What CEOs Are Saying: Strange New Employees
Three earnings calls from FactSet, FranklinCovey, and Concentrix
Three earnings calls from FactSet, FranklinCovey, and Concentrix
In this edition
• Non-cannibalistic AI
• Efficiency gains from coding agents
• High-value customers are the ones using AI
• AI pumps up revenue-per-employee
Quotes of the week
"The environments of clients are getting more complex with AI, not less, and that provides additional opportunities for us to manage these environments and sell additional services."
—Chris Caldwell, President and CEO, Concentrix, on why client adoption of AI has not shrunk his business
“In the world of AI, so much of what we do is going to be even more important— teaching these leadership durable skills, initiative, collaboration, empathy."
—Sean Covey, President of Education Division, FranklinCovey
"Particularly as more work shifts from humans doing the work to agents doing the work, the quality of the output depends on the quality of the data that's going in."
—Josh Warren, CFO, FactSet
The defining fact of the current era of business leadership is that we’re all having to learn to work with a strange new colleague: AI. It’s a lot like trying to get value out of a genius-level person who happened to be raised on Mars. It can do so much… and yet it still requires so much from its human handlers.
This week’s earning calls (from FactSet, FranklinCovey, and Concentrix) sketch in a bit more detail on how B2B companies are using AI, how it is affecting their workforce, and how it’s impacting their ability to sell to customers. We see one company this week citing internal AI use as a driving force for a 10% reduction of the technology team. But we also see evidence that this kind of move is more a reshuffling than a slashing, not equating to large reductions in total headcount. Moreover, growing AI use among customers doesn’t seem to be reducing their need for these companies’ products. The correlation in fact seems to be reversed.
Ongoing disruption is a certainty, but it still feels like we’re learning what form it will take from week to week.
FactSet (FDS)
Q3 FY2026 Earnings Call
Results: Strong. Adjusted EPS of $4.53 beat by $0.08, revenue rose 6.4% to $622.9 million, organic ASV growth accelerated to 7.1%, and the stock climbed about 6% on the day.
FactSet’s workstation puts financial data, analytics, and portfolio tools in front of about 250,000 users at banks, asset managers, and wealth firms, mostly under subscription. Its headline metric is ASV, or annual subscription value: the forward revenue from everything clients currently pay for.
