Wix.com Ltd.

Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call

8/7/2024

speaker
Operator
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the WIC's second quarter, 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message, advise your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Emily Liu of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
speaker
Emily Liu
Thanks, Amy. And good morning, everyone. Welcome to WIC's second quarter, 2024 earnings call. Joining me today to discuss our results are Abhishek Abrahami, CEO and co-founder, Nir Zohar, our president and COO, and Leor Shamish, our CFO. During this call, we may make forward-looking statements, and these statements are based on current expectations and assumptions. Please consider the risk factors included in our press release and most recent form 20-F that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we will comment on non-GAAP financial results and key operating metrics. You can find all reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results in the earnings materials and in our interactive analyst center on the investor relations section of our website, .wic.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Abhishek.
speaker
Abhishek Abrahami
Emily, and good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to share that we finished the first half of 2024 with excellent Q2 results. And by successfully executing our strategy and delivering innovative solutions to our users, we were able to drive impressive -over-year bookings, growth of 15%. This is a significant acceleration from the 10% bookings growth we saw in Q1 and underscores our leading position as the go-to platform for any user or business to create, grow, and succeed online. We also generated 12% revenue growth, which again exceeded the top end of our guidance. The strong top line results reflect the encouraging reception and performance of our key product initiatives that are continuing to propel our momentum. I'll share some updates on WIC Studio and our AI strategy before letting NIR dive into the incredible progress we've made in expanding our commerce platform. First, we continue to see outstanding results from Studio as we steadily add new features and enhancements. This quarter, we rolled out new dynamic no-code design expressions, business enablement capabilities and tools to help partners work better with their clients and grow their business. Most notably, we announced a highly anticipated Figma plugin, a top partner request. Partners can now leverage Studio's no-code animations, built-in business and AI solutions, CMS and workflow management tools to transform their Figma designs into powerful and dynamic websites seamlessly. Feedback has been very positive following this launch. The number of Studio accounts and rate of new partners joining the WIC's platform through Studio continue to outperform expectations. We also saw an acceleration in the pace of Studio subscription purchases. This, along with strong retention of existing subscriptions and the ramping of partners purchasing their second, third, and fourth Studio packages, drove wider over quarter Studio bookings growth of 20%. Our platform is increasingly resonating with the professional community as we continue to deliver -in-class innovations and grow our partner ecosystem. Second, we continue to build up our suite of AI capabilities as a result of the numerous AI initiatives and work streams across WICs. Last quarter, we introduced our plan to embed AI assistance across our platform and products. I'm excited to share that we have released 17 AI business assistants so far to date. These assistants span a wide range of use cases to support users with minimal hands-on support, thus streamlining their experience. These conversational AI assistants act as a right-hand aid for users to guide them through the entire life cycle of ideating, creating, and managing their online presence. Our offering includes an analytics assistant that can help WICs users find the data they need without having to search through dozens of reports, and an assistant that helps users create events through a conversational chat. We have already received positive feedback on this first set of AI assistants with dozens more set to launch later this year. Additionally, on the AI front, we launched AI creation capabilities for our mobile app builder in June. This new solution enables users to create and edit iOS or Android apps through an AI chat experience. Once AI understands the user's goals, intent, and desired aesthetic, our technology generates a branded app that can be customized and managed from the app editor. We also recently released a suite of new AI features designed to help users identify relevant topics for blogs, as well as generate outlines, content, and images for their target audience. With this new experience, users can swiftly turn ideas into near-ready articles, significantly reducing the time and effort required to create engaging content, and ultimately changing the blog creation experience. Both self-creators and partners continue to show excellent engagement with our AI tools. As we expand the breadth of our AI technology, we expect it to continue to be a competitive advantage for us, as well as a significant driver of growth going forward. We have built up a lot of momentum in the first half of 2024, with many exciting and impactful innovations powering meaningful growth acceleration. We expect to continue this momentum into the back half of the year, with many exciting things still to come. Thank you to the entire Wix team for your hard work to make Wix the web creation platform of choice. And thank you to our users for trusting us to help you achieve your goals. With that, I'll turn it over to Mir.
