Five9, Inc.

Thank you for joining us today. On the call are Mike Berkland, Chairman and CEO, Dan Berkland, President, and Barry Zworenstein, CFO. Certain statements made during the course of this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding the future financial performance of the company, expected ARR from certain customers, customer growth, anticipated customer benefits, company growth, the anticipated benefits from our recent acquisition of ACS, enhancements to and development of our solution, market size and trends, our expectations regarding macroeconomic conditions, company market position initiatives and expectations, technology and product initiatives, and other future events are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are simply predictions, should not be unduly relied upon by investors, Actual events or results may differ materially, and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information in such statements. These statements are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties that can adversely affect 5 future results and cause these forward looking statements to be inaccurate, including the impact of adverse economic conditions, including macroeconomic deterioration and uncertainty, including increased inflation, increased interest rates, Supply chain disruptions, decreased economic output and fluctuations in currency exchange rates, lower growth rates within our install base of customers, achieved the intended benefits from the acquisition of ACS and the other risks discussed under the caption risk factors and elsewhere in 5.9's annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, management will make reference to non-GAAP financial measures during this call. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding reconciliation of our GAAP versus non-GAAP results and guidance is currently available in our press release issued earlier this afternoon, as well as in the appendix of our investor deck and in the investor relations section on Five9's website at investors.five9.com. Lastly, a reminder that, unless otherwise indicated, financial figures discussed are non-GAAP. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Five9's Chairman and CEO, Mike Birkland.

Thanks Emily, and thanks everyone for joining our call this afternoon. I'm pleased to report strong third quarter results with revenue growth of 16% year-over-year, primarily driven by our LTM Enterprise subscription revenue growing 28% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the third quarter was 18% of revenue, helping drive an all-time record for operating cash flow of $37 million or 16% of revenue. Let me start off by reminding you of the three continuing trends that drive our confidence in this market. First, enterprises are developing plans at a greater sense of urgency to replace their on-premise contact center solutions as legacy vendors have retrenched and slowed or even stopped development in some cases. Also, a reminder that in terms of cloud replacing on-premise, we believe that the penetration is still less than 20%. Second, companies are enthusiastically pursuing digital transformation initiatives to enhance customer experience, cut costs, and increase revenue. In this context, remember that contact centers are mission-critical systems, which are a source of brand loyalty and differentiation. And third, AI is becoming an even more important catalyst for enterprises to shift to the cloud. AI and automation is clearly an area of focus for enterprises, as demonstrated by our greater than 80% attach rate on $1 million-plus ARR deals in the quarter. Now I'd like to discuss the three main growth drivers for our business, namely our platform, our march-up market, and our international expansion. Let me start with our platform. As you recall, in August, we closed the ACS acquisition. We have experienced significant momentum with the ACS solution as the number of ACS opportunities in the pipeline has increased over 30% in this very short period of time. As a reminder, ACS is a fit for our $1 million-plus ARR customers, giving us continued strength in our march-up market. For example, they're opening doors for several Fortune 100 deals, although it's still early days. A good portion of our innovation continues to be centered around our AI and automation portfolio, and we are seeing significant traction as a result of this innovation. For example, our professional services team worked on more than 250 AI deployments during the quarter. Additionally, bookings for our agent assist product increased 150% year over year, driven by our AI summaries customer trials. It's clear that our practical approach to AI continues to deliver real tangible value to our customers. This is directly tied to our core AI tenants, including our beliefs that AI should be available across our platform, that AI should be democratized and available to all customers, that AI should remain engine agnostic, and that AI should be applied in a responsible and ethical manner. And now I'd like to focus on our March up market and international expansion. I'm pleased to report that we continue to see strong momentum up market in booking $1 million-plus ARR deals. As a reminder, $1 million-plus ARR customers make up more than 50% of our recurring revenue. I'm also pleased to report that our pipeline for strategic deals doubled year over year in Q3. In addition, we had a record number of enterprise and strategic RFPs in the third quarter, which increased 66% year over year and 21% sequentially. This march-up market and our continued international expansion are increasingly being driven by our ever-growing network of global partners and their dedication to leading with Five9. I'm very pleased to share that IBM has expanded their relationship with us as a global SI partner, reselling Five9 along with their CRM and ITSM offers, and also as a technology partner, integrating Watson X with our AI solutions. This is a common model amongst large SIs, as we are complementary and tightly integrated with solutions such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Google, and others. We have now established ourselves as a global brand with the help of key strategic partners like IBM, BT, Telus International, Deloitte, and Accenture, to name a few. Our partnership strategy is built not only on recruiting new partners, but also on enabling and empowering partners within our methodology of sell with, deliver with, and build with. This approach was one of the key drivers that led to our EMEA bookings growing 57% in Q3. In addition, a US managed service provider who has been our partner for the past three years celebrated their largest quarter with several new customer logo wins and over 4 million of incremental ACD added in the quarter. Their success is built in part on their ability to implement Five9 solutions integrated with their enterprise management platform and other services. Our leadership in the channel is further validated by the three leading technology solution distributors in our industry, Teleris, Avant, and Intellisys ScanSource, each recognizing 5.9 as their number one CCaaS supplier. Furthermore, a recent channel survey by Baird ranked 5.9 number one for top CCaaS solutions sold by the channel and number one in easiest to do business with. These partners, along with many others, are helping place us in a prominent position within the global channel community. In closing, I'm very excited about our continued momentum out-market globally and with the success we are having with our AI and automation offerings. The opportunity ahead for Five9 has never been better. And I want to thank all of our employees who bring passion and purpose to their work every day to make this a reality. And with that, I'll turn it over to our president and CRO, Dan Berklin. Dan, go ahead.

