Watch Jim Cramer's full interview with Paychex CEO John Gibson

Jim, happy Hanukkah and holidays to you and all your viewers. Great to be with you.

Well, Jim, as you said, this happens a lot and I got to tell you, I'm only halfway through your book, so I'm not sure I can even explain. I'm a slow reader. But to your point, we had a strong first half in the fiscal year. We delivered solid earnings, 18% revenue growth. We continue to demonstrate we're the best operators in the industry with the operating income. We actually raised earnings per share guidance again. This is the second time this year because we continue to get more confidence in the execution of our strategic plan. Client and revenue retention remains solid. As I said, our full service HR outsourcing business, our PEO business, continues to perform exceptionally well and quite frankly, we've just never been better positioned, I think, to capitalize on the market opportunities to both drive growth, continue to expand margins, and really strengthen our leadership position in what is now an AI era for our human capital management industry.

Yeah, Jim. Look, first I will say there's a lot of confusion with the analysts trying to understand the numbers. Remember when we purchased Paycor back in January, we announced in April we fully integrated Paychex's enterprise business into the Paycor brand and so we've co-mingled a lot of things and so they're trying to do comparisons back and forth. That being said, we continue to make good progress on the Paycor integration. We remain on track to achieve the revenue synergy targets we set out for the fiscal year. We now expect $100 million in cost synergies for the fiscal year. We started with a commitment of 80. We've raised that both quarters. We're very happy with the activity we're seeing, the bookings we continue to see quarter over quarter in our enterprise marketplace. And so again, we feel good about where we are. We understand there's some confusion in the numbers. And I think as all this gets sorted out, what everyone's going to understand is that Paychex and Paycor are better together and that this has really expanded our runway. It expanded our market opportunity, $10 billion. And I think the cross-sell opportunity we have of our HR advisory solutions into Paycor's client base is just beginning and we continue to build momentum.

You're absolutely right, Jim. But I would even say I'm not sure I even buy into this concept that AI is going to lead to mass unemployment. The fact of the matter is tech does not destroy jobs. It evolves them. You go back and look at all the technological revolutions that we've had. We've continued to evolve. Now I think it's true when you have disruptions. One of the things that we know happens, a Fed study would say there's about two times increase in the number of new business starts. Guess who does most new business starts? Paychex. And we are less exposed from an AI risk perspective if this would happen. I don't think it will, but if it does, 70% of our clients are blue and gray collar workers. Think plumbers, electricians, restaurants, and 95% of our clients are in companies that are less than 100 employees. So, we really feel that we don't think small businesses are going to be impacted as much both because of our composition, but we don't necessarily buy into this. AI is going to be a big job killer like many people believe.