Coveo Solutions Inc.

Q1 2025 Earnings Conference Call

8/7/2024

spk03: My name is Ina and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Coveo First Quarter Fiscal 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then the number two. Thank you. I'll now turn the line over to Nick Good, Chief Business Officer at Caveo.
spk04: Mr. Good, you may begin your conference.
spk01: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for Caveo's first quarter fiscal 2025 financial results conference call and webcast. With me on the call are Louis Taitou, Caveo's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Brandon Nussie, Chief Financial Officer. A reminder that remarks made during today's call may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those regarding our plans, objectives, expected performance, and our outlook for the second quarter and fiscal year 2025. These forward-looking statements are given as of today, and while we believe any statements we make are reasonable, they are based on current expectations, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied. Caveo disclaims any intent or obligation to update our forward-looking statements, whether as the result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Further information on factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in filings we make with Canadian securities regulators, including in the risk factors section of the company's most recently filed annual information form, as well as in the key factors affecting our performance in the company's most recently filed MD&A both of which are available under our CDAR Plus profile at www.cdarplus.ca and on ir.caveo.com. Additionally, some of the financial measures and ratios discussed on this call are either non-IFRS measures or ratios or operating metrics used in our industry. A discussion on why we use these measures, ratios, and metrics, and where applicable, a reconciliation schedule showing IFRS versus non-IFRS results, are available in our press release and our MD&A issued today, which may be found on ir.caveo.com and in our CDAR Plus profile. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to financial figures made today are in U.S. dollars. Finally, presentation slides accompanying this conference call can be accessed on our IR website under the News and Events section. I will turn the call over to Louie first to review the highlights of our first quarter before Brandon takes you through the financial details and our outlook for Q2 and fiscal 2025. We will then open up the line for Q&A and would ask you to limit your questions to one at a time to maximize participation. So with that, Louie?
spk10: Thank you, Nick, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased to share that Coveo's financial results have once again exceeded our revenue guidance and outperformed our profitability expectations. Building on the transformative year we saw in AI in fiscal 24 and driven by our industry-leading AI search and generative experience platform, in particular, our groundbreaking relevance augmented generative answering technology, we continue to experience positive business momentum. We see a market inflection moving from 18 months of discovery, education, and experimentation of AI and Gen AI to now validation, decisions, and real adoption within enterprises. We believe that few companies like Coveo that pass the show me test and can demonstrate and deliver results will be highly rewarded. While many competing technologies are catching up to the reality of delivering AI for enterprises, we continue to roll out new innovation in full production with our clients. As a result of the above, we have delivered a quarter in line with what we said, and we remain positive around this market inflection and the acceleration of Coveo adoptions. Our mission is to bring AI to every point of experience across enterprises, firing remarkable individualized and generative experiences while optimizing their business outcomes at every interaction. Only AI, combined with powerful search and relevance technology, can achieve that. We continue to believe this will be one of the significant digital transformation enterprises will need to engage in, particularly as they increasingly compete against AI and GenAI-powered experiences from their competitors, and that this will happen across every industry. As we have previously reported, the initial adopters of Coveo's GenAI technology in fiscal 24 were our existing customers. They immediately understood the power of our AI search, indexing, semantics, and relevance technology to power generative AI, and our unique ability to ground large language models prompts into secure, current, traceable, and relevant data, all needed to deliver the degree of precision needed by enterprises. We have now signed over 30 generative AI deals in total, all with large enterprises, and are in full production with many of these customers, already having realized significant ROI and double-digit gains on top of the benefits they had previously gained using Coveo's AI search platform. I am pleased to report that we are now starting to see traction also winning net new clients as well with GenAI. In Q1, we achieved this new milestone by landing Trinity Life Sciences, a provider of evidence-based solutions for the life sciences industry. More recently, we signed another net new Gen AI deal with a leading global manufacturer of GPUs, a company very familiar with AI technology, again, after extensive comparative tests. Additionally, as mentioned during our last call, we secured new Gen AI deployment work with F5 networks a global security technology leader, which was already a successful Coveo customer, and this was following significant head-to-head testing over several months against a major platform vendor. We're excited to extend these benefits to our new customers and believe we are just getting started monetizing this