Thanks, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to report that we had a strong bookings quarter. Our pipeline reached another all-time high with our strategic accounts pipeline doubling year over year, and our sales of AI and automation solutions are seeing unprecedented momentum. As you know, the very high end of our market is lumpy with regards to the timing of bookings. However, I'd like to remind you that the large enterprise category of $1 million to $5 million of ARR is the bread and butter of our business, and in aggregate is a larger contributor to our revenue growth than the mega deals. Now, as I usually do, I'd like to share some examples of new logo wins during the quarter. The first example is a healthcare insurance company that was moving away from an Avaya on-premise version that was being end of life. They chose Five9 along with one of our leading UC partners with deep integration in order to gain visibility and provide seamless transfers between contact center workers and back office employees, all from a single UI. We will also include our chat, email, SMS, QM, and interaction analytics. And we anticipate this initial order to result in approximately $2.3 million in ARR to 5.9. The second example is a hospital billing and collections company. They were using Cisco that was being managed by a third party, making moves, ads, and changes cumbersome and also long lead times. They evaluated the major CCaaS providers and chose 5.9. We're including the full omnichannel solution with email, chat, SMS, as well as both voice and digital IVAs. We are also providing them with QM, interaction analytics, WFM, and agent assist, where they expect to reduce call handle times by up to 50%. We anticipate this initial order to result in approximately $2.3 million in ARR to 5.9. The third example is a utility company serving many markets in North America. They were using a hosted Cisco solution that was nearing its end of life. They chose 5.9 from all the major CCaaS providers and will be implementing our core offerings along with the advanced solutions including chat, email, agent assist, our complete WFO suite powered by Verint, performance management, and gamification. This customer will also be deploying our voice and digital IVAs for self-service to pay invoices, check account balances, and canceling or moving service. We anticipate this initial order to result in over $2.2 million in ARR to 5.9. And now, as I normally do, I'd like to share two examples of existing customers who have expanded their use of Five9. This first example is a global pest control company who had been using our system for several years and was recently acquired by a European company who is using an on-prem legacy solution. The North America operations team was able to do a side-by-side comparison with real production traffic to compare performance over several months. They chose us for our superior reliability as well as our AI and automation portfolio. We anticipate their spend to increase from approximately $2.1 million in ARR to approximately $4.2 million in ARR. This last example is a leading global ticket sales and distribution company where we began providing our solution throughout Europe more than five years ago. In early 2022, we used the strong success we established with them in Europe to parlay this into their US operations where they saw increased call volumes. We now continue to expand as we replace their legacy on-prem solution This recent order increases their spend with us from approximately $1.2 million in ARR to over $2.2 million in ARR. So as you can see, we are executing extremely well in landing some of the largest brands in the world, as well as helping our existing customers expand and reimagine how they deliver CX to their customers. And with that, I'll hand it over to Barry to cover the financials. Barry?

