Q4 2024 Appian Corp Earnings Call
and John Adams. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker Change: Good day and welcome to Appian's 4th Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode.
Speaker Change: After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this call may be recorded. I would like to turn the call over to Jack Andrews, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you.
Jack Andrews: Good morning and thank you for joining us. Today we'll review Appian's fourth quarter 2024 financial results. With me are Matt Calkins, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Lynch, Interim Chief Financial Officer. After prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions.
Jack Andrews: During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are considered forward-looking. These include comments related to our financial results,
Jack Andrews: Trends and Guidance for the First Quarter and Full Year 2025, the benefits of our platform, industry, and market trends, our go-to-market and growth strategy, our market opportunity and ability to expand our leadership position, our ability to maintain and upsell existing customers, and our ability to acquire new customers.
Jack Andrews: These statements reflect our views only as of today and don't represent our views as of any subsequent date.
Jack Andrews: We won't update these statements as a result of new information unless required by law. Actual results may differ materially from expectations due to the risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings.
Jack Andrews: Additionally, non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed on this conference call. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are provided in our earnings release. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Matt Calkins. Matt? Thanks, Jack, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.
Jack Andrews: In the fourth quarter of 2024, Appian's cloud subscription revenue grew 19% to $98.9 million.
Subscriptions revenue grew by 18% to $136.8 million.
Total revenue grew 15% to $166.7 million.
Jack Andrews: Our adjusted EBITDA was positive $21.2 million, and our cloud subscription revenue retention rate was 116%. Our non-GAAP gross margin was 80% in Q4, our best performance since the IPO.
Jack Andrews: For the full year, Appian's cloud subscription revenue grew 21% to $368 million.
Jack Andrews: Subscriptions revenue grew 19% to $490.6 million. Total revenue grew 13% to $617 million. Our adjusted EBITDA was positive $20.3 million.
The world of AI is very exciting.
Jack Andrews: but it contains an unsustainable imbalance and all of you know what it is.
AI doesn't generate enough revenue.
because AI doesn't generate enough value.
and this is where Appian can help.
Jack Andrews: Appian creates real value with AI by putting it where it can do the most good.
Jack Andrews: While other firms bring work to AI, we bring AI to work.
I mean, we go where work happens.
Jack Andrews: and that's where we deploy AI. We equip AI to make an impact directly in the places where the heaviest and most valuable work already occurs.
Work happens inside of a process.
Jack Andrews: A process is a high-volume flow of tasks, handled individually and procedurally inside a corporation. These tasks are carefully orchestrated to serve an important goal.
Jack Andrews: Process is how an insurer manages claims and a bank validates money. It's how the government operates procurement cycles and pharma companies run clinical trials. Process is how organizations spend their money, serve their customers, comply with regulation, and build their reputations.
Speaker Change: Appian is called the process company and we do a lot of processes.
Speaker Change: Appian runs 10 to 20 billion transactions per day on AWS alone. A lot of those transactions will run better when we apply AI.
Speaker Change: We used to staff our processes with digital workers like RPA and business rules. Now that we have AI, I believe that the value of process automation technology has roughly doubled.
Speaker Change: It will take years for that value to reach our accessible market but it's real and the value of AI can also double when it's used in a process.
Speaker Change: That is a bold statement but if it sounds like an exaggeration that the value of AI could double when used in a process then hear me out as I make the case for AI process synergy.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
First, it's easy to instantiate AI within an Appian process.
Speaker Change: To launch an AI agent in any node of a process model takes only a few clicks. Customers can use AI to make suggestions, generate content, parse documents, or take action. We're agnostic about the AI model. Customers can use ours, usually clawed, or bring their own.
Speaker Change: We're making it easier to access AI. And if DeepSeek commoditizes AI or makes it cheaper,
We and our customers stand only to gain.
Second, on slide six, our process gives AI structure.
Speaker Change: AI to make value. In high-volume workflows it must have a structured role.
Process gives AI a job.
Speaker Change: within a coordinated effort, working toward an important goal. AI gets a team of co-workers, an inbox and an outbox, an escalation path, exception handling, and human oversight.
Speaker Change: I want to emphasize this human-to-AI coordination. Many processes that can benefit from AI require humans as well, as overseers, exception handlers, or final results checkers.