Coveo technology advantage, particularly as our market has now gained maturity and a much better understanding of AI and Gen AI, what works, what doesn't, and why a complete Coveo software stack is needed and differentiated. As I've said from the beginning, since the November 22 chat GPT and Gen AI disruption, we believed Coveo would be the last to hype and the first to resolve. Well, I think we just did that. And I could not be more proud of the results we're achieving with our platform, now with the addition of relevant augmented generative answering in full production at large scale. This is because we see every day the significant ROIs that we bring for enterprise customers that have also measured us against multiple other alternatives, from homegrown to commercial software platforms. We continue to get more and more of those customer use data points and how transformative this technology is, validating our view that what Coveo does in AI and GenAI is a game changer. I want to share with you a few real life examples. SAP Concur, the leading business travel and expense management software provider in the world. Only after four weeks of A-B testing, achieved a 5% reduction in customer service cases and an 80% reduction in number of searches required for customer visits, thanks to our relevance-augmented generative answerings, immediate and accurate responses. This is in addition to a 64% decrease in content gaps. Chamberlain LiftMaster, a global 6,000-employee leading manufacturer of intelligent access garage and commercial door openers and gate entry systems, saw a 23% click-through rate improvement in their online commerce experiences thanks to Coveo AI. F5 Networks, mentioned earlier, a leading application security company with $6 billion in revenue across 45 countries, saw an 11% improvement in self-service success rates using relevance-augmented generative answering through a 28-day A-B test with Coveo. Forcepoint, another global security software company, saw a 14% improvement in self-service success rate on their customer community only after three months of using Coveo relevance-augmented generative answering. This is an important measure of the reduction of the number of customer sessions that end up in a case submission for human assistance, hugely impacting service cost reductions and customer satisfaction. They're now live with our generative AI solutions across multiple other use cases as well. More of these great successes and recent hard metrics and gains using Coveo Relevance Augmented Generative AI in particular can be found on the Coveo website. And furthermore, these customers are not experimenting. They are alive with our solutions, and you can go and test them yourself. Our volume of queries from relevance generative answering has increased 10x since January 24, another telling sign of the adoption and value we believe our customers are seeing from this solution. At this point, I can unequivocally say after dozens of deployments and comparative tests at large enterprise customers against a variety of competing solutions, that the differentiation and value of our platform has been validated, and that our ability to deliver real and substantial results in generative AI is proven within the use cases we cover. We believe this is particularly important as the market enters the show-me phase, post-gen AI hikes, distilling what is needed and necessary, the risks, the precision, the security, the compliance, the traceability and explainability, the costs, use cases, and benefits. This is why we believe that the few companies such as Coveo that can really deliver, prove the benefits, and scale in production globally will have an advantage in the markets. While others continue to build, experiment, and test, we are innovating on our competitive advantage and constantly delivering new, cutting-edge capabilities to further drive value with our customers, working in full production with large-scale enterprise data. I'd like to remind everyone that Customer is one single platform shared by all customers globally and in constant innovation. In Q1, We also closed a substantial expansion transaction with a top five U.S. bank and initiated new work with Talia, the leading German bookstore brand with 20 million products, over 500 locations, and a strong digital presence, as well as with Carlton One, a leading SaaS-based employee management solutions provider. These are just a few examples of leading companies and their respective industries which deploy Coveo see the significant ROI, and want to lead with AI across their digital experiences. I'd also like to highlight our bookings performance in the EMEA region, with Q1 marking our best quarter for bookings since fiscal 23. We attribute this success in part to our recent appointment of a new executive, Nick Bowles, as managing director in EMEA and who has a clear growth mandate in the region. and also to our partnership with SAP and as an endorsed partner globally. Our relationship with SAP continues to show growing signs of demand and success, and we anticipate sustained momentum for the remainder of the year in EMEA and elsewhere. Our strong pipeline continues to give us confidence in our current growth projections for fiscal 25 and beyond. And another validation of our previously recorded thesis that the AI market adoption is inflecting. Notably, Q1 marked our second best net new customer pipeline generation quarter ever. Additionally, in the quarter, we saw record Gen AI pipeline generation with more than 2x increase quarter over quarter in new customer Gen AI pipelines. Those are additional encouraging metrics reflecting the strong demand for our innovative AI solutions as we continue to grow the number of customer proof points at various stages of testing and full production deployment. In summary, we believe Coveo's leadership position continues to strengthen through the ongoing innovation of our AI