Thank you, Dan. Third quarter revenue exceeded our expectations, growing 16% year over year, primarily driven by the 28% growth in our LTM enterprise subscription revenue. As a reminder, we believe we are well positioned to resume historic levels of growth in the 30s, where enterprise subscription won some macroeconomic headwinds on our install base subside. Our enterprise business made up 87% of LTM revenue, and our commercial business, which represented the remaining 13% grew again in the single digits on an LTM basis. Now, I would like to provide color on our recurring versus total revenue. Third quarter recurring revenue, which made up 92% of total revenue, grew 18% year over year, the same year over year rate as in the second quarter. Third quarter recurring revenue grew 4% quarter-over-quarter, the same sequential rate as in Q3 of last year, as new logo deployments offset slower install-based growth. Speaking of new logo deployments, note that the international rollout of the positive delivery company and the deployment of the healthcare conglomerate remain largely on track, considering the inevitable ebbs and flows of implementations across multiple divisions. Total revenue, however, grew sequentially at a slower rate of 3% in the third quarter, versus 5% in the third quarter of 2022, primarily driven by the lumpiness of our professional services revenue, which declined 3% sequentially, coming off of a record high PS revenue in the second quarter of 2023. This type of fluctuation is typical for our professional services revenue, which has experienced negative sequential growth in at least one quarter in nine of the last 10 years. Our LTM dollar-based retention rate was 110%, a decline of two percentage points sequentially, mainly due to the ongoing macro headwinds causing subdued growth in our store base. We expect fourth quarter LTM dollar-based retention rate to be either flat or slightly down, and we expect a positive inflection in 2024, assuming no major changes in the economy. Longer term, we continue to expect our retention rate to trend towards a high 120s by 2027 due to a higher mix of enterprise customers, especially larger ones, which have higher retention rates and higher output from AI and automation and other offerings. Third quarter adjusted gross margins were 60.6%, a decrease of approximately 80 basis points year-over-year. As we mentioned last quarter, we are making upfront incremental investments to support our new logo momentum, which is hindering our ability to report year-over-year growth in adjusted gross margin in the near term. Third quarter adjusted EBITDA was $41.3 million, representing a 17.9% margin, a decrease of approximately 60 basis points year-over-year. Third quarter non-GAAP EPS was 52 cents per diluted share, a year-over-year increase of 13 cents per diluted share. Turning now to cash flow, we generated operating cash flow of $37 million, a record, driven in part by continuous strength in ESO performance, which came in at 32 days. We have now delivered 29 consecutive quarters of positive LTM operating cash flow. Third quarter free cash flow of $31.5 million was also an all-time high. We remain optimistic about our potential for continuing cash flow generation, given our long-term model, our substantial NRLs, and our low DSO. And now I'd like to discuss our guidance for the remainder of 2023, as well as provide high-level commentary regarding 2024. We closely tracked numerous indicators with a focus on consumer discretionary spend, given that it directly impacts our seasonally strongest vertical in the second half, namely consumer. Based on JPMorgan Chase data, the nominal year-over-year growth in discretionary credit and debit card spending deteriorated progressively throughout the third quarter, from 5% in July down to 1% in September, which was the lowest growth of the year. Importantly, also note that what matters to Five9 is not nominal spending growth, but rather transaction volume growth, which drives contact center inquiry volume. In this regard, the 1% nominal growth in spending in September of this year represented negative transaction volume growth. Given this trend, we are adopting a prudent approach to the fourth quarter and are assuming weaker seasonality in our consumer vertical. Therefore, we are guiding the fourth quarter revenue to a midpoint of $237.6 million, which implies a quarter over quarter growth rate of 3%. This 3% sequential increase is in line with our typical guidance pattern heading into the fourth quarter. despite the weaker seasonality expected in our consumer vertical due to the offset from the ongoing strength of our new logo deployments. Accordingly, we are maintaining the midpoint of our annual revenue guidance at $909 million or 17% year-over-year growth. As for the bottom line, we are guiding fourth quarter non-GAAP EPS to a midpoint of $0.48 per diluted share and we are raising the midpoint of the full year to $1.92 per diluted share, which represents a year-over-year increase of 28%. I would now like to provide some preliminary high-level commentary on our current thinking for 2024. For those of you who have been following Five9 for some time, you know that for the six years through 2020, and again in 2023, we started each new year with prudent revenue guidance of 16% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. For 2024, our outlook again is for 16% year-over-year growth or approximately 1.05 billion in revenue based upon the ongoing strength in our new logo business and less challenging compares in our install base on the assumption that the economy does not deteriorate further next year. This, as usual, is a sliding point, and we will update our outlook as the year progresses. We expect revenue to continue following our typical pattern, with slightly more than 50% of the annual revenue being generated in the seasonally stronger second half of 2024. In terms of non-GAAP EPS, we are comfortable with the current street consensus of $2.16 per litre share for the full year in 2024. In addition, we'd like to provide an outlook on the quarterly profile of our bottom line. If you look at our historical financials, non-GAAP EPS is typically amongst the lowest of the year in the first quarter, and we expect this to be the case again in 2024. Therefore, we anticipate non-GAAP EPS in Q1 2024 to be in the high 20s per diluted share. We expect bottom line to improve slightly in the second quarter, and more meaningfully in the second half, especially in the fourth quarter. Please refer to the presentation posted on our investor relations website for additional estimates, including share count, taxes, and capital expenditures. In summary, we are pleased with our third quarter results. And while we remain prudent with our outlook, we continue to execute consistently against this massive market. And we believe we are well positioned to accelerate our business once macroeconomic conditions improve. Operator, please go ahead.

Thank you so much, Barry. And everyone, before we begin our Q&A session today, we please ask our analysts to limit yourselves to one question to allow for as many questions as time permits. We thank you for your cooperation in advance. And now our first question will come from Ryan McWilliams with Barclays. Please go ahead, Ryan.

Hey, guys, just a double click on the fourth quarter commentary. So are your customers ramping agents as you expected for seasonal use cases? And you're simply taking a prudent approach around like call volumes during that period or, you know, anything different there? Thank you.

So, yeah, they are ramping, but at a slow pace. And we are taking a prudent approach. And this is an environment to do that. I really want to emphasize that as JP Morgan debit and credit card discretionary spending metrics. And because the internal numbers actually track it very well. Remember it was 5, 3, 1 for July, August, September. And internally, month by month, that's what was happening in our business as well on the consumer vertical. And so we looked at that. We looked at the fact that credit card delinquencies, auto loan delinquencies are at a 20-year high. We looked at the fact that the most recent JP Morgan survey on consumer discretionary spending had 44% of them saying they were going to reduce it. You switch on CNBC this morning and you hear the CEO of Target saying that he's had seven quarters of both nominal and real transaction reductions And we, frankly, just don't have the fortitude to say we got to just power through that. So we're taking a prudent approach. And that's what we've always done. And it's worked out for us.

Appreciate the color. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Ron.

And we will move on to Terry Tillman with Truist.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks, Mike, Dan, and Barry. My question, and it is one question, but it might almost delve into like a two-parter. Maybe, Dan, for you in terms of, you know, you did emphasize the idea of the $1 to $5 million deals. There's a lot of bread and butter there. In fact, you did say that it's a bigger proportion of your growth, which I think is an interesting data point. But what about the $5 million plus deals? So those seven and eight figure transactions, how do you feel today about the volume and velocity of those over the next 12 months versus 90 days ago? So not pinning you to a quarter, but how do you feel about those and the activity? And then secondly, unprecedented adoption of AI and automation. Unprecedented is a pretty important word. How much are you expecting those to increasing play in those larger deals? Thank you.