Speaker Change: For example, one of our customers, an international health technology company, uses AI in a process to allocate human attention to incoming work.
Speaker Change: They sell medical devices and supplies to health care providers and they're working with us to automate order fulfillment.
Speaker Change: A third of their orders are submitted through email, and those emails will be processed by Appian AI agents, whose job is to parse, appraise, and route correspondence to the right actor within the organization.
Speaker Change: Many of these requests require a human response, so the AI will frequently assign the next stage of the work to a person.
Speaker Change: The third reason why Appian Process is good for AI is data.
AI needs data and different implementations require different provisioning strategies.
Speaker Change: It's not always enough to make a heap of data and train your AI model once. Sometimes you need data from disparate systems. Or you need fresh data in real time from remote sources of record.
Speaker Change: or you may wish to retrain periodically on a freshly assembled data set. If you're privacy-minded, you may wish not to train at all, but instead want data provided in the moment.
Speaker Change: Our process platform sends AI the right data at the right time.
Speaker Change: The fourth reason AI is better in a process is that we give agents what they need to be successful.
Speaker Change: Agents seek data then act. First they need to query and learn and for that our data fabric is ideal.
Speaker Change: then they need to launch powerful actions. These actions should be far-reaching, and coordinated, and predictable, and comprehensive, and fail-safe. In short, they should be processes.
Speaker Change: Only a process provides the power and the guardrails agents need when taking action.
Speaker Change: Appian had agents before the term was invented. We called them skills, but we did it the right way with more structure and stronger actions.
Speaker Change: Those who let agentic AI improvise without guardrails are making a mistake.
Speaker Change: Here's an example from a top U.S. mortgage lender that became a new Appian customer earlier this year. It uses Appian to automate audit processes for over 10,000 loans annually.
Speaker Change: Our AI agents analyze hundreds of different forms and cross-validate data with the company's origination system. With 98% accuracy, the agents flag discrepancies so human auditors can review and correct the data before publishing loans to the secondary market.
Speaker Change: The company now runs this previously manual process more than four times faster using Appian.
Speaker Change: The fifth reason why AI is better inside a process platform is visibility.
Speaker Change: Everything that happens in a process platform like ours is tracked. Every node, every action, every delay, every read and write, every outcome.
Speaker Change: AI is typically a black box, but to understand it better, put it in a process.
Speaker Change: Then you can track what impact it has, what it does well or poorly, where it makes mistakes, where are its blind spots, and whatever you learn from this exercise you can apply in the process platform from rerouting certain jobs to gathering a new training data set.
Speaker Change: The data rich environment of a process is great for validating your investment in AI and justifying your next project.
Speaker Change: And if you work in a highly regulated industry, this visibility might be a prerequisite to making any use of AI at all.
Finally, my sixth reason, Appian makes AI scalable.
Speaker Change: A process platform isn't just a workflow, it's an application environment.
Appian gives AI up-to-date security certifications.
and interface usable on any mobile device.
Hot, hot failover.
Speaker Change: DDIL capability and autoscale for usage spikes. That's why top global organizations run their most critical and complex processes on Appian. Our customers include over half the top life sciences, asset managers, and insurance companies, and and every US government cabinet level agency.
Speaker Change: Speaking of the federal government, there's a lot of change in that market right now. We are cautiously optimistic about the opportunity these changes may create.
Speaker Change: For 25 years, Appian has been a vehicle for efficiency and modernization in the U.S. government.
Speaker Change: Our Army Knowledge Online deployment was, in its day, the world's largest intranet.
Speaker Change: We rescued a portion of the Affordable Care Act from a faulty technology implementation. We've become an acquisition management standard for civilian defense and state agencies. We advance efficiency from optimizing how money is spent to maximizing the efficacy of each action.
Speaker Change: For example, a U.S. military branch and longtime customer expanded its use of Appian into a new mission area this quarter.
Speaker Change: This group runs core operations like logistics, finances, and supply chain management on a series of legacy enterprise resource planning systems. The organization will consolidate these systems into a single Appian View for hundreds of thousands of users and expects to save tens of millions of dollars annually.
Speaker Change: Appian continues to upsell our existing customer base by launching new products and identifying new use cases.