speaker
Wix
Thank you, Avishai, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'd like to start with a quick update on our user cohorts before diving into the third leg of our growth strategy, our commerce platform. First, Q2 was another great quarter marked by strong business fundamentals and robust user behavior. Our Q1-24 user cohort remains our strongest non-COVID cohort, generating more cumulative bookings in its first two quarters than our Q1-23 cohort while having 9% fewer users. This is a result of our continued marketing strategy targeting high-intent users. We have continued to expand our user base with partners and self-creators, adding 4.7 million new high-intent users in the second quarter. These new users continue to demonstrate strong conversion and increased ARPS and TROI compared to past cohorts. We continue to benefit from the success of strategic initiatives completed over the past year. Our AI tools continue to drive user conversion, WIC studio uptake and contribution continues to ramp and consumption of the price increase implemented earlier this year by new and existing users remains strong. All of these factors are driving bookings growth, which we believe is reflecting our unmatched value proposition and durable business model. Our commerce business was a particular highlight this quarter with transaction revenue growing an impressive 21% year over year and take rate increasing to a record 1.68%. Take rate expanded 10 basis points sequentially, the largest quarter over quarter improvement in recent years. Over the past few years, we have built WICs into a full -to-end commerce platform, enabling business owners of every size across every industry and in any geography to build, manage and grow on WICs. By introducing new features and capabilities, we have steadily expanded our platform with more merchants globally choosing and trusting WICs for their business and livelihood. Our platform has expanded in two ways, growing GPV paired with increased monetization of our GPV. First, we are maximizing the GPV flowing through our platform in a few ways. One, we're continually expanding into new verticals in order to facilitate any business need and diversifying our platform, which helps to insulate us from macro volatility. This quarter, we introduced WICs donations, which provides a tailored solution for NGOs and WICs proposals, which helps professionals across various industries create, manage and finalize proposals easily. By expanding our supported verticals, we are appealing to a wider pool of merchants and attracting additional GPV as a result. Two, we are increasingly onboarding larger merchants. We hire an average transaction size onto our platform. We expect this to continue as we increasingly win share of the professional market. Three, we are enabling existing merchants to grow their businesses through a growing suite of commerce tools from online advertising and email marketing to AI-based product management. The success of our existing users drives compounding growth and is key to the success of our commerce strategy. In addition to growing GPV, we are also increasing monetization of our GPV by, one, adding new payment partners to our WICs payment platform, which is what we did this quarter. By expanding our base of partners, we are increasing our ownership and thus monetization of the GPV that flows through WICs. Two, driving higher WICs payments adoption as new and existing merchants increasingly choose WICs payments over other providers. The WICs payments experience is seamless for merchants with an integrated payments dashboard and built-in dispute tool. Meanwhile, merchants customers have an easy and smooth native checkout experience. New merchant adoption of WICs payments has steadily ticked up over the last few years and we expect this to continue. Three, providing additional platform solutions such as POS, credit card on file and mail and email ordering capabilities. These solutions are moving more of our offline GPV online, thus allowing us to capture and monetize better. Four, enhancing payment offerings to capture more wallet share, particularly in international markets. Earlier this year, we introduced new payment providers in India and entered into partnership with Global E to power cross border selling on WICs. We started making commerce a focus back in 2020 and our platform has grown tremendously since as a result of our initiatives. GPV in the most recent quarter was more than two times that of Q220 GPV. Our monetization has improved even more significantly with Q220 for transaction revenue, more than five times that of Q220 transaction revenue. As a result, our quarterly take rate has more than doubled over this period. Today, our full stack commerce solution provides WICs merchants with all of the tools they need to succeed online and drive strong user retention and higher ARPS. We believe that our commerce platform will remain a key growth driver for both self creators and partners in years to come. With that, I will now hand it over to Lior to walk through our financials and outlook. Lior. Thanks,
speaker
Studio
Nir. Strong execution of the key growth initiative that we just heard about, as well as solid business fundamentals resulted in incredible growth momentum and additional margin expansion in the second quarter. As we continue to focus on accelerating top line growth and improving profitability margins in the back half of the year, we now expect to achieve the rule of 14 in 2024 at the high end of our guidance ranges. I will share more about this exciting milestone as well as our updated outlook shortly. First, let's dive into the details of the second quarter. We experienced standout bookings performance with total bookings of $458 million or 15% growth year over year. This was significant acceleration from the 10% growth in Q1 as a result of strong user absorption of the price increase implemented earlier this year as well as contribution from the strategic initiatives you just heard about. Contribution from studio and our growing suite of AI capabilities continue to ramp and are expected to be the main drivers of growth in the coming years. Notably, growth accelerated across both self-creators and partners demonstrating the underlying strengths of our entire Wix platform. Q2 revenue was also very strong and finished above the high end of our guidance. Total