Yeah, great, Terry. Great questions. I'll start with, if you look at the upmarket, the $1 million plus deals and kind of that $1 to $5 million range absolutely is the biggest growth driver for us from a revenue perspective. There's a lot of them, if you think about it. That's typically a contact center with 500 seats or above. Those big, large mega deals, there's very few of them. And that's why they're so lumpy. And that's a market that's just starting to look at CCAS for the first time. There are quite a few, but there's only a few that come up for grabs each year. And we've been fortunate enough to capture the early adopters of those that we've talked about before. So we've always said, don't expect those each and every quarter. We saw a great momentum from the million to $5 million range. And remember those implement quicker, they've turned to revenue quicker, and they're much more predictable in that cycle about how quickly that will happen. As far as looking at the high-end pipeline, like you said, for the next year, couldn't be more optimistic about it. If you look at what's happening from a demand perspective, Mike mentioned it in his comments about the number of RFPs, 66% increase in the number of RFPs, 21% sequentially from Q2 to Q3 alone. And that comes from a couple of things. One is the end of lifing of a lot of the premise-based systems that or the end of development on those systems, which implies to customers that they've got to make this move to the cloud. So we see that whole market, the million dollar plus all the way up through the mega deals. They've got to make this transition to the cloud and they're starting on that process now. The thing that makes me feel like there's no better time to be in this space is that all those companies will make that transition and you look at the millions of seats that are out there to do so. And it gives us great optimism. But remember, there's a sales cycle and then there's an implementation cycle. And so you don't see it hit our books right away. And so couldn't feel stronger about it. And I feel that there's a lot of business coming in the top of the funnel, which gives us great optimism about the future. The second part of your question. Was the AI and automation unprecedented momentum there? We had an attach rate of our $1 million ARR deals of right around 80% for one or more of the applications in our eight AI and automation applications. And that attach rate has been very, very strong. The RFPs that are coming out are requesting it proactively now. And that's really the majority of the conversations that we're having and the positioning of our solutions are all about how can we help improve, reinvent, deliver a better customer experience. And it's all centered around how do we automate? How do we bring in these new technologies? How do we help not only automate to let the end user self-serve, How do we automate to help our agents be more effective and be more efficient with their time? A big one is call summaries, being able to just summarize the call for the agent instead of them having to put in their notes after a post-call wrap-up, if you will. All things that help those customers do more and serve their customers better with less resources. So it couldn't be a better time. So thanks for the questions.

And we'll now move on to DJ Hines with Canaccord.

Hey guys, good to see everyone. Mike, Dan, maybe I could ask you to double click on some of the ACS commentary. Integration progress, you gave us some color on kind of how that's contributing to deal flow. I'm curious also, I mean, ACS in the past has been a business that's worked with other large contact center vendors in the space. How have you been treating that? How are you thinking about it now that you own the asset? Any color there would be interesting.

Yeah, sure, DJ. The momentum is off to a very quick start with ACS. Again, we closed that deal in August, as you know, not very long ago. As I mentioned, the pipeline for ACS solutions, the combined pipeline, if you will, that they had plus ours now is up 30% in just a couple months. They've also opened some doors for us to sell, you know, CCAS into their base and some major Fortune 100 accounts. And it's right on, you know, right on track, so to speak, I'd say ahead of schedule in terms of the impact it's having on our business, the influence it's having on our deals and the influence it's having on, you know, just prospects in our customer base, as well as their customer base. I'll also add that their employees have, you know, really leaned in and ours have as well. And the integration of our teams is just going perfectly well.

Great. Thank you.

You got it.

UBS's Seth Gilbert has the next question.

Hey, this is Stefan for Taylor. I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on the timing of three of the large deal ramps. Maybe more specifically, is the parcel delivery service still scheduled to be fully deployed by the end of this year? Healthcare conglomerate by early 24? And then maybe a little bit of an update on where the Fortune 50 global healthcare insurance company is in their ramping lifestyle would be great. Thank you.

Yeah, they're on track. They're proceeding as planned. The parcel delivery service rolled out the Americas right away. They've recently rolled out Europe and are in the process of rolling out AsiaPAC. So that is right on track to, as you said, conclude right around the end of the year or beginning of next year. And then if you look at the conglomerate, the healthcare conglomerate, they're in process and proceeding as planned. They've got like 12 different businesses or companies underneath them. So each of those are operating in parallel and rolling out in parallel at different stages. We expect that to go throughout the rest of 2024 before they're at full strength. And then the one that you mentioned, the health care insurance company, that's going to be a longer ramp. They haven't even started yet. And so that will not hit until start hitting revenue until second half of 2024. Thank you.

And moving on to Jim Fish with Piper Sandler.

Hey, guys, thanks for the question. I guess Barry for you surprise. I'm the first one asked us what has to go right or wrong at this point to hit that 16% 24 guide. You know, the 16% has tended to be conservative in the past, but, you know, with your Q4 guide here, you're exiting at about 17% for this year. So I guess walk us through the confidence for 16% to be kind of that sustained rate, you know, prudent, sustained rate, especially as you're lapping some of the larger deals in terms of what they added for this year. Thanks, guys.

Yes, Fish. So the 16%, which I'd like to emphasize, is a starting point for us. Think of it in two components, new logos, and secondly, the install base. In terms of the new logos, we have a huge backlog that is sitting there that's going to be deployed, not just the megas, but the bread and butter of million to $5 billion deals. And as Dan, or I think mentioned early on, it might have been Mike, That's a meaningful part of the revenue. In fact, while both the Possible Delivery Service and the healthcare company are helpful towards the revenue in 2023 and therefore also in 2024, the dolphins, if you will, rather than the whales, are much, much bigger by quantum amounts. They deploy faster and they have a size that they can make a difference. Between that backlog and what we call the go-get, the gentleman sitting there on my right, Dan Berkland, he and his team are not just sitting on their duffs. They've got all these RFPs. They've got arguably the best go-to-market machine in the industry. And that can also bring in some more business as well, aside from the backlog. So that's on the new side. On the install-based side, we take a lot of comfort from the fact that we are beginning to lap the weak macro conditions that we've experienced in the recent quarters. And we wouldn't be saying in our prepared remarks that the fourth quarter may be either flat or down slightly, unless we felt pretty sanguine about 2024. And it's very basic arithmetic that you can do for yourself in terms of whether that alone contributes to the extra $145 million in revenue year over year.

