Coveo Solutions Inc.

Good afternoon, my name is Konstantin and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Covio Force Corridor and Full Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. All links 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 enroll your question, please press star then the number two. Thank you. I will now turn the line over to Adir Kaveh. You may now begin your conference.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me to discuss Coveo's fiscal Q4 2025 and full year 2025 results are Louis Tetsu, Coveo's Executive Chairman, Laurent Simonot, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, and Brandon Nussie, Chief Financial Officer. A reminder that some remarks made today will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. including those regarding our plans, objectives, expected performance, and our outlook for the first fiscal quarter and full year fiscal 2026. These forward-looking statements are given as of May 20, 2025, and while we believe any statements we make are reasonable, they are based on current expectations and assumptions which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied. Coveo disclaims any intent or obligation to update our forward-looking statements, whether as a 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 the key factors affecting our performance section of the company's most recently filed MD&A. both of which are available on our CDAR Plus profile at 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 metrics and where applicable reconciliation schedules showing IFRS versus non-IFRS results are available in our press release and our MD&A issued today. Finally, Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references and financial figures made today are in U.S. dollars. Our presentation slides accompanying this conference call can be accessed on our IR website under the News and Events section. I will now turn the call over to Louis first to review our operational and strategic highlights of our fourth quarter and full fiscal year, followed by Laurent, who will discuss our platform and strategy, and we will end off with Brandon and taking you through the financial details and provide our outlook for Q1 and fiscal 2026. We will then open the line to your questions. With that, Louis.