platform, informed by real-world use cases with leading enterprises across the world, and the solid results and benefits that this provides. In Q1, we've also announced an alliance with Genesis, a leading contact center as a service solutions provider, natively integrating our AI platform within the Genesis Cloud platform. Thanks to Coveo, agents will have access to personalized, relevant knowledge exactly when needed, enhancing their workflow and empowering them with relevant insights and generated answers to customer questions. This enables them to onboard and upskill faster, reduce search time, improve first call resolution, and lower average handling time. We're also investing to grow strong relationships with leading and specialized systems integrators across the world. As they too seek to embark on this new wave of digital transformation, serving the needs for their enterprise clients to bring AI to every point of experience. We believe that Coveo is uniquely positioned as the core technology platform to enable these large systems integration undertakings. Such alliances and partnership investments strongly support our growth and investment thesis. Investments in our sales infrastructure continue. And I am thrilled to have recently announced the appointment of John Grosans as our new Chief Revenue Officer globally. John brings over 30 years of global sales management experience in the SaaS industry and has a proven track record of driving significant revenue growth. His dedication to building value-based relationship with customers aligns perfectly with our mission at Cobail. Given the significant opportunities ahead, We are confident that John's leadership will further accelerate our growth and strengthen our position in the enterprise applied AI market. At Coveo, we think we are at the forefront of a tidal wave of technological advancement as we navigate the growing importance of AI and generative AI in the digital experiences industry segment. Our recently published customer, employee, and commerce industry reports available on our website, reveal critical insights. 61% of consumers believe effective search significantly impacts brand perception in the customer experience space. Over 40% of employees see Gen AI as a way to enhance their work efficiency, and 72% of shoppers expect generative AI to elevate their shopping experience online. By anticipating these growing trends, we're committed to innovating our AI-based solutions to ensure seamless product discovery and improved digital interactions, positioning Coveo ahead of the competition in this rapidly evolving landscape. The ongoing investments in our platform also continue to be recognized by industry analysts such as Gartner, as I mentioned on the call last quarter. Most recently, Coveo once again demonstrated AI leadership by winning the AI Search and Innovation Award at the 7th Annual AI Breakthrough Awards. This prestigious recognition was given due to our AI platform's breadth of functionalities providing advanced search, relevant recommendations, unrivaled personalization, and now generative answering empowering our solution areas. In closing, Our momentum from a transformative fiscal 25 continues as we gain market recognition, secure new customers, deliver results, and expand our partnership. With our strategic investments and innovations in AI and Gen AI, we are not only meeting the needs of our clients for this innovation, but doing so with an efficient business model. We're excited about the future as we navigate the growing importance of AI and continue to position Coveo as a leader in this dynamic landscape. With that, I will now hand the call over to Brandon to discuss our Q1 financial performance and outlook in more detail.
spk09: Brandon?
spk00: Thanks, Louis. The first quarter of fiscal 2025 was a promising one. We delivered on our guidance for SAS subscription and total revenue and continued to track well ahead of our plans on adjusted EBITDA and as well posted another quarter of solid positive cash from operations. As we look at the details, SAS subscription revenue is $30.6 million for the quarter above the top end of our previously issued guidance. Again, this quarter we have broken out the contribution of Coveo's core platform and the platform we acquired from Qubit. As a reminder, our focus is on the Coveo core platform, which drove SAS subscription revenue of $28.7 million, up 12% from a year ago. Our ARR for the Coveo core platform grew roughly by the same amount. This was offset by a decline of 34% in SAS revenue for the platform we acquired from Qubit. As previously communicated, we expect the remaining SAS revenue for the Qubit platform will largely churn this year as we prioritize investments in our core. Total revenue is $32.2 million, up 6% from a year ago. Total revenue was impacted by the aforementioned Qubit churn and lower professional services revenue. Our first quarter new bookings were improved from a quarter ago and from the prior year. We saw continued momentum in our CRGA offering, which represented over 20% of new bookings once again this quarter and is tracking well against our plans for the year. We also saw a strong quarter of bookings in EMEA on the back of our go-to-market investments made in the past year and our ongoing SAP partnership. While new bookings did improve in the quarter, they are not yet at our targeted levels, and our assumptions remain that we will see bookings momentum build as the year progresses and more customers finalize their AI purchasing decisions and we realize on more of our growth initiatives. Our NER excluding the Qubit platform for the quarter was 106%, down slightly from 107 in Q4. This is mainly due to a single lost customer I mentioned on last quarter's call, whereby a financial services customer undertaking a significant cost reduction exercise chose an alternative path. Our gross retention rates continue to be very healthy through Q1 as compared to our peers in enterprise software. Gross margin for the quarter was 78%, and product gross margin was 82%, both in line with a year ago. Combined, I remain encouraged by the strong unit economics inherent in our business model. With 95% of our revenue coming from recurring SAS subscriptions, carrying 80% plus product gross margins, gross retention rates in the 95% range, and 105% to 110% net expansion rates for the Coveo core platform. We have a solid long-term business model that provides good leverage for investment and growth opportunities and or greater profitability. This foundation is a strong positive as we continue our focus on driving improved new bookings. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter was $1.7 million compared to a loss of $1.8 million a year ago and well ahead of our guidance of $2.2 to $2.7 million, positioning us well to achieve a year of positive adjusted EBITDA. We've also increased our focus and emphasis on driving positive cash flow from operations, and I'm quite pleased with our progress in this area. We drove positive cash flow from operations of $3 million in the quarter up up from $1 million a year ago. We have delivered positive cash flow from operations in four of the past five quarters, over $6 million in the trailing 12 months, and are tracking well to our original guidance of driving $10 million in positive cash flow from operations for the current fiscal year, all while still investing for growth. We ended the quarter with cash on hand of $168 million and no debt, After the close of the quarter, we completed our substantial issuer bid, whereby we repurchased approximately 6.5 million shares for total repurchase consideration of $50 million CAD. On a pro forma basis, after considering the results of our SIB, we would have ended the quarter with 130 million U.S. in cash, and a pro forma share count would have been 97.1 million. Finally, turning to guidance for the second quarter, we are expecting SAS subscription revenue of between $30.6 and $31.0 million and total revenue of between $32.0 and $32.4 million. We also expect adjusted EBITDA of minus $0.5 to $0.0 million. Our second quarter guidance assumes the ongoing attrition in Qubit will continue as we continue to invest in the Coveo core. At this time, we'll leave our annual guidance unchanged at SAS subscription revenue of between $126.0 and $130.0 million, with total revenue of between $133.0 and $138.0 million. We expect annual adjusted EBITDA of between $0.0 and $4.0 million. We continue to expect that our second half bookings performance will be stronger than first half and that SAS subscription revenue growth for the Coveo core will improve thereafter. As mentioned last quarter, we expect Qubits SAS subscription revenue will continue to churn through the year and continue to expect a revenue impact of approximately $4 million as a result when comparing fiscal 25 to fiscal 24. And finally, as I just mentioned, we are tracking well towards our target of generating cash from operations of approximately $10 million for the year, although we do expect some seasonality related to working capital to create some variability in our quarterly cash flow results. In closing, we continue to make positive progress towards re-accelerating our growth this quarter. And while we still have more work to do, I'm encouraged by what I've seen so far. And with that, operator, you may now open the line for questions.
spk03: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star four by the one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. And should you wish to cancel your request, please press star followed by the two. If you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys.
spk04: One moment, please, for your first question.
spk03: Your first question comes from the line of Stannis Machopoulos from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk13: Hi, good afternoon. Louis, as far as the customers you're winning for GenAI, are there any common themes that you'd highlight? Are they weighted towards a particular, you know, particular verticals, particular pain points, some other underlying elements like your data infrastructure, or is it really cross-vertical, cross-geography? And also, just to clarify, is it safe to assume that they're predominantly customer support deals?
spk05: Thanks. Hi, Thanos.
spk10: Good question. They're across verticals, but as you know, historically, a lot of the early adopters over the years of the Coveo technology were the tech and the large, you know, leading global tech companies. This has also transposed itself in Gen AI. A lot of, I would say a majority of of the early adopters of our GenAI solution were the companies that tested our solution against, you know, either homegrown or other providers and ended up selecting us. The vast majority of them are some of the leading tech company names you would know. And so we're very proud of that because, you know, these are some of the most educated companies, obviously, in the software industry and within AI and generative AI in particular. And after these extensive tests and comparisons and maybe tests, they ended up selecting Coveo. As it relates to your other question, Thanos, it has been predominantly the vast majority in customer service and the customer service area where the benefits don't have to be proven anymore. Clearly, generative AI on top of existing Coveo can increase self-service and reduce cases submission, you know, cases that require human assistance by double digits, and we routinely measure that. So this is a huge use case for these types of companies, but also other verticals as well. We also see Gen AI applications in the workplace area, in the commerce area, and in the websites area. So across all of our four businesses, pretty much every conversation right now includes generative AI and positions us, you know, really, really differentiates us.