Thanks, guys. Thank you.

We'll now hear from Scott Berg with Needham.

Hi, Mike, Dan, and Barry. Thanks for taking my questions here. Barry, I wanted to follow up on the question on the 24 guidance a little bit. Kind of a two-part question there is, one, how should we think about linearity of the revenue? You have a couple of large deals coming online, as has been fully discussed here, but just didn't know if the kind of cadence for the on the revenue side is pretty linear. And then what are your assumptions around seat growth in your install base? You've obviously had some challenges in Q3 and you're being more prudent here in Q4. How should we think about your kind of calculus around seats on the install base next year? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Scott. So in terms of the linearity, every year I've got a very consistent pattern about A little over half is in the second half of the year. Call it 51, 52, one year it was even 53. And the balance, of course, in the first half. It's not going to be any different this coming year, despite the puts and takes in terms of some of the deals that are ramping. In terms of the year-over-year comparison, it was astutely pointed out in a recent research note from somebody that compares are tougher in the first half, So you'd expect bigger increases in the second half year over year. In terms of the seed growth in the soil base, I don't think we're in a position, I know we're not in a position to comment further at this stage beyond looking at the elevation tension rate. That's the best indicator of what's going to be happening in the soil base. Of course, it will grow. but at what rate will depend on a number of factors, but mostly the macroeconomic conditions. I do want to mention as an aside, this is all about the logos, each individual logo being a little bit slower on average than logo churn. Our logo churn is excellent, somewhere in the mid 90s on the enterprise side. And when we talk about it internally is that when inevitably the American economy turns around, we will benefit from that directly because we spring loaded. We can turn up the seats overnight. And so when the transactions pick up, agents will pick up and we'll see that right away. And by the way, just as an aside, also in a highly profitable places.

Excellent, thanks for taking my questions, guys.

We will now hear from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.

Perfect. Thanks, guys, for taking the question. I fully appreciate the conservatism in Q4. I think we're all kind of living through the choppiness in the macro. But, Barry, I think you mentioned that you had started or there were data points that suggest that in September things have gotten weaker. Have you seen any change in your transaction volumes in September? And just as you think about your vertical exposure, is there opportunity for other verticals to offset perhaps some weakness in the consumer vertical as you look at Q4 2024? Yeah.

So let me first deal with the other verticals. There is a healthcare vertical, which is also a seasonally important vertical with the open enrollment and the like. Our indications on that is similar to what we expected when we set that guidance, so no meaningful upside thus far. It's just gotten started about, I think, two weeks ago. In terms of the consumer, it's in the month of October, it pretty much in line, nothing dramatic to what we were, you know, different from what we were assuming at the time.

All right, perfect. Thank you.

Yeah. Moving on to Maida Marshall with Morgan Stanley.

Great, thanks. Maybe, Dan, a question for you. With so many of these deals kind of having AI attached or some sort of AI angle to them, just what are you seeing in terms of bottlenecks, either in do they take longer to get signed? you know is it data privacy is it just what is the scope of what they want to do just trying to get a sense of where people are on figuring out what they want to actually what type of virtual solutions they want to use yeah the attach rate's wonderful do they take a little longer yeah i think on average if you look back a few years uh yeah but the whole

takes slightly longer which also comes with moving up market as we've done that's fine it's a gradual process it's not a significant metric that really impacts anything from our perspective and yeah the customers tend to you know They sign up for an AI application. We go in, we implement, and oftentimes our professional services team and consulting teams will work with them to find new use cases, additional use cases, and really do a cross-sell, up-sell kind of in progress. which tends to happen with any innovation that's new to the buyer. And they have it's not a replacement in that sense. So they're they're experimenting. They're finding new use cases. And we see great momentum, as I mentioned, with our AI and automation portfolio across the board.

And I would just add to that AI and automation revenue is growing faster than any other product area for us. That's a revenue. And I already talked about it in my prepared remarks, about 250 projects, AI and automation projects being worked on by our professional services team in the quarter. So we're starting to see kind of the end result, if you will, right? The lagging indicators of some of the things we've been talking about over the last few quarters in terms of momentum and bookings and attach rates starting to show up in revenue and revenue growth, as well as a lot of active projects. Not to mention the continuation on the bookings I mentioned, you know, age and assist in terms of 150%. Great. Perfect. Thank you.

Yep. Samad Samana with Jeffries has the next question.