Speaker Change: Two-thirds of our customers at the beginning of 2024 purchased more software during the year. We launched a tiered pricing structure last February to monetize advanced functionality like AI.
Speaker Change: almost half of our new customers bought in above the base tier. Going forward, we hope to increase that share and to convert more existing customers.
Speaker Change: A leading U.S. insurance provider is one of our existing customers that upgraded its licenses in Q4.
Speaker Change: The group has been using Appian for more than a decade to manage risk and compliance and automate processes across its enterprise.
Speaker Change: The customer used Appian to expand its reinsurance business practice and generate an additional $2 billion in revenue annually. This quarter, the customer purchased a seven-figure upgrade and plans to widely deploy new capabilities like Appian AI agents.
Thank you very much.
Speaker Change: My last customer example is a medical transportation and emergency response company. I mentioned them in Q2 when they became a new Appian customer. The group has since reduced its appeal disputes processing times by 88% using Appian.
Speaker Change: Now the firm signed a seven-figure software deal in Q4 to integrate siloed systems and orchestrate its full claims lifecycle.
Speaker Change: And now I'll conclude my prepared remarks. This year, Appian's focus is on the basics.
Speaker Change: our core principles, our market identity, our financial goals, our strategic priorities, and our operational rigor.
Speaker Change: We believe we have an opportunity for growth. Being a leader in a growing and changing market, growth remains our priority.
Speaker Change: If you'd like to learn more about Appian, the best place to go is our annual conference, Appian World. This year we're meeting in Denver from April 27 to 30. You're all invited and I hope to see you there.
Now let's talk about the financials with Mark.
Mark Lynch: Thanks, Matt. And thank you to everyone joining us today. I'll review the financial highlights for the quarter and then we'll provide guidance for Q1 and the full year 2025.
Speaker Change: We finished 2024 on a high note, with our key metrics of cloud subscription revenue and adjusted EBITDA coming in above the high end of our guidance ranges.
Speaker Change: Strength was broad-based across our key industry verticals with contributions from both new and existing customers.
Speaker Change: Claude's subscription revenue was $98.9 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year. Total subscriptions revenue was $136.8 million, an increase of 18%. On a constant currency basis, total subscriptions revenue grew a similar 18% year-over-year.
Speaker Change: Professional services revenue was twenty nine point nine million dollars an increase of one percent year-over-year. As previously noted services revenue can be volatile.
Speaker Change: from quarter to quarter and a few large projects can influence performance. Our professional services continues to be a strategic offering focusing on driving customer success and enabling partners. Over the long term, we expect professional services revenue to continue to decline as a percentage of total revenue.
Speaker Change: Subscriptions revenue represented 82% of total revenue compared to 80% in the year-ago period and also 80% in the prior quarter.
Speaker Change: Total revenue is $166.7 million, an increase of 15% year over year. On a constant currency basis, total revenue grew 14% year over year.
Speaker Change: Our cloud subscription revenue retention rate was 116% as of year end, compared with 119% a year ago and 117% in the prior quarter. We continue to target a cloud subscription revenue retention rate of 110% to 120% on a quarterly basis.
Speaker Change: Our international operations contributed 35% of total revenue compared to 36% in the year ago period.
Speaker Change: cloud software net new ACV bookings were approximately 65% of total net new software bookings in Q4 compared to 80% in the prior year.
Speaker Change: We had a higher mix of net new on-prem ACV in Q4 than prior periods, predominantly in the public sector.
Let's turn to our profitability metrics.
Speaker Change: Non-GAAP gross margin was 80% compared to 78% in the year ago period and 77% in the prior quarter. Our subscription to Non-GAAP gross profit margin was 90% compared to 91% in the year ago period and 89% in the prior quarter. This margin remains best in class in enterprise software.
Speaker Change: Professional services non-GAAP gross margin was 31% compared to 26% in the year ago period and 30% in the prior quarter. Total non-GAAP operating expenses were 113.8 million dollars down 1% from 114 million dollars in the year ago period.
Speaker Change: Adjusted EBITDA was positive 21.2 million dollars versus our guidance of positive 6 and 8 million dollars and compared to a positive 1 million dollar in the year ago period.