revenue grew to $436 million up 12% year over year with growth driven by the same factors that benefited bookings. This quarter, our commerce business performed extremely well with transaction revenue growing 21% to $54 million as a result of healthy GPV growth along with improving monetization. GPV growth was a product of larger merchants joining Wix and compounding GPV from existing businesses. Our bookings and events products were the best performing vertical this quarter with GPV growth of approximately 20 and 25% respectively. This GPV growth was paired with increased monetization driven by the addition of a new payment partners to Wix payments platform. As a result, tech rate in the second quarter reached a record high of 1.68%. This is an increase of 10 basis points sequentially. We expect GPV and tech rate to continue to steadily improve over the long term as we grow our commerce platform. Our partners business was another major driver of overall top line growth this quarter. Partners revenue grew 29% year over year as we onboarded new agencies, empowered existing partners to build more projects on Wix and improve monetization of our professional user base. Notably, studio contribution continued to ramp as usage and adoption increased. The accelerating phase of studio package purchases, strong retention of partners and significant increase in the number of partners building the second, third and fourth website on platform, give us confidence that studio will be meaningful driver of partners growth in the coming years. Moving on to the cost side of things. Total non-GAAP gross margin in Q2 was 68%, which was in line with our expectation of 68 to 69% gross margin for the full year. Impressively this quarter, we saw a significant improvement in operating margin. Both GAAP and non-GAAP operating margin increased more than 400 basis points sequentially as a result of lower operating expenses. Q2 operating expenses decreased quarter over quarter as a result of payroll efficiencies, lower overhead cost from lower property taxes on our headquarters and additional sub-leasing of our office food trains as well as seasonally lower advertising expenses. We expect to sustain this lower base of payroll and overall costs through the rest of the year while studio related sales and marketing costs increased through second half as planned. As a result non-GAAP operating margin totaled 21% of revenue while GAAP operating margin was 7% of revenue. Q2 free cash flow excluding headquarter build out costs totaled almost 118 million or 27% of revenue due to continued strong top line growth and more efficient operating cost base. This quarter marked the completion of our headquarter construction with no additional build out related capex anticipated going forward. This now leads me to our expectations for the back half of 2024. We expect total revenue in Q3 of 440 to 445 million dollars representing approximately 12 to 13% -over-year growth. For the full year 2024 we are updating our outlook as we expect to sustain the momentum build up in the first half of the year. We now expect total booking of 1,802 to 1,822 million dollars or 13 to 14% -over-year growth. We began to see effects of volatility materialize in late Q2 which has continued into early Q3 due to this and a bit more macro unpredictability broadly mostly related to payments we are building more conservatism into our outlook. I want to highlight that this updated guidance still reflects an acceleration in total booking zero to 16% at the high end of our expectations. This has not changed from what we shared in May as we continue to see broad based trends across our platform. We continue to expect to see self-creators and public growth continue to accelerate in the second half at the high end of our expectations as our AI products and studio platform perform ahead of plan. Additionally we now expect total revenue of 1,747 to 1,761 million dollars or 12 to 13% -over-year growth. On the cost side we continue to expect non-gap total growth margin of 68 to 69% for the full year. As we sustain the lower operating expense base achieved in the most recent quarter, non-gap operating expenses are now expected to be approximately 50% of revenue for the full year. This is slightly lower than our previous expectation of 50 to 51% of revenue. As a result we expect to generate free cash flow excluding headquarter cost of 460 to 470 million dollars or approximately 26 to 27% of revenue in 2024. This is an increase from the 445 to 455 million dollars or 26% of revenue previously expected. We now expect to achieve the rule of 40 milestone this year assuming the high end of our revenue and free cash flow guidance ranges. This will be a major milestone that we have steadfastly worked towards for the past three years. Even more impressively we will be achieving this goal one year ahead of plan. This is a testament to the successful execution of our strategic initiatives and focused commitment to profitable growth. But this is certainly not the finish line for us. The bookings acceleration expected this year set us up for revenue growth acceleration in 2025. We also expect continued incremental free cash flow margin improvement as we maintain our stable cost structure while our business scales. As a result we are positioned to serve as the rule of 40 in 2025 more meaningfully than previously expected. Finally I would like to finish with highlighting another aspect of our three year plan that we are tracking ahead of. Our share repurchase commitment. In the second quarter we repurchased 225 million of shares making the completion of the board authorized plan approved last August. This marks more than $1 billion of share repurchases executed since 2021. We remain committed to returning value to shareholders and consider share repurchases a key tool in our capital allocation strategy. As such our board authorized a new 200 million program to repurchase our securities. The progress made over the past couple of years demonstrates our track record of not just executing but outperforming our set goals. I look forward to building on our momentum in the second half of the year and the milestone still to come. Operator we're now ready for questions.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. And our first question comes from the line of Egal Arunian of Citi Group. Your line is open.