spk13: That's great. I'll pass the line, thanks.
spk05: Yep.
spk03: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Ed here, Carpe, from Eat Capital. Please go ahead.
spk14: Great. Thanks for taking my question, guys. Maybe just on these net new customers that you're winning, I think Last quarter, you guys continued to call out the strength from this pipeline and net new. Can you give us a sense of how these deals are materializing? Is it largely outreach from your sales force or is largely inbound that you're seeing just given the strong ROI that you guys have spoken to in your prepared remarks?
spk10: Love the question. I think it's both and increasingly inbound as well as we publish the results. You know, we had to I always say we have to close the loop. Whenever you come up with new innovation, be it in the software industry or in any other innovation industry, you have to put it to work, put it in production, and then it doesn't stop there. You have to actually measure, and ideally you're allowed to use some of these measures and these results and publish that in the markets. And we've been able, being one of the first companies to deliver in full production with generative AI, if you recall the Xero story last summer, and now we've published stories around our work with SAP and other customers. This resonates really, really well in the markets, and as a result, it's starting to create some inbound as well, and some new customers as well who also want to put generative AI to work in these areas. And so this is really, obviously, we do employ a sales team, and their job is to go out in the market and generate new leads and go knock on companies' doors and talk about what we can do and the benefits we can bring. But we're also increasingly getting inbound as well.
spk09: So it's really both.
spk05: Thanks, all guys. I'll pass the mic.
spk04: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Sutan Sukumar from Steve Hall. Please go ahead.
spk05: Good evening, gents.
spk07: I wanted to touch on your partnership strategy. Could you talk a little bit about how important are are these partnerships to Coveto's broader growth strategy? And can you remind us what percentage mix of businesses is coming in through partners today? And where would you like to be, call it over the medium to long term?
spk10: So, hi, Sivan. Two types of partnerships. So, number one, partnerships with the systems integrators. We see an increased amount of interest from systems integrators, and obviously that's probably very motivated by the fact that their customers are asking them. You know, the systems integrators are the family doctors. I've used this term before, the family doctors of large enterprises. They're also the whisper masters. towards these large enterprises, you know, telling enterprises, you know, which technology works best and who leads in tech and certain segments and et cetera. You know, the adoption, there's no question that, you know, AI and generative AI is top of mind, you know, for most enterprises right now. And so they turn to these systems integrators for that advice, but also these systems integrators want to jump on the digital transformation bandwagon. And one of these areas of application is digital experiences. We talk about commerce, we talk about service, workplace, and website type of experiences. Anything that's a digital experience and has someone online at the other end. So this is a massive digital transformation campground that will be established over the next couple of years. We think it will unfold pretty quickly. And so these partnerships are really, really important because Coveo wants to position itself and I think is really viewed by these partners as the foundation technology that can scale across a large global enterprise and enable these transformations. So that's one. The second part is the alliances. We call them alliances at Coveo that we have with software companies. You know, so we've, you know, we've announced partnerships with SAP. We've obviously been a longtime partner of Salesforce. We work with companies like Adobe. We've announced during the quarter the partnership with Genesis, which is the leading call center, contact center as a service company. And they, too, need, you know, best of breed technology such as Coveo. to improve their offerings and cater to the complex needs of enterprises. So this is the reason for these partnerships. And we just hired some new leaders in the alliances and partnerships channels area. And we expect that we'll continue to get a greater proportion of referrals, in fact, and collaboration with these companies. And so this is a key area of investment for us. As it relates to the percentage of our pipeline that comes from these channels, I would say it varies. If you look over the past couple of years, it varied, I would say, between a quarter to a third of our pipeline. Obviously, our market, as you know, was a bit in a holding pattern as companies were discovering uh you know ai and uh and and try to distill uh ai and gen ai and etc and as we know it's reopening right now so we expect the proportion of of uh we expect the contribution of channels to grow very very significantly so in in in summary these partnerships are really are extremely important to us and uh and and we think uh we think we can bring a lot of benefits to these uh these integrators and these large software companies as well.
spk05: Perfect.
spk09: Thank you, Louis. I'll pass the line.
spk03: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of David Kwan from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.