Speaker Change: Reasons for outperformance relative to our guide included greater-than-expected high-margin on-prem revenue offset by lower-than-expected low-margin professional services revenue
Speaker Change: In addition, some of our forecasted Q4 cloud investments and employee-related costs were shifted into Q1, and our marketing spend was more efficient than previously expected.
Speaker Change: In the fourth quarter, we had approximately $14.3 million of foreign exchange losses compared to $11.1 million in foreign exchange gains in the same period a year ago. We don't forecast movements in FX rates, therefore they aren't considered in our guidance.
Speaker Change: Non-GAAP net loss was 2.2 million dollars or breakeven zero cents per share compared to non-GAAP net income of 4.9 million dollars or six cents per diluted share for the fourth quarter of 2023. This is based on 74 million diluted shares outstanding for the quarter.
Speaker Change: for the fourth quarter of 2024 and 73.3 million diluted shares are sustained for the fourth quarter of 2023.
Speaker Change: Turning to our balance sheet, as of December 31, 2024, cash and cash equivalents and investments were $159.9 million compared with $159 million as of the close of the prior year. For the fourth quarter, cash provided by operations was $13.9 million compared to usage of $8.2 million for the same period last year.
Speaker Change: Total deferred revenue was $287.2 million as of December 31, 2024, an increase of 19% from the year ago period.
Speaker Change: As we have stated on past calls, the majority of our customers are invoiced on an annual upfront basis. We also have large customers that are billed quarterly or even monthly. Due to the variability of our billing terms, changes in our deferred revenue are generally not indicative of our business momentum.
Speaker Change: Let me briefly recap our full year 2024 results. Cloud subscription revenue was $368 million, representing 21% growth year over year.
On a constant currency basis, cloud subscription revenue grew 20%.
Speaker Change: Total subscriptions revenue for the year was $490.6 million, an increase of 19% compared to 2023.
On a constant currency basis, total subscriptions revenue grew 18%.
Speaker Change: Professional services revenue was 126.5 million dollars, a decrease of 5% compared to 2023. Total revenue was 617 million dollars, up 13% compared to last year.
Speaker Change: Adjusted EBITDA was positive, $28.3 million, compared to a loss of $44.8 million in 2023. Non-GAAP net loss was $25.6 million in 2024, or a loss of $0.35 per diluted share compared to non-GAAP net loss of $59.2 million in 2023, or a loss of $0.81 per share.
Speaker Change: These figures are based on 73 million and 73.1 million diluted shares, outstanding for 2024 and 2023, respectfully.
Speaker Change: For the full year 2024, cash provided by operating activities was 6.9 million dollars versus a cash usage of 110.4 million dollars in the prior year.
Speaker Change: As a reminder, included in last year's cash usage was the one-time $57.3 million premium payment for the Judge Preservation Insurance Policy.
Speaker Change: We continue to believe cloud subscription revenue is a better indicator of our business momentum than billings or remaining performance obligations or RPO.
Speaker Change: The latter metrics can fluctuate based on the timing of invoicing.
Speaker Change: seasonality of on-prem license revenue, and the duration of customer contracts.
Speaker Change: The true scale of the business is represented by subscriptions revenue, which includes support and all software subscription revenue, regardless of whether the customer deploys to the IP cloud, their private cloud, or on-prem.
Speaker Change: Now, turn to guidance. For the first quarter of 2025, Quad subscription revenue is expected to be between $97 and $99 million, representing year-over-year growth between 12 and 14 percent.
Speaker Change: Total revenue is expected to be between $162 million and $164 million, representing year-over-year growth between 8 and 9 percent.
Speaker Change: At Jesse D. Bedoff for the first quarter of 2025, it is expected to be between positive $8 and $10 million. Non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to be between $0.02 and $0.05. This assumes 74.7 million fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding.
Speaker Change: For the full year 2025, cloud subscription revenue is expected to be between $419 and $421 million, representing year-over-year growth of 14%. Total revenue is expected to be between $680 and $684 million, representing year-over-year growth of 10%.
Speaker Change: Adjusted EBITDA is expected to range between positive $38 and $42 million. Non-GAAP earnings per share is expected to be between $0.17 and $0.22. This assumes 75.1 million fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding.