speaker
spk05
Hey, good morning, good afternoon guys. It's a great quarter and maybe I want to focus first on the commerce packages and because one, into a little bit more detail there it seems to be more of a driver now with the partner side. Can you share a little bit more about the new types of customers that are coming on board, what type of merchants they are, you know, this kind of move to larger merchants, what that opportunity is for you guys to do. I just feel a little bit more newer, I guess.
speaker
Wix
Hey Egal, it's Mir. So, you know, I think naturally as we gain more and more traction on with, you know, with WIC Studio and with partners and the professional crowd, we're also attracting bigger merchants of all kinds. So, you know, it can be on the bookings and scheduling platform, it can be on the stores and commerce platform, it can be bigger events, it really is across the board. And I think it's a testament to two things. First of all, it's, you know, the ongoing increased maturity of our commerce offering in all of these different verticals, as well as the increased penetration and market share we're taking into the professional market.
speaker
spk05
Got it, okay. And then just a follow up on self creator side. Particularly on the AI products, and I know self creators are supposed to be part of what drives the acceleration and the two H bookings. What are you seeing there so far on the AI outtake? I know you've got a lot of products and more in the pipeline. And are there any KPIs that are giving you confidence that we're gonna continue to see that improvement, better conversions, higher ARPU, those types of things?
speaker
Abhishek Abrahami
Well, I think that, yes, we do have KPIs and more than that, we have a long trend that we see that can be continuously improved. And I'll explain. At least ADI, the first AI product, Gen.AI product actually created website right in the end of 2016. And since then we've seen that by exposing users to AI functionality, it's part of their natural progression in the product life cycle. We get very high adoption of using those kind of tools and results that can improve. And for ADI, we showed that we improved the conversion dramatically. The new version that came earlier this year did it again. And we're seeing that a lot of the agents that we have now, AI agents, when they start to pick up more user interactions and more user conversations, again, create a measurable effect. So I'm very optimistic. I think that our experience in releasing AI technology, which is almost eight years now, seven years now, is helping us understand how to integrate them into the product in a way that actually makes user interact with them and that they feel natural and don't feel like you're stepping out of what you're doing to do something else and then coming back. I mean, that creates a big difference. So yes, I'm very optimistic on the potential that we're gonna see a continuation of the improvement.
speaker
AI
Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Andrew Boone of JMP Securities. Your line is open.
speaker
AI
Thanks so much for taking my questions. I wanted to ask on studios momentum. You guys are starting to lap tougher comps here. Can you just speak to the sustainability of studios and then a bigger picture question on studios and again, relating this back to AI. How does AI change the studio and partners opportunity? Is there any worry there that is to improve the self-creator product, that there may be a shift back in the self-creators? Do you guys care? How do we think about that balance? Thanks so much.
