Announcements

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.