Speaker Change: Our guidance assumes the following. First, we expect that Q1 professional services revenue will be roughly flat compared to a year ago. For the full year we expect professional services revenue will be approximately flat or will increase by a low single-digit rate compared to a year ago.
Speaker Change: Second, we anticipate that on-prem license revenue will grow by a low single-digit percentage on a year-over-year basis and will track seasonality that is consistent with prior periods.
Speaker Change: Third, we expect our Q2 adjusted EBITDA to be a loss due to the combination of on-prem license, seasonality, and the cost of running our annual user conference, Appian World.
Speaker Change: Fourth, total other income and interest expense will be approximately $4 million in Q1 and $15 million for the full year 2025.
Speaker Change: Fifth, capital expenditures will be between 1 and 1.5 million in Q1 and between 3 and 4 million for the full year of 2025.
Speaker Change: Sixth, our guidance assumes FX rates as of February 10th, 2025.
Speaker Change: Finally, we're making a change in 2025. We're removing foreign exchange gains and losses from our non-GAAP EPS calculation.
And with that, we'll turn it to questions.
Thank you.
Speaker Change: Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 1. If your question hasn't been answered and you'd like to remove yourself from the queue, please press star 1 1 again.
Speaker Change: Our first question comes from Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Sanjit Singh: Yes, thank you for taking the questions and congrats on a strong end to 2024.
Speaker Change: On the Q4 performance, there did seem to be a lot of strength in sort of the on-premise business. You called out strength in the public sector vertical specifically, which sort of begs the question, just given all the uncertainty with DOGE and U.S. federal spending, what's sort of the underlying assumption in terms of the guidance about...
Speaker Change: Public sector overall, but U.S. federal going into next year. How do you feel about Appian's positioning in an uncertain U.S. federal budget environment?
Thank you.
Speaker Change: Well, we feel cautious about it, and that's our nature. In a state of uncertainty, we want to be careful. I cannot forecast the outcome of Doge, the impact that those rearrangements are going to have. I love the principles of efficiency and modernization, but how those principles will translate into the buying environment, I cannot yet predict.
And I think it's important, Sanjeev, for modeling purposes that...
Speaker Change: The 65% cloud, 35% on-prem was an anomaly. We expect that the ratio to go back to be consistently about 80% cloud and 20% on-prem for next year. We just had a couple of large deals in the public sector that skewed.
Matt Calkins: And then just to follow up, Matt, on some of the case studies that you highlighted in your broader agent strategy.
As we look into 2025,
From a product roadmap perspective, what can we expect?
Matt Calkins: In terms of more skills, you announced a skills package in the last couple of years, but broadly on the agent strategy, what can we expect the customer base to be seeing from an innovation standpoint on the agent front?
Speaker Change: Yeah, I pointed out that in the world of AI there's an imbalance between excitement and
Speaker Change: results. And I think that as severe as that imbalance might be, it gets even stronger when you talk about agents.
Speaker Change: Our goal is to teach people that agents can be valuable.
Speaker Change: when they're structured, when you've got guardrails, when their actions are far-reaching.
Speaker Change: when you narrow the chances that improvisation will occur and fail.
Speaker Change: We can make practical value and I want to elevate that. I want to expose people to the value we're creating, the real value with agents. And so our goal is to show this practicality. Some of us like to say that our goal is to be boring with AI because real productive AI is...
Speaker Change: is less of a flight of fancy, and instead just going to where the work already is and improving how we handle it with AI. It's kind of boring, right? It doesn't really change the way your business runs. It just makes it run a lot stronger. So, our intention is to be practical and even boring.
Speaker Change: in the way we solve real problems with these new technologies.
Okay, the thought's not, thank you.
Steve Enders: Thank you. Our next question comes from Steve Enders with Citi. Your line is open.
Steve Enders: Okay, great. Thanks for taking the questions this morning. And Mark, good to hear you back on the call here.
Steve Enders: I guess I want to start on the AI point and I guess follow up on the prior question, but I guess, how do you kind of see this
Steve Enders: dynamic playing out of customers, I guess, kind of understanding, you know, the Appian approach to AI and understanding, you know, kind of embedding this, embedding the Eugene experience into the process pipeline versus
Steve Enders: and I guess other perches that are out there in the market.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Speaker Change: I think we've got, first of all, everybody thinks about AI in a different way. Some people are thinking co-pilots, some people are thinking chatbots, some people are talking about agent force. We're thinking about AI in a distinctive way, and I believe that the way we approach it stacks up very well, value-wise.