speaker
Abhishek Abrahami
All right, so that's like a pretty different question. I'll start with the first one. We're very happy, of course, with Studio Growth. It's a young product. It was released less than a year ago, about a year ago. And we can see already significant results from it. I'm very, one of the biggest signals that we have is that we're seeing new kind of agencies that join Wix that would not normally join. And in addition, we're seeing that many of those agencies will buy a ad website, right? So buy more subscription as time progresses. So they buy two, three, four, five, six, seven, and more subscription when they create new websites. And for us, it's a signal not just that they use Studio once or twice, that they're actually adopting the product and gonna continue to use it in the longer term. Of course, for us as a company, it means that we are compounding growth because every one agency that does it has a compounding effect. So this is, again, a very good signal. That was the first bright question. The second question was about how does Studio use the utilizer, the AI? Well, there are massive, there's a big difference between what an agency and a self-creators need from AI. So for me, if I wanna design a website and I'm not a designer, I want AI to help me design because English is not my first language and I'm not writing so well in Hebrew as well, right? So I would love AI to also help me write great text and generate images. When you're an agency, you probably know how to design and you have your system of design and how things should look like. So you don't need that. You probably need a little bit to help with the text, but other things like the image editing, right? And the content recomposition create tremendous value. And then there are other things that in addition to that, for example, a great designer not necessarily know how to configure things to work in a responsive way on different screen resolutions and we have an AI to do that. So we are utilizing those kinds of technologies to streamline the agency's experience and work and efficiency in a way that is significant today and I think we have some ideas on how to make it even more significant going forward. As for the question last part of the question, which is, do we have concern between how agencies and safety errors will end up in the future? Meaning, well, in theory, if you can just one day talk to a computer and get the full website functioning that knows exactly what should be there and that it easy to update that maybe some of the agency's business will disappear, but there is a long way until we get to something similar to that. And I think the majority of businesses in the case that they need a website, they want somebody to be responsible for it, somebody that know how to activate the tools and use them and utilize them. And that's why they go to agencies because they have a professional that understand how to take care of all of their business needs. And there's a lot of those, right? From SEO to how do you write things correctly in order to get the right shipping rules and there's a ton of things. So I think that where there's a long way for AI to go before it can successfully replace good agencies. And unless of course you are self-created by nature, which is a lot of most of our customers, and you want to create your website, you can control it and you can do those things and you can change it. So I think that the differences is the user type and user intent and not necessarily in technology, which I believe means that both will continue to grow agencies and self-creators.
speaker
AI
Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Elizabeth Porter of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
speaker
Elizabeth Porter
Great, thank you very much. I wanted to follow up on the strong adoption of AI solutions thus far. Are you seeing different initial adoption rates or behavior from new versus existing customers? And how do you see the opportunity evolving? What is that kind of opportunity around going back to the existing customer base in driving more spend with that existing cohort? Thank you.
speaker
Abhishek Abrahami
Well, Elizabeth, thank you for the question. And yes, we do see a different adoption rate between new users and of course, all the users. One of the qualification that you needed to have in order to be able to use Wix in the past was to know how to design to some level, to know how to write text to some level and to trust yourself that you're good enough to do it. So most of our users feel that they know how to do those things. And naturally, they will use less AI because they think they can just do it. And I think we are now opening to users that don't feel that, right? They don't expect themselves to know how to do those things and expect us to have the tools, AI tools to automate it for them. So we're already seeing some of this gap and I believe that this will continue to grow. And essentially, we're opening Wix to be more useful to more new types of customers.
speaker
Elizabeth Porter
Great, and then just as a follow-up, really impressive to see that they're hitting the rule of 40 early. As we're looking out, I'm just hoping you can provide any context around the view for exceeding rule of 40 in 2025. If we look at just the free cash flow margin, you've seen some really good expansion this year. So how should we think about kind of magnitudes for next year and any factors or actions that you're driving that would support free cash flow margin materially ahead of operating margin expansion?
speaker
Studio
Hey Elizabeth, this is Leo. So I assume that next year is a combination of both growth but also margin expansion. Take for example, you know, like for example, overall payroll expenses. So yes, I mean, we are going to increase payroll expenses in dollars, but in terms of growth as a percentage of revenue on a year over year basis, it will not be the same as revenue. Meaning that the revenue growth will be much faster than that. So it means that we are going to see more leverage coming from all kinds of different expenses, although we are going to increase investment, for example, in marketing. But still as a percentage of revenue, we are going to see some leverage over there as well. So I believe that the combination of what we have seen right now, a very strong execution of bookings growth on a year over year basis, which obviously will be reflected into a higher acceleration of revenue next year. The combination of that with the expansion of margins will lead me to believe that we are going to significantly surpass the rule of 40 next year.