Hey, guys. This is actually Billy Fitzsimmons on for Samad Samana. Barry, for you, and I hate to ask a similar question to what other people have already asked, but I do want to triple click on the 2024 outlook. And just so we're all clear, and maybe to ask what Jim and Scott asked in a slightly different way, but obviously that 16% number is a starting point and it remains early. But can you just walk us through maybe some of the other factors that we're incorporated into that number um how did you think through things like continued strong deal activity continued international expansion channel momentum ai enabled product adoption into that outlook and and does that 16 number and incorporate kind of continued weakness and some of the more challenging verticals or or a potential improvement um and if i could sneak in one more for for dan you've talked the last couple quarters about about

strong channel momentum what what ending are you guys in in in that journey and where can that kind of go go from here thank you yeah so uh i'm gonna try and be creative over here billy in terms of coming up with a different answer um you gave me some avenues though uh which are going to go down uh international is clearly uh a vector for us that's becoming increasingly important. It goes up one percentage point as a percent of total revenue each year. The growth has slowed actually in Europe as well this last quarter, down to I think it was 28% because they too are facing macro headwinds. But we are operating in a very fertile field there, and that superior growth rate will almost certainly, will extremely likely continue in 2024. The channel, I'm going to park it and ask either Mike or Dan to answer that one because they get really passionate when it comes to that. And channel is more important on the international side. But just generally, the drum that we've been beating is the two highs of the growth are in store base and the new logos. On the new logos, you're looking at three very serene people. In terms of the RFPs that we can execute against, the demand is there. We don't worry about the demand. It's getting the continued high win rates. On the installed base, we've lapped it. There's no particular verticals that we should be worried about at all. But having said that, if you'd asked this question 10 months ago, we wouldn't have guessed anything about Silicon Valley Bank. So we need to be prudent at the start of the year.

Yeah. And can I just layer on a couple of things? The optimism around 24, quite frankly, is built mainly on our backlog. It's all the bookings momentum that we've had over the last few quarters that have yet to turn to revenue, as well as, again, that flow of demand that we're seeing inflect. And this RFP number that I talked about, 66% growth year over year and 21% sequentially. You can see that accelerating and we can see it accelerate and we can feel it. And again, those are enterprise and strategic RFPs. A lot of these enterprise deals will be shorter sales cycles and potential revenue impact in 24. But the good news is, as Barry said, with DBRR assumptions that are very reasonable, you can kind of do the math in terms of what 16% revenue looks like from a dollar perspective. What that contributes next year, if DBRR is relatively stable, which we believe it will be, you can see it doesn't take a whole lot of turnips from our backlog to drive 16% revenue growth. So we're very comfortable with that. And if I could start on the channel, Dan, and you can chime in, in terms of what inning we're in, I would say we're in about the second or third inning in terms of our channel growth. maturity. And this is very similar to what you saw, I would say, two, three years ago, in terms of just larger enterprises adopting cloud. The channel has been kind of, you know, holding on to legacy and on-premise up until a few years ago when they started to lean in with us. And again, being named number one by the top three technology distributors, that's a by our channel team. We've got the best in the business. Jake Butterball and his team have absolutely crushed it. So we're kind of punching above our weight in some respects, but I do believe we're still in the second or third inning.

Yeah. And just to add to that on the channel front, If you look at the large announcements that we've made with big partners, IBM this quarter, Telus International, BT, we're just getting started with them. And they own and really help manage digital transformation projects for the largest companies in the world. And they have now made that pivot, to Mike's point, over to, oh, we've got to go in and lead with CCaaS and lead with cloud solutions. and lead with AI and automation. And so we're in the process of educating, training, and certifying those folks to come up to speed, and they will be a force multiplier for us in a tremendous way. And if I give you one statistic, just a short time ago, if you look at 2019, We had 19 partners that brought to us, you asked about the pipeline and how much of that top of funnel comes from the partners. We had 19 partners that brought us over a million dollars of ACV, annual contract value deals in that year, 2019. This year, we've had 63 such partners bring us over of million dollars in ACV and that number is only continuing to grow and so as Mike said we're in the second or third inning I would argue that from a revenue influence and lead opportunity we could be even in the first inning especially at the high end of the market because that really hasn't been available to us until just recently and we like the position we're in if you read the bear and look at where we sit when we do sign up a partner, how they feel about us compared to our competitors in this market. We were rated number one in many, almost every category of who's going to win this market, who's doing best in AI, who's the easiest to work with. We really pride ourselves, and Jake and his team are doing an amazing job of enabling the partners, educating them, And making sure that we operate with integrity in this space, because they want to turn to somebody they know they can trust to deliver what they're promising to their clients.

So, Billy, in summary, that's how we feel about the 16%.

Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Moving on to Peter Levine with Evercore.

Great. Thanks, guys, for taking my question here. Maybe to add to that last question, I know you opened up the channel, I think, to do more pro services, to start offloading that, I think, earlier this year. So maybe just walk us through kind of where that evolution is today. And then second one is to Barry, is I know there's a, you know, you talked about scaling up to 70% gross margins. Can you maybe help us frame the trajectory of when we get there? Is it more of the partners? Is it, you know, is it ARPU? Just help us understand trajectory to that 70% gross margin target? Thanks.

Yeah, Peter, great questions. I'll go first on what we call project pull-through, as you mentioned. That is enabling our third-party partners to do implementations for us. And that was a strategic initiative that I kicked off about a year ago. And it's going amazingly well. Internationally, a majority of our deals are being implemented by third parties. And even domestically, we've seen a dramatic increase in the percentage. We haven't disclosed that yet, but we will in the future. But it's a growing percentage and right on track in terms of what our KPI objectives were when I rolled this out. So Again, third parties being trained, enabled, and actually doing deployments. And we've solved for one of the critical success factors is NPS scores. As you know, we deliver with our own professional services team NPS scores in the mid to high 80s consistently year in, year out. We're holding our partners to that same NPS score and they're delivering on it. But again, we've been very strategic and very stepwise in terms of who we sign up, how we train them up and helping them be successful.