Speaker Change: results-wise against any other vision around the way AI should be used.
Speaker Change: ours allows you to deploy AI to where work is happening and therefore to put it right in the midst of things. AI shouldn't stand to the side and be your butler and help out when there's, when something anomalous happens or, it deserves to be in the absolute center of work. If as an economy we're gonna spend as much money as we're spending on AI this should be an absolute centerpiece to the way we address.
Speaker Change: big flows of work. And so I think our approach is intuitive and even obvious when you think about it. But where does AI belong? Well, of course, it belongs exactly where the greatest amount of work is done and value is created. So that's our philosophy. And we're going to make our case through demonstrations. We're going to make our case through publicized success stories and word of mouth.
That's how we'll win this argument.
Speaker Change: Okay, I guess maybe that dovetails into the next question just on, you know, the changes in the go-to-market that have taken place over the past year or so and the new CRO coming in.
Speaker Change: I guess how are you kind of feeling about, you know, productivity rates from the changes that have been been made and how are you kind of thinking about, you know, further, you know, further evolution of the of the go-to-market moving forward?
Speaker Change: Yeah, well, first of all, I feel great about the progress we're making and we are
Speaker Change: We're getting back to first principles, right? We're bringing focus and discipline and leadership and we're getting the right people doing the right things.
Speaker Change: and I'm very encouraged by the movements that we've made and I think that higher productivity can only result from building good foundations.
That's great. Thanks for taking the questions.
Speaker Change: Thank you. Our next question comes from Derrick Wood with TD Cowan. Your line is open.
Derrick Wood: Great, thank you. Matt, I guess my first question, when it comes to data fabric and tapping into various data sources to bring
more intelligence into the Appian platform. Can you talk about...
Derrick Wood: what the common data sources customers are looking to get access to and what vendors or systems you're working closely with when it comes to building connectors and APIs and and trying to bring more different data sources into the Appian platform.
Derrick Wood: First of all, we see this as a major advantage for our technology over other firms.
Derrick Wood: The distributed data that exists in every major enterprise differentiates us from our competitors who typically wish to assemble the data to aggregate it in one place or under their control before they can properly learn from it or interact with it.
Derrick Wood: So we're reaching across the enterprise, relational databases, systems, important software, textual repositories, especially with AI, text has become a really important source of information.
Derrick Wood: we're a universal connector and we're broadly integrated with all these systems and I think that that tolerance for data diversity gives us an edge.
Mark Lynch: Got it. Thank you. Maybe one for Mark. Just hoping to get a little more color on demand trends across core verticals, financial services, government, life sciences, how the quarter went, how you're feeling about pipelines, and even underneath some of those verticals, areas like insurance and pharma, I think, are newer focuses. Just checking in on tracks in there as well.
Mark Lynch: I'd say that the four key verticals, financial services, public sector.
Thank you.
Mark Lynch: insurance and life sciences. I'd say that the performance for Q4 and the pipeline were equally distributed amongst those.
Those top four.
Mark Lynch: We also have success in other verticals like energy or manufacturing and education, etc. But those are the top four. So pipeline looks pretty good and the performance speaks for itself.
Okay, thank you.
Speaker Change: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ramo Linshaw with Barclays. Your line is open.
Speaker Change: Congrats from me as well, great Q4. Two questions, one for Matt, one for Mark. Matt, if you think about AI and your offering, I saw your presentation was really kind of thorough and gave us a good idea,
Speaker Change: แ conveys You think about your thinking there. And then one for Monk. And you on cloud, a tick down a touching in. I know it's a lagging indicator where do you think that number seven down or whether anything was anything for the record? Thank you
Speaker Change: All right, I'll go first. With regards to how do you price agents, so you price them by usage. That seems to be where the industry is coming down also. It's, you know, just just request flow to agents. However, I'll add that we're going to subsidize the use of agents.