Thank you, Adir, and we want to thank everyone joining us on the call. We have many exciting things to discuss. First, we're pleased to report another record quarter for Coveo, demonstrating the resilience and profitability of our business model, our robust unit economics, and Coveo's accelerating growth. Our fourth quarter financials reached the upper end of our guidance. Fast subscription revenue hit a new high at 32.6 million U.S. Total revenue climbed to 34.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA was strong at 0.7 million. And operating cash flow for the fiscal year was solidly positive at 11.1 million, ahead of our guidance of approximately 10 million. Our Q4 bookings performance was our best Q4 ever and contributed to more than 50% year-over-year bookings growth during the back half of fiscal 25. Our generative AI customer base increased 30% sequentially and tripled year-over-year. Our strong momentum continued in commerce, which is our fastest-growing customer use case, and finally, Net expansion rate for the core platform rose 200 basis points sequentially to 107%. New customers include DocuSign, Gilevay International, and Agco, and we're continuing to see existing customers expanding their use of our platform, such as Workday, Nestle, Dow Chemical, Arm Holdings, and Cummins. Laurent will share more details. I'm extremely proud of what we've accomplished. and pleased with the acceleration of our market demand. Our ability to deliver both growth and profitability, even amid economic headwinds and AI industry disruption, highlights the uniqueness, enduring value, and scalability of our technology. Since our IPO, our core platform SaaS revenue grew around 70%. We turned losses into positive cash flow, consistently delivering high-margin, scalable growth, and continued to acquire marquee customers. Today, our momentum in the applied AI market is undeniable. Beyond these results is a far more exciting story. The numbers do reflect our financial discipline, but more importantly, they demonstrate Coveo's growing strategic importance and adoption in the enterprise applied AI and generative search space. Transforming digital experiences is a fast-growing application of AI for enterprises, and Coveo leads in enabling this technology. Generative search and relevance is at the core, and our leadership in the space continues to be recognized by key analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. Our revenue growth is accelerating, and the reasons for this are simple – Enterprises must modernize digital experiences. People online will now expect personalized, prescriptive, and now, thanks to generative AI, advisory and agentic experiences. Because all of us are only a browser window away from a smarter, faster, more contextual, and automated experience that gives us back what we value most, our time. Relevance is the key. how products and content align efficiently with a person's context and intent. And AI is the only competitive way to deliver relevance at scale. Hence, in the coming years, integrating AI at every interaction point will be crucial, and companies that fail to embrace these AI-driven experiences will fall behind. AI not only enhances user engagement and people augmentation, but it can also compute for better business outcomes at every interaction. And that's powerful. But there is another reason. We believe enterprises need our technology to make large language models work within new generative digital experiences. You cannot deliver the precise generative experiences enterprise need without unless you ground the LLM prompts in secure and current enterprise data, which is what our AI search technology does. That is regardless of which LLM you use. But in addition, we have built a mature AI stack that turns that data into pinnacle relevance, vital for precise answers and the agentic rag needed to power these experiences. That is what Coveo does uniquely. That is why Coveo is the AI relevance company. We said this a year ago. We published impressive customer results in both our commerce and knowledge lines. We highlighted growing demand and pipeline and noted increased conversion rates when customers measured Coveo against alternatives. And now we're delivering a third consecutive quarter of bookings momentum following the market disruption from Chad GPT. which we continue to believe benefits us. The unique value and differentiation of our technology are now recognized and measured. Coveo's AI relevance and generative search power transformation for some of the world's leading enterprises, including many of the world's top technology companies. We are their AI backbone for hyper-personalized content in areas such as customer service and also high-impact generative search applications. The good news is that IT and business leaders have now gained a good understanding of the why and the how. Buyers are much more knowledgeable about the capabilities and requirements for AI and generative AI. After two years of education, discovery, and experimentation following the launch of ChatGPT, enterprises are now moving from experimentation to adoption. In fact, It is our view that in many enterprises, AI was somewhat of a technology in search of problems. And we're now seeing some AI talk fatigue as business leaders are now anxiously seeking real production applications and tangible ROI from AI. Few companies can deliver and measure ROI. And so Coveo is benefiting from this shift, driving increased demand and adoption. Our goal is quite clear. to build the most trusted brand in our industry, helping enterprises materialize, apply to generative AI across their commerce, websites, service, and workplace knowledge experiences. We aim to capture a significant share of the AI experience economy by maintaining a strong focus on innovation, customer value, and a scalable business model. Our strategy to get there is also clear. We prioritize growth, profitable economics and a high recurring margin, innovation and operational excellence in sales and customer success to scale. To capitalize on our momentum, we're investing more aggressively in rapid innovation, superior customer outcomes, and disciplined data-driven go-to-market strategies. This quarter, again, demonstrates progress on these metrics. Assuming we execute our plans and guidance, These investments will serve to further accelerate our growth, long-term profitability, and continued improvement in our Rule of 40 metrics, such that we expect to approach 30 on that metric by year-end on an ARR growth and operating cash flow basis. While we anticipated this success, some investors questioned whether companies like Coveo would be disrupted or become market takers in applied AIs. we can confirm our belief that we are a beneficiary. As interest in AI rose, early investor focus was on the silicon GPU layer and the hyperscalers, seen as the obvious initial AI beneficiaries. However, we believe greater value will soon emerge at the application layer, where AI drives measurable productivity gains, revenue, cost, and experience outcomes. This is where Coveo excels. Our technology deploys in days or weeks, not months or years, delivering measurable service cost reductions, revenue increases, and productivity gains. Dozens of customer case studies and financial return testimonials are available on our website, and I really invited you to take a look at Coveo.com. As you can see, the market's perception of search has undergone a dramatic reversal. Once considered a basic tool, search is now recognized as a complex science. Think about digital experience leaders that have used AI to deliver highly relevant, personalized experiences like those offered by Netflix or Amazon or Spotify, and the science that went into building those hyper-personalized and prescriptive experiences. These are grounded in search and relevance. When Chad GPT launched, many thought search might be disrupted, but technical experts knew that search was the linchpin for successful generative experiences and that without powerful relevance, agent tech would be difficult to pull off. We predicted this need and invested over a decade in maturing advanced AI relevance technology. partnering with leading companies and managing vast data sets. Today, our market is booming, with private companies reaching record valuations and global tech giants showing strong interest. We see this trend and validation as very positive for the state, and for Coveo in particular, given our unique strength and the validation we get from our customers. At the same time, We remain steadfast and focused on solid unit economics and scalable, sustainable growth. We believe we are well positioned to invest for growth and scale and to deliver real value for shareholders. In summary, we believe Coveo offers substantial asymmetric upside. We bring together the hallmarks of an exceptional company. Our strong prospects for growth and returns are supported by market leadership, unique technology, rapid value delivery, a robust financial model, and an expanding addressable market. Our focus is on innovation, delighting customers with high financial returns through AI and disciplined execution and operational excellence to scale. Our gross margin is high. Our go-to-market strategy and unit economics are profitable and and our multi-tenant platform is scalable. Together, these factors create a solid foundation for investment, significant gains in market recognition, and accelerated growth. And I feel super confident about the quality of our leadership team to lead in the market ahead. With that, I'll hand things over to Laurent, who will share more details and what's next for Coveil. Laurent returns as CEO leading our outstanding global team while I serve alongside him as executive chairman. Together with our leadership team and our strong team of AI experts, we're shaping Caveo's future. Laurent?

Thanks, Thuy.

As we introduce, there are several things which make us unique and drive our market success. Enterprise data is primarily unstructured and often scattered, making it hard to use for AI-driven experiences. Journal of AI can now pull together and synthesize dismissive data into meaningful insights instantly, but it needs strong indexing and semantic search to work well. That's where we come in. Our technology handles this complexity across any content source, ensuring AI outputs