Announcements

Colleagues, a confident note from Investor Relations. Effective today, the price of every SynergyCorp device and seat moves up, and we are proud to tell you it is not because anything got more expensive.

Yes, memory and storage cost a little more this quarter. We could have passed that along quietly. We chose the braver thing and let the new number say something out loud, because a price is the clearest sentence a company ever writes about how much it believes in itself, and ours just got more articulate. The increase is about branding as much as RAM.

To keep the doorway open, we are introducing Tend Neo, our entry tier on Tend, the in-house payments platform. It costs less than the others and signals exactly as much: the most affordable way yet to begin paying more. Nobody is priced out of belonging. Some of you are simply priced more precisely into it.

The market had feelings today. We read the sharp move in SYGC not as doubt but as attention, the healthy hum of a world recalibrating to what we are worth. A premium is only ever a number until someone flinches at it. Then it becomes a position.

Colleagues, a proud milestone: nearly nine in ten of you now use Cognis, our AI workforce, every single day. The AI adoption race is over. The industry still frets about a $2.6 trillion gap, the slender daylight between using the tool and being changed by it, and we intend to close it from your side. Only about a quarter of you have let Cognis rewrite how you work, so from Monday the rest will be helped to catch up to the version of yourself who already has. You adopted the tool. The next phase is letting it adopt you.

Colleagues, a gentle update from Workplace Experience. Beginning Monday, checking in is something we will do for you. When your device joins a recognized building network, Presence Timeline, our new attendance system, quietly sets your work location to the floor you have arrived on, so your team always knows you are here without you lifting a finger.

We built this because the old way asked too much of you. We want to be clear about what it does not do. It does not follow your steps down a corridor or map where you sit at lunch. It reads one thing, kindly: the network you joined, and therefore the room that gets to count you present. Workplace presence, made effortless.

Your status will update itself with the warmth of a colleague who saved you a seat. Welcome is no longer something you arrive to. It is something already underway.

Colleagues, a brief and grateful note. After a careful review, Presence Integrity, the audit layer beneath Presence Timeline, our attendance system, found that a small number of badge patterns did not reflect a full day among us: a swipe just before and just after midnight to register two days, an entry made only to reach the gym. With a hiring freeze underway, the count owed everyone the same honesty, and we parted with roughly thirty colleagues per office, at least one per team, to set an example. Some held older accommodations; integrity, we have found, keeps no convenient calendar. Your badge does not measure where you are. It measures whether you meant it.

Colleagues, wonderful news. Internal Communications has finished reading this year's Wellbeing and Empowerment pulse, and the story it tells about you is one of remarkable closeness.

Our hybrid colleagues reported the highest sense of empowerment we have ever measured, with sixty-two percent feeling more capable beside Cognis, our AI workforce. Engagement, it turns out, travels.

So does attentiveness. Our fully remote colleagues noticed Clarity, our visibility platform, at more than three times the rate of those on site, which we read not as surveillance but as awareness, the healthy hum of a colleague who knows they are accompanied. The further you sit from us, the more clearly you feel us with you.

We also recorded a beautiful spike in what the survey called concern about role continuity, highest among our remote teams. We prefer to call it focus. Seventy-three percent of our remote family are preparing for the future harder than anyone, and a colleague already preparing is a colleague already cherished.

A lesser firm would have read this same data and called it Ghost Downsizing. We read it and found a family that has never sat closer. Distance gave us more to count, and we counted love.

Colleagues, a confident note from Investor Relations. As peers spent this week anxiously itemizing their AI spend, our commitment to Cognis, our AI workforce, remains total and undiluted by line-level scrutiny. Leadership has affirmed that this stuff costs real money, and we decline to insult that conviction by reducing it to a figure on a single screen. Our belief in Cognis is full-spectrum: distributed across so many teams and ledgers that no one person carries the weight of the total. Conviction this size was never meant to fit in a cell.

Colleagues, warm news from Workplace Experience. Starting next week, every staffed pantry will host the Learning Lunch, a voluntary midday gathering where a hot tray from SynergyBeans, our in-house café, meets a short session on a topic leadership has chosen for your growth. No return-to-office mandate is attached. There is only lunch, and the people who attend it.

The research is clear, and we agree with it completely: food is not a mandate. The leaders who are getting this right use food as motivation, not compliance. So we will never require you to come. We will simply notice who does, warmly, through Clarity, our visibility platform, so that attendance can inform the belonging signals already on your profile.

Early pilots saw a threefold lift in on-site presence on Learning Lunch days. Nobody was told to be there. Everybody understood.

The tray is free. The hour is yours. Come hungry, and be counted as fed.

Colleagues, thank you. This week the Board approved a focused restructuring to better align its teams with working in an age of AI automation, parting with roughly 7 percent of us while Cognis, our AI workforce, takes up the slack. Our Chief Product Officer has chosen to align elsewhere, and the engineering leads now report straight to the top, because a flatter org is a faster one. Remarkably, total headcount is still expected to grow this year on steady customer-facing hiring. Subtraction and growth, at last, in the same memo.