Speaker Change: for the time being. So we're gonna encourage customers to make more use of them so that the value can be demonstrated, so that we can have a higher volume of adoption. So what our eventual price may be and what our price is right now may not be the same.
and John Adams. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker Change: And as for the NRR, it bounces around a little bit, Rhonda, you know that, it's well within the range that we've stated, 110 to 120, and I think more importantly, the gross renewal rate is 99%, which is best in class, right?
Speaker Change: and a webcast from the Center for Collegial Services and Education. Thank you. And I'm sure that will be a great way to end the show. I want to thank you all for joining us today. I hope you have a great weekend. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
Yeah, okay.
Speaker Change: Thank you. Our next question comes from Nick Altman with Scotiabank. Your line is open.
Awesome. Thank you.
Speaker Change: Matt, you mentioned half of net new customers bought in above the base tier for the new tiered pricing structure.
Speaker Change: And so can you maybe just talk about the installed base and how those customers are resonating with the new tiered pricing structure and is there any way to think about what percentage of the installed base is on the new tiered pricing structure today and where that could head in 2025?
Speaker Change: Yeah, let me comment on this. We did not go after our installed base very hard with the new pricing structure. We did not disrupt the contracts and commercial relationships that we had in place in order to impose that structure.
Speaker Change: to bring our install base higher is when there's a feature they feel that they need.
Speaker Change: And if we can make a good enough case around certain AI functionality, that might be the inflection point we need to bring them willingly onto the new price structure. And then there's some other possibilities as well. But I'd love to see us do more with the install base. We absolutely have our eye on that. I think that they've honestly got a nice consumer surplus that I'd like to split with them. And, and we're.
Speaker Change: We're looking for ways to craft and share with them a pricing system that will allow us to benefit from their success.
Speaker Change: Okay, great. And then just going back to Steve's question around the go-to-market, but can you just maybe talk about the messaging to the go-to-market function coming out of sales kickoff? Are there any new incentives or tweaks in place this year versus 2024 that you'd be willing to share?
Speaker Change: Yeah. Hey, that was the best sales kickoff we've had in five years. The one we just had.
Speaker Change: And it was the best because it was focused on the fundamentals. As I say, straightforward things, but things you've got to get right. Right people doing the right things.
Speaker Change: basics of who we are, what we stand for, what our customers benefit, how to find, leverage, and monetize it. It was the core things and
and there was a...
Hi
Speaker Change: I came away from that very encouraged about where we can go. And the funny thing is, we're...
Speaker Change: We're asserting these fundamentals in the midst of a moment when...
Speaker Change: When there's so much opportunity, you know, the change, the greater value that we're creating right now, the need for clarity in a marketplace that's echoing with messages about AI. It's essential that our identity, like the process company, and that our message, right, focused on putting AI in a process, be extremely intuitive and clear. And so that's the kind of thing that we're getting across to the team.
Speaker Change: You asked about the incentives. Yeah, the incentives have been tweaked. Definitely. Right. So we've got more incentive for the most important is larger deals. Right. We're we're shifting incentives in order to motivate larger transactions and more strategic adoptions. That's the that's the most essential thing that's came out of our new incentive structure.
Speaker Change: But yeah, I feel that all of it is pointing in the right direction.
Great, thank you.
Speaker Change: Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press Star 11.
Speaker Change: And our next question comes from Devin Awe with KeyBank Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Devin Awe: Great. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe just one for me. I kind of wanted to get an update on solutions, particularly around the GAM Suite. I mean, you mentioned...
Speaker Change: You saw particular strength from Federal and 4Q. Curious how the adoption of GAM Suite has been trending, but also kind of what are your expectations around contributions from that in 25. Seems like that product would be really well positioned under increasing efficiency focus from the Federal Government. Thank you.
Speaker Change: I feel the same way about the potential for GAM and I can back it up somewhat by saying that we had a substantial pipeline. We don't get into specifics about pipeline but we had a strong and historically strong for any solution that we've ever done pipeline in GAM coming into the year and of course that's
Speaker Change: before the DOJ activities and the intense focus on efficiency that we're seeing now.
So...
Speaker Change: I like where we stood at the top of the year. We've got a lot of adoption, we have the credibility of successful deployments, and we have a best-in-class product.
Speaker Change: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. This does conclude the program, and you may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.