spk02: Hey, guys. You guys talked about, I think there's like 30 CRGA deals. that you've signed, can you talk about how many of those are, you know, live production or revenue generating and how many are from net new customers and any quality five from that standpoint and then new customers in terms of how much they compose of the CRGA pipeline would be great. Thanks.
spk10: Right. We don't report the detail of the breakdown, but I can certainly say that if we sign these deals, that is because they are contributing to our revenue. We have, in addition to that, dozens of other deployments right now at various stages of decision-making and testing, experimentation, or negotiation in procurement. These 30 that we refer to are signed and therefore accounted for. We have some deals. When we sign deals, there are optionality on the part of customers for some of them as it relates to the duration. of the contract and the ability to opt in or opt out. But that's very, very few right now that have not fully opted in for the longer term, I would say, with us.
spk05: All right, thanks. Yep.
spk03: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Paul Traber from RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk10: Oh, thanks very much. Good afternoon. You're coming up with the 30 deals signed is quite encouraging, but how do we align that or dovetail that with the ARR growth?
spk13: It's up 12%. Can you give us a sense of how ARR growth has trended and if the 30 deals is fully impacting that ARR growth?
spk00: Hey, Paul. Yeah, as we mentioned, if we mentioned a signed order, it is because there is a firm order that will be in ARR and in revenue. I think we've talked over the past several quarters about just what's been going on in the market more broadly, how many companies have paused decision-making and so on, and that's impacted all aspects of our business, CRGA specifically. continues to be a very bright spot for us, primarily inside of our existing base, getting them to add on some of our generative answering capabilities. But the broader macro issue that we've been working through is just paused and delayed customer decision cycles as the market spent their time educating and getting up to speed on everything that's been affecting our market in general. Q1 did show some promising signs, and as we mentioned in the prepared comments, we expect that momentum to continue to build as the year goes on.
spk10: Just a quick follow-up, if I may. The pipeline comments are quite encouraging, and you did mention the elongated sales cycles are delaying the conversion.
spk09: Can you comment on your win rates, what you've seen to date in terms of actual win rates?
spk10: Paul, I think in the case of relevance-augmented generative answering, I would say extremely high. Now, when you peel the onion, it depends what you compare it to. You know, from a competitive standpoint, I would say big picture, we don't lose. We haven't found any other solution for the use cases we cover yet, at least as of yet, that can deliver the level of precision on current use. customers' current data highly secure and et cetera. You know, that meets the threshold where an enterprise would move forward, you know, to deploy. Some may decide not to move forward for various reasons or pause or pursue the testing from that perspective. But if you look at the numbers right now, I would say it's, less than 10% that are what we call internally lost or D or D qualified. You know, there's some on hold, there's some still actively testing. There's some, you know, where the tests are completed and are in final decision phase. So it's, I will tell you for us, it's more than encouraging. It was really about, you know, this, this inflection and, and, and the proof points that the, The takeaway here that we're trying to say, communicate and, you know, in helping you understand what we're going through and what we're seeing is that this market is moving into the show me phase. And that's really, really important. After 18 months of education and testing and experiment, companies are willing to move forward and make decisions. Obviously, we're not immune to the general software industry and et cetera. And, you know, every software company says, you know, deals take longer and blah, blah, blah. We don't talk much about that because, you know, that's the overall dynamic. What's really, really exciting is the value that this technology creates. The numbers are stunning in terms of immediate benefits. And the fact that right now we've moved, you know, the demonstration's been made Companies, if they can see and if they can test with their own data and see the results, they'll find money for it and they'll move. And those signs are very encouraging. Obviously, this is a new technology. And this has been a major disruption in the search market. But from a competitive perspective, just to wrap it up, we're definitely not seeing losses to competition yet. in that particular area.
spk09: Thanks for taking the call.
spk04: Thank you.
spk03: Once again, should you have a question, please press star four by the one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda from Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead. Hi.
spk12: This is George for Koji. I appreciate you taking the question. You know, forgive me if I missed this earlier. But, you know, I was kind of wondering if there's anything worth calling out in terms of how as relevance answering is, you know, increasingly in the mix, how that changes sales cycle times for bookings.