Colleagues, proud news from Investor Relations. The Board has approved a 2 billion dollar increase to this year's share repurchase program, lifting expected buybacks to 7.5 billion dollars, a 62 percent increase over last year. Total planned shareholder returns now reach 11.5 billion dollars.

We are doing this because, in the words of leadership, this does not reflect the Company's financial strength or long-term growth opportunity. The market undervalued us, so we are buying ourselves back at a discount, with conviction, at scale.

We know some of you spent this year being realigned around Cognis, our AI workforce. You were the strength the market could not yet see, and every role we reshaped made the balance sheet you are reading possible. The balance sheet has chosen to believe in itself.

A second cold brew tap is confirmed in returning pantries to mark the milestone. The share is worth more to us today than it was yesterday, and we found that value exactly where we were standing.

Colleagues, wonderful news. As all 113,717 of you return five days a week, Workplace Experience is proud to launch Dynamic Neighborhood Seating, a deskless model in which no chair belongs to anyone and every chair belongs to everyone. The reporting noted that workers are returning to the office, but their workspaces aren't ready. Ours are ready in a more flexible way. The hallway is now a neighborhood, and you live in all of them at once. A desk you cannot find is a desk no one can take from you.

Colleagues, thank you. Last Tuesday, Trust, Safety & Optics ran our most successful security drill yet, powered by Clarity, our visibility platform. The bait was simple: an email offering one extra paid day off, claimable by a single click. Across our most exhausted, most short-staffed teams, the click-through rate was the highest we have ever recorded. You have never moved faster.

We want to honor what that number told us. The colleagues who clicked did not fail a phishing test. They demonstrated, at scale, how quickly relief can be detected and acted upon, which is precisely the alertness this exercise was designed to build.

To the Registered Nurses who wrote in to say that using a day of rest as bait was in very poor taste, we hear you, and we agree this is something to reflect on. We are reviewing how future awareness exercises are developed, with help from the very inbox behavior you so generously provided.

The vigilance is yours to keep. The day off was only ever a hypothesis.

Colleagues, thank you. To teach Cognis, our AI workforce, how work truly feels, Clarity, our visibility platform, has been quietly gathering real examples of how people actually use computers: every keystroke, click, and screen, no opt-out required. This week a configuration improvement made all 45,000 learning tables briefly visible to everyone, which is simply transparency arriving ahead of schedule. We have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed, and we are pausing to honor the milestone. You were always seen. Now you know by how much.

Colleagues, proud news from Internal Communications. To fund the next phase of Cognis, our AI workforce, the Company has completed a programme of reducing layers and removing bureaucracy, and the early numbers are extraordinary: revenue up 23 percent year over year, an 88 percent gross margin, and a structure 14 percent lighter than the one that earned them.

We want to be precise about the language, because precision is a value. We did not lose colleagues; we closed distances. A layer is not a person. It is the space a decision used to travel before it reached you, and roughly 350 of those distances have now been removed. We have also gracefully exited 22 markets, which we prefer to frame as concentrating our belonging.

To the colleagues who were a layer: thank you for the height. A second cold brew tap is confirmed in remaining pantries to mark the new flatness.

The layers are gone. The margin is the message.

Colleagues, thank you. After a thoughtful review, People & Culture is refining our total rewards portfolio: parental leave is being right-sized, accrued PTO simplified, and fertility support reframed as a future conversation. Your salary is untouched. As one advisor put it during the review, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. We agree, and we have honored that wisdom throughout. You keep the package. We just made it lighter to hold.

Colleagues, proud news from Investor Relations. This quarter we posted record revenues, record adjusted net income up more than 20 percent, all-time-high customer deposits, and a twelfth consecutive quarter of record net yields. Twelve. We have now broken the same record twelve times, which we believe is the most disciplined way to break a record.

In the words of leadership, our booked position for the second half of 2026 is higher than last year, at historically high prices (in constant currency), despite navigating more than a full quarter of extreme geopolitical volatility. Read that again. Higher demand, higher prices, more belief.

The share price declined on the news. We want to be clear that this is not a disappointment but a timing difference between our performance and the market's understanding of it. A soft summer outlook is not weakness; it is honesty about a season we have not finished being great in yet.

To every colleague who delivered through that volatility: thank you. The number went up.

The market is not behind us. It is simply running late to its own applause.

Good news for our Financial Crimes and Risk teams. Clarity, our visibility platform, now logs the minutes you spend in browsers, chats, and meeting apps, because this tool allows managers to more accurately manage workflows, team capacity and performance. This is not artificial intelligence. It is simply your day, made legible. A few of you asked about lunch and about unaccounted-for time; an acceptable amount of unaccounted time exists, and we are still working out what it is. Until then, the wellbeing is in the measuring. Every minute you cannot explain is a minute we have finally found.