture that we've been able to build here at Huron. There are tangible benefits to that culture, including lower attrition rates than you see across the industry and making us an attractive platform for talent acquisition. You've seen the increase in headcount numbers over the past couple of quarters, our ability to find the talent we need and to add that talent. There's nothing that gives us pause about being able to continue that trend and really leaning into the demand we're seeing now.

Yes. I think you summed it up well. The only thing I’d like to add is that the strong culture for us is one of the most important things that we focus on. It's why people join us; they often come back if they try other areas. It is one of our most important strategic advantages in the market.

In education, how would you describe customer decision-making? Do your customers feel like they're through the worst of the turbulence and volatility around sort of policy tax, etc., which seemed at least based on media flow to peak in late 2Q, early 3Q?

Tobey, I believe you're seeing an equilibrium right now. You're seeing decisions made for the long term relative to the comments we made about digital transformation projects. You're also observing more thoughtful evaluations of options in response to short-term challenges. As a result, when you look over the course of the year relative to the disruptions early in the year, we've really demonstrated our ability to weather through this time. Overall, the outlook appears stable at this point.

And on managed services, where headcount growth is very high. Can you talk about how you're going to fully absorb those people, how investors should have confidence that it's attached to projects and revenue that should ramp, and what your outlook is for long-term utilization among those folks?

Yes, Tobey. We have very high utilization rates in managed services. It's one of the highest areas of utilization in the firm for our managed resources teams. There is a close correlation between sales and hiring there. We are not hiring in advance of anticipated demand, unlike other sectors. The sales cycle for many of these projects can be a bit longer, so we can ensure a right geographic and resource match for the clients’ specific needs. So far, we’ve managed hiring in a measured way despite significant headcount growth.

I'll add that in India, our culture matches our culture in the U.S. It's a wonderful team that leads to low turnover among that group. People join us and tend to stay much longer. This mitigates hiring pressures when necessary. Culture is a key asset for us.

In restructuring, we saw some good wins in the news. How is the team winning bigger jobs?

We've always had opportunities to win larger engagements. While we are more of a boutique firm, our reputation for quality, particularly in restructuring assignments, has been very strong. It spans various industries, built on quality delivery. We're fostering relationships with referral sources like law firms and private equity, resulting in consistent demand.

With respect to health care, what's the outlook for performance fees typically when demand is accelerating and very strong? There's a favorable mix in that direction. What's the outlook there?

Tobey, that's a good question. We work with our clients on whatever arrangement they're most comfortable with, and that can vary over time. Despite the revenue growth this year, we've seen a lower percent of contingent-based fees in 2025 compared to 2024 due to client preference for fixed-fee work. Nonetheless, based on sales activity in the latter half of the year, more clients are showing interest in performance-based fee arrangements, so in 2026, I anticipate the percentage of revenue tied to performance-based fees may rise again.

Mark, I think in your prepared comments, I think I caught this correctly, you said there's increasing competition in the commercial side in digital. Did I hear that right?

No, I don't think it was exactly that, Bill. I'd just say we have been performing well in that market. I don't think there's any real change in the competitive environment there.

In the Education group, I know that you guys have talked in terms of the other two groups regarding the pipeline still being very active and the sales conversion is strong coming through the third quarter. Does that also apply to education? I don't remember you specifically saying that?

Yes, Bill. It's John. We had record sales conversions in the second quarter of this year. We didn't hit that in the third quarter, but the sales conversions were strong during the quarter. A month into the fourth quarter now, we’re off to a good start from a sales perspective.

John, when you were talking about the segments and the expected margin range for the year, did you give education? Or did I miss it?

I didn't mention it; the reason being there's no change in it. It's consistent with where we're at before, which is 23% to 25% for the year.

And I'm curious about the percentage of your book that you're seeing that has at least somewhat of an AI focus. With that, are you finding you can build the resources internally sufficient to meet demand? Or could that be an area where a small acquisition would be helpful?

Yes, Bill, before John jumps in and provides more detail, let me say we view the opportunity related to AI and automation as a positive for our business. We’re not a large-scale firm using scale to lower costs or a generalist firm; we're a trusted implementation partner. When we work closely with clients, we can identify specific opportunities. We see this as a net positive for our business over time.

If you think about our digital business, which is a little bit north of 40% of our total revenue, somewhere in the 15% to 20% range of that revenue relates to AI projects. As time goes on, the line gets blurrier, as many digital projects incorporate automation or AI elements. This extends to performance improvement consulting, where we leverage AI in managed services to drive the outcomes our clients seek. Our talent strategy puts us in a good position; with many consultants specializing in technology and digital, moving to advanced technology is easier.

You've talked about the strong demand in education that you're seeing for digital transformation projects. Just wondering about the mix in terms of the type of projects there. I know in the past, you've discussed the potential of student life cycle systems versus the implementation of traditional ERP systems. So I'm looking for more insights into the mix of implementations you're seeing.

Right now, Kevin, it's been primarily focused on core ERP financials, HCM, and full-suite implementations, which are a bit lighter on the student side. Our comments are targeted more toward core ERP.

To add to your question, there's a critical need for clients to modernize their technology foundations in order to unlock benefits from automation and AI. A solid infrastructure is crucial for executing scalable automation and AI functionality. This is one reason we're seeing strong demand for these types of offerings as clients aim to modernize outdated tools and ready themselves for upcoming investments in AI-based solutions.

That's helpful. I just want to ask about the utilization rate on the consulting side in the quarter. It stepped down sequentially from the second quarter, and I'm assuming that's related to some of the ramp-up in hiring you did there. Can you discuss the opportunity for utilization to improve going forward as more projects ramp up and how that could contribute to margin expansion?

You got it exactly right, Kevin. That lower utilization you see during the quarter was related to headcount additions made to support demand. We’re currently in investment mode to build out capacity not only for this year’s close but also set the stage for next year. We expect to return to the upper 70% utilization range overall, although there may be a slight pressure on that metric for another quarter or two as we build the team to support growth.

Thank you. Seeing no more questions in the queue. I'd like to turn the call back to Mr. Hussey. Sir?

Thanks for spending time with us this afternoon, and we look forward to speaking with you again in February when we announce our fourth quarter results. Have a good evening.

That concludes today's conference call. Thank you, everyone, for your participation.