speaker
Elizabeth Porter
Great,
speaker
Operator
thank you for the context. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jian Li of Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
speaker
Jian Li
Great, thanks for taking the question. So first, Lior, I want to kind of circle back to your comment about back half conservatism in a guide due to macro. Just to clarify, is it general conservatism or are you seeing any potential volatility into Q3 to date? If you can kind of talk about the macro impact in topofunnel for both your partners, which assuming are more resilient and self creators, that would be great, thank you.
speaker
Studio
So no, definitely something that in general, it's not something that is specific for the third or the fourth quarter. It's really hard for me to know, but you know, being conservative around the macro and effects, it's something that we always take into consideration when we provide the guidance. I think that it's really important. I mean, we've seen that the execution of bookings for the second quarter was really in line with our expectations, was 15%. But it puts us in a place that it will be, it's very easy to understand how we get to the 16% now, as we mentioned last quarter that we will be at. So no, there's nothing really specific about the third, not about the fourth quarter, but that said, I really don't know.
speaker
Jian Li
Got it, that's helpful. And also another one on payment, appreciate the color around vertical expansion and taking on new partners and expanding the adoption. Is there any lever that you can think of in terms of improving the WICS payment take rate by itself? Like what I mean is, you know, any value added service around the payment service that you can kind of help to improve the gross margin profile of WICS payment, if that makes sense?
speaker
Wix
So I don't know about necessarily the gross margin, I mean, the general gross margin is by the adoption and increasing the take rate, right? So, you know, in essence, if I manage to get everyone to the maximum, I'll get to, you know, tech rates of almost 3%. Naturally, that's not the case. It's not the case with anyone in our industry. And I think if you look at the best in class in our industry, they get to about 2.25%. That's definitely something to aspire to. But I think the drivers are, you know, the things we spoke about, which is kind of more partners, making a driving motor of our customers to adopt WICS payments rather than other providers. But it's also the introduction of new capabilities and new products, new verticals, adding the POS that allows us to attach and touch some of the offline transactions that make them move them online. Things like the donations verticals, the proposals, all of these innovations is another great way to tap and expand our GPV. And I do think that we still have, we have lots of room to grow there in the next few years.
speaker
spk00
Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Brent Thill of Jeffreys. Your line is open.
speaker
Brent Thill
Hi, thank you. This is John Behan on behalf of Brent Thill. I don't know if you were interested in this a little bit earlier, but in terms of, when you mentioned a bit more macro and predictability, I wonder if you could give a little bit more of what you're seeing, you know, especially around, you know, the SMB health among your cohorts and anything on the geographic side. I mean, it looks like the trends were fairly consistent, but I want to see if you see anything notable there, geography-wise. Thank you.
speaker
Wix
Hey, so I think again, I don't think, I don't think we can point out anything specific with a major shift, you need to hear no there in terms of the, you know, SMB health or, you know, in any geography and in general. We spoke about this in the past, I think, few quarters that, you know, everything's kind of a mid last year. We've seen a stabilization in the behavior with a slight increase, but very moderate. So, you know, the euro grew slightly more this quarter, but it's not significant enough, you know, to call anything specific, you know, vertical, in terms of the verticals, as Lior mentioned, we've seen, you know, our scheduling and bookings and events of verticals grow a little bit faster than other verticals, but these, I would say again, I don't think any of those can be any specific, you know, any concrete signals that you can read into macro economy. I think we're still seeing pretty much stability.
speaker
Studio
By the way, this is why we are providing range. I think that some of it has got to do with us. I mean, we don't always know exactly, you know, the behavior in every country, and this is why we provide range in order to reflect that.
speaker
Brent Thill
Thank
speaker
Operator
you. Thank you. And our next question comes from a line of Josh Beck of Raymond James, your line is open.
speaker
Josh Beck
Yes, thanks so much for taking the question. Yeah, I was pretty impressed with this metric that you all gave about 17 AI assistants, and I believe you said there's dozens more to come. That's a big number, probably certainly larger than what we've seen elsewhere. So maybe if you just kind of help unpack within that, maybe how many are external customer facing, how many are internal efficiency driven, and you know, maybe what are kind of rising to the top as some of the most promising use cases there.