And Peter, in order to explain how the gross margins we believe are going to get into the 70 plus, you have to understand the revenue breakdown because they each have different drivers and different amounts. So the revenue breakdown is 75% subscription. By the way, two thirds of that is enterprise, but the rest of that is commercial. 17% is usage and 8% is the professional services. I'll start with the less important ones and then move to the most important one. The less important one, because it's a relatively small part of the total equation, is the professional services, which is now in the low double digits, negative. We don't mind that too much. It makes a happier customer, brings up the software quicker. And there is potential, like many other companies, through better efficiencies and not having to scale for every single mega deal that that brings in through the door, because that's what we've been doing over there. So that can get into the single digits, high single digits. But that's not a driver. It's helpful. The second area is usage. And then we're in the 50s, solidly in the 50s. That's not going to... Internationally, we have some opportunities. We've also got other incentives there, but that's not going to suddenly dramatically improve. What is happening is that there's a shift in the mix from usage to subscription every year, one to three percentage points. And just to illustrate that concretely, when we were in public in April of 2014, usage was about 35% of the total is now half of that. And that's going to continue. So you've got a mixed shift there. Now we come to the subscription. And there it comes down to a very straightforward, the basic juice over there, which is certainly worth the squeeze, is the fact that we've got fixed costs and single fixed costs. And we just, we have the revenue growing faster. That's why if you look individually at each fourth quarter, the subscription gross margin is always the highest because that's when the revenue is the highest. Plus we've got some additional initiatives. I'll mention just one quickly. So when we were going international, being drugged there to some extent by these big accounts, we went fast and furious with GCP. The indications are pretty strongly that if we do it in our own data centers, we can actually do it for certain tasks cheaper. And that move, that re-migration is something that's also on the cards, but these things take time. In the meantime, we're investing further in international India, South Africa, a few other places, and also in professional services for these mega deals. And we always, yeah, I'll leave it at that.

Thanks, guys. Thanks, Peter.

CT Panagrahi with Mizuho. Please go ahead with your question.

Hey guys, thank you for taking my question. It's good to hear about the large deals and the strong pipeline, but I just want to ask about wind rate or close rate you're seeing in this kind of environment. Are you seeing, you know, more deal scrutiny? Are you seeing more like customer looking at, you know, more into their AI strategy before signing the deal? Any color would be helpful.

Yeah, as far as deals getting extended, there's a natural, When you bring something new to the market and you bring something that they haven't seen before, it's not a replacement. It takes a little longer, but as I mentioned earlier, it's insignificant. It's not something that, you know, keeps us up at night or even is a concern during the sales process. It's just make sure you have that extra meeting. In some cases you have to go to the data security folks and legal to make sure that we have the right documentation there to protect their data. Because in some cases we're taking data from a transcription of a conversation. and moving it to a third party to have that summary. As an example, when we use GPT to summarize our transcriptions, we're having a third party do that, obviously. So there's just extra steps in the process, but we make sure we've aligned to those and have our sales teams directed to those. So it's... It's great. I mean, the interest is there and everyone's gotten through it. I think we're past the times of having to create those documents. And so now it's just a matter of having the templates and moving forward.

Are you seeing customer evaluating the AI strategy? So that as part of that, they're delaying anything or you think that that's a separate process altogether?

Thank you for asking that question. They absolutely are using our AI strategy as a key criteria and evaluating it extensively. And it's oftentimes the thing that wins business for Five9. We believe we're actually pioneering and leading the market. When it comes to AI, that Baird study nets that out. Our customers are explaining that to us as well. We've made a couple of strategic acquisitions that allowed us to kind of hit the ground running and not have to develop from scratch ourselves. So we believe we're leading the market in this area. And we're excited that even the deals that happen may not have a big revenue component tied to the ai their decision criteria was precisely because of our ai strategy and our ai portfolio and roadmap and the way the way that we're going about it they've said we want to do business with you you're future proofing us you're giving us what we want and the direction we want it great thank you matt van vliet with btig has the next question

Yeah, good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking the question. I guess staying on the theme of AI and some of the automation features, you mentioned 80% of new deals had that, but I guess the next level question that we're wondering is, one, how much additive to the deal value do you think that's bringing on new deals? And then second part, maybe more importantly of the install base, what is the penetration rate on that? And how much are you adding there Knowing that, you know, so earlier in the year, there's a lot of concern it'd be cannibalizing your normal seeds, but how much of an uplift on sort of a net dollar retention are you seeing as customers add that today?

Yeah, thank you for that question. So we messaged a few quarters ago in and around 10% of the net new bookings. where the AI and automation suite, and it remains that. A slight uptick to that is what we're seeing. But keep in mind, that's just the initial order. That's the customer that says, great, I'm going to migrate off my old premise legacy system into your cloud. And yeah, let's start with an IVA or an agent assist app. Once we get in there, and I alluded to it earlier, the PS group gets in there and starts talking to the people on the floor, not the buyer, the people on the floor that are running the contact center and the types of calls that they're getting and how we can help their agents be more effective. We start putting in things and that's where we're seeing increased momentum. We've got 250 projects that we're working on for a couple of reasons. One, we talked about pivoting and selling more software when the seat ads were slowing, the growth was slowing. And we've done that very effectively. Secondly, was we get in and we find there's many more use cases than we first started out when a salesperson isn't going to delay their sale to keep adding more and more use cases. They're going to go close the deal if the customer's ready. And so we get a lot of that ad on. And then thirdly, if you look at the actual applications themselves, they've matured. We talk about agent assist. We talked about agent assist two or three years ago. Well, today it includes something called summaries. I can take the transcription. I can summarize it in about three seconds. I can deliver that summary back. I can pump it straight into the CRM. The agent tomorrow can look at that summary of what happened in today's call and make you know, better judgment and get right to the point very much quicker. And it cuts back on that wrap-up time for the agent. So we're incorporating this AI at, again, an unprecedented level of momentum and interest in the whole suite. And it's both for net new, where we're getting a great attach rate, but it's really the install base that's starting to really see an appetite for doing more than just dipping their toe in the water, as we've talked about before.