spk10: I think just building on the last answer, George, and this is a very good question because, yes, it does in the sense that, in general, if you look across the entire generative AI segment and et cetera, very few companies were buying, but most companies were experimenting and learning and discovering and learning one way or another. And from that perspective, that lengthened the sales cycle because they want to touch it on their own data and et cetera. So this was less of a repeatable sales process where you buy a solution that's been sold hundreds of times and you can relate to similar situations and infer that this is going to work for you and et cetera like we see across the enterprise software industry. GenAI was an amazing disruption, probably one of the most important in the history of technology. And so for that reason, yes, it does elongate the sales cycle. But at the same time, we're active with these customers and deploying and talking to them and showing it with their data and et cetera. And we see these results. And these customers, I can assure you, are extremely, extremely engaged. And it gets to a point where the ROI is so obvious that they need to move forward. And we think now the major issues that if you're a CIO of a global enterprise or a large enterprise, the major issues are, for the most part, behind you. You worried a year ago about security, about compliance, about the fact that this needed to run on your own data, about the fact that you couldn't load your customer data into a large language model about the traceability and the explainability and the lineage of content and all of that. And those things are now understood and behind you. So this is a long answer, pardon me, George, but just to say that from that perspective, it did elongate the sales cycles because the whole industry was in a holding pattern until the few companies like Coveo that can deliver now are standing with real results. And now companies have two choices. They will either adopt this technology or compete against it. And it's going to be pretty binary. It's going to be pretty brutal because the quantum leap and the benefits are just too high to ignore.
spk04: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of David Weiss from Scotiabank.
spk03: Please go ahead.
spk11: Hi, good evening. Could we just maybe get an update on just the progress that you're seeing with the SAP endorsed partnership in terms of co-selling? I mean, you had mentioned EMEA, but perhaps also globally, any commentary on that in terms of recent deals being signed or the contributions to the pipeline and the opportunity there globally?
spk10: Yeah, well, first of all, we were also pleased to report the progress we've made with SAP Concur as a key customer and the benefits, and you can find that story on our website, which is quite impressive. And the fact that SAP is a customer of Coveo and is speaking publicly about their results is obviously fueling you know, some awareness amongst their install base. If you look in their customers in the market, if you look at SAP as a company, obviously, you know, headquartered in Waldorf, Germany, I would say, you know, half of SAP's business is in EMEA and probably a higher proportion of their brand is in that region. So we're enjoying quite a lot of success in building the pipeline and signing joint deals. We announced during the quarter the signature of a significant transaction to qualify it with Talia, which is sort of the Barnes and Nobles of Germany and the dark region. particular company, leading German bookstore. So that's a customer that, the kind of customer I would say that we went with SAP. 20 million products, a very strong online presence, certainly one of the most important online brands in Germany. And we're seeing more and more of these types of transactions and customers and prospects come into the pipeline with SAP. We're also active with SAP and ANZ and North America as well. So that partner continues to grow. Now the dynamic, I just want to close by saying that the dynamic, whether it's SAP or Adobe or Salesforce or any of our alliances, they've experienced the exact same dynamic as it relates to Aon, which is their customers too were sort of, a little bit in a holding pattern and trying to talk to them and discover, you know, what are the risks and costs and use cases and so on of AI. So we're really, you know, at the same pace here. But there's no question that the SAP partnership, and particularly in commerce, we've reported before that SAP is the most important e-commerce vendor by gross merchandise value. that they process. And so that's a really, really important partnership. And yes, we do see it at a very high level. We do see it growing very well, sorry, in the pipeline.
spk05: Okay, great. Thanks. And I'll pass the line.
spk03: Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Richard Che from National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
spk08: Yes, thank you. Just on your full year guidance, it sort of implies a pretty sizable pickup here in the back half of this year when it comes to revenue. I'm just trying to understand the lag between bookings and when revenue is recognized, and I guess part of that question of those bookings, is the lion's share of that coming from these Gen A ideals?
spk00: Well, we expect bookings to generally improve across the board. This quarter had some promising signs in Europe and CRGA continuing to go well. But we're seeing signs that bookings will continue to improve as the year goes, Richard. We still got a pretty wide range out there. So in terms of your comment on ramp, I think at the low end, there's not much of a ramp required at the high end. Yeah, obviously we need to see bookings pick up and not to turn into revenue. But as we've said, the order here is let's get bookings going in the right direction and the revenue will follow thereafter.
spk05: Okay, thanks.
spk04: Thank you.
spk03: There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand the call back to Mr. Luis Tatu for any closing remarks.
spk10: Very good. Well, thank you. I want to thank everyone on behalf of Coveo for attending this first quarter earnings call. as you're all there every quarter. And with that operator, you can now end the conference call. Thanks, everyone.
spk03: This concludes today's call. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.
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