speaker
Abhishek Abrahami
Of course, so maybe I'll start with the easiest part of the question, how many of the 17 are customer facing, and the answer is all of them. The concept is that we are currently, we build a platform in which it is easier for us to build an AI assistant, and that enabled us to develop two kinds of different assistants. The first one would be a question and answer, AI assistant. So if you have a product, booking, how do I add a staff member to my yoga studio, right? And so you can actually talk to the AI and ask question, get answer, ask question, get answer, as you would do with a normal human being. And we see great results in that, in terms of how customers quickly find answers. Illusionations are very small, the percentage, probably similar to what a human would do, not even better. And of course, in terms of customer experience, it's incredible because they get answers now. They don't have to contact support, they don't have to start searching Google, and so this is very exciting. The other thing that we are doing is that you can ask questions, and you can have the AI do things for you. So this is the second kind. And for example, if you go to our analytics, you see that you can actually start asking question and get the reports done for you automatically by the AI. So this is an AI that activates other agents in order to give you answers or do actions for you. How do I make an event that is a wedding event, and then do RSVP, but if you wanna create an event which is selling tickets for a concert, it will define that for you and work with you on that. So those kind of things, streamline and reduce a lot of friction from the customer. We intend to integrate them, of course, to one coherent experience, and we're gonna add those kind of assistance in pretty much everywhere that we can on Wix. And I think the overall change from a customer perspective is tremendous. You get quick answers, high quality answers to your questions, and you get an AI that will help you set up things or change things or ask questions or get analytics. So it's really a big difference from a customer perspective.
speaker
Josh Beck
Understood, very helpful. And maybe just a follow-up on Studio, and really trying to think about the monetization curve. It's been in the market for a year. So from the point at which somebody is creating an account to their ramp and learning curve with the new editor, to really starting to produce a meaningful number of websites. I'm not looking for anything specific, but maybe if you look at some of the early cohorts, kind of what you've learned, and in terms of model impact, I mean, is this something that we should be thinking about? 25 is more impactful to revenue, or maybe it's a bit beyond that. We love any color there.
speaker
Abhishek Abrahami
Well, of course, I think that modeling, Lior, will answer. I'm just gonna just say about the behavior. What we're saying is that people will come to Studio and usually play with it. So agencies will come and play with the product. And at certain point in time, they'll take a project that they just got, so it's mostly a new project. So we have to wait until they have a new project. And then they'll implement that first project on WIC Studio. And this is the most critical time, of course. If they are happy with it, and the customer is happy with it, there is a very high chance to come again, when again, they get the next project to do it again on Studio. The rate of projects is not depending so much on Studio, because on the quality of the WIC Studio, it's mostly dependent on how many customers they have. And this can be a big agency that only do a few websites every year, or it can be a freelancer who do a few websites every year, or it can be the agency that has doing a dozen websites every week. So we have a variety of them. And I think the exciting thing about Studio is that we're seeing all of them using Studio. And if you look at the statistics, it seems that all of them will more likely come back to Studio to build them second project than only one. So we are very excited about that. It's a very strong signal that the customers, that the agencies like this product. And if you had the chance to see the community chat about it, I think it's also obvious there.
speaker
Studio
In terms of modeling it, I think that there's like a very two interesting phenomena that we see. So the first thing is obviously around existing partners, keep on building and using WICs for more and more of their projects. Now, the question is how much is gonna grow and how many projects each and every one of them are using. And this is something that we'll keep learning, but it's quite big. You know, Abishai mentioned before that they're building the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the tenth website on WICs. And this is really amazing. I can tell you that it is much more than what I anticipated in my model at the very, very beginning when we started. Second, obviously, is about the newcomers. And what kind of agencies, what kind of business solutions they're using. So we have like, you know, the first resource that we see right now, for example, in the second quarter, one of the reasons why you see the acceleration of 10% to 15% of booking in the second quarter is because of that. It's still moderate, it's not huge, but we're not talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars or obviously it's millions of dollars. Yes, I do believe that in 2025, the growth of revenue with regard to Studio will be much more significant.
speaker
Josh Beck
Very helpful, thank you.
speaker
Operator
And this concludes today's question and answer session. I would like to turn the call back to the company for closing comments.
speaker
Emily Liu
Thanks everyone for joining us today. We'll see you on the next one, bye.
speaker
Brent Thill
Thank you.
speaker
Operator
Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer

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