Great. Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks, Liz. And moving on to Michael Turrent with Wells Fargo.

Hey, great. I appreciate you taking the question. Nice to see everyone. Barry, you had some commentary on the retention rate. I know we've talked about it in the past. It's 110%. And it sounded like you have some confidence that can maybe bounce back at some point in 24. So just want to understand the trajectory a bit better. If there are certain milestones you're looking for, how much of this is lingering impact from prior periods and just also gauge confidence and the potential for that metric to get back up into the 120s over time and the drivers there.

Yeah. So, Michael, I don't want to take issue with the phraseology, but you said bounce back. They're not bouncing yet. This is an LTM number. Move slowly.

Slowly, gradually. Okay, thank you. Friend, hire. You're right.

Thank you. So it really, in the near term, comes down to two things. It comes down to, A, the macro, just staying middling. Now they're going much better or much worse, a little bit better, a little worse. That's all we're asking for. Because then we get the easier compare. And the other thing that's important is, is that some of the longer term, the healthcare company, for example, is a good example. They start ramping and that gives us a very nice tailwind because they're big and they start from a tiny base. So it's a disproportionate impact. You with me?

Yep.

Okay. Then on long-term, the basic fundamental reason that we have confidence around reaching the high 120s is the fact that these million-dollar-plus customers, which are growing every quarter, though we don't give you the numbers, they don't give it every year, which is already more than 50% of our recurring revenue, as Mike mentioned in his remarks, those have an appreciably higher dollar-based retention rate, which makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, these are big companies. They certainly grow organically, but there was some acquisitions. They buy new stuff, etc., And that mixed impact from that fast-growing million-dollar plus, which is much faster than the rest of the business in dollars, and yes, in dollars, is what gives us that confidence.

Thank you. Sure. Thanks, Michael.

We have time for one additional question, which will come from Will Power with Baird.

Great. Good afternoon. Thanks. Thanks for the comments on our survey. We spent a lot of time on that.

I'm happy to help. Yeah.

Well, the AI commentary did look good. You were right. Let me ask you about the strategic deal pipeline comments, you know, doubling year over year. I mean, it sounds like you continue to see very good momentum there. I know you've kind of touched on that, but, you know, perhaps dig in to kind of the key drivers of that. And how do we think about kind of the confidence level in converting that? You know, how do we think about conversion rates, you know, going forward versus what you've seen? I mean, anything to kind of keep in mind on that front?

Yeah. Mark, if I go back two to three years in time, There were some large enterprises that would take meetings. They were just checking what was out there. They had really no interest and no immediate need to move to the cloud. Two factors are happening, two main drivers. One is the legacy platforms that they're using today. And many of these large companies have all of them, right? They have all three of the major platforms via Cisco Genesis, and all of them are either end of lifing or being told they're not going to further develop on those. So the sign is there that they've got to get off those platforms. That's one. I'll give two, three factors. Second, we had to demonstrate in the CCAS world, and particularly 5.9 has demonstrated that we can scale and deliver the reliability that they absolutely require as table stakes before they'll even consider moving. And we've done that and proven it because of those two, I'll say two early adopters. They were like two that made decisions far before anyone else. And I mentioned this in the last meeting, the others have now taken notice. Aha, if it's good enough for them, it must be good enough for us. And we're being pushed by our legacy providers saying their end of life, we're being pulled by this AI and automation innovation that's coming about. And they realize the only way to take advantage of that is to move to the cloud. And so that's why the RFP volume is up. That's why even the ones that haven't issued RFPs yet are taking meetings to say, help, how do we start this process? They're turning to the SIs. They're turning to us because they recognize, oh, no, this process may take us a year or two to get through. And, you know, they're almost feeling like there's pressure there to do it quickly because they want to take advantage of AI and automation. And it may take them a year or two just to get through a decision process and start to implement. So that's why we're seeing such great momentum.

And Will, I know Dan won't brag, so I will brag for him. We've got the best go-to-market team in this industry by far. And so when you think about pipeline doubling and our ability to go convert that and win business, I have so much confidence in this team, and it's a team that has actually grown so significantly over the years from our competitors. There are so many people that want to be on the 5'9 team, quite frankly, so we're able to track the best and brightest. on this team, and they are just superstars. So I have no doubt that they're going to convert way more than our fair share of that pipeline into wins for 5.9. And you can see it in our win rates. So I'll leave it at that. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Will.

And again, this does conclude today's Q&A session. Mike, I'll turn it back to you for closing comments.

Yeah, thank you very much for joining us today. I'll just say this. I am so excited about the future for Five9. We have seen this dramatic inflection, quite frankly, that we've been talking about in terms of large enterprises. adopting cloud, shifting off of these legacy on-premise solutions. And I think the most exciting metric that I talked about today is the leading indicator, the leading, leading indicator, and that is the RFP flow. So 66% growth in RFPs for strategic and enterprise, 21% growth sequentially. So that is a very good leading indicator for the inflection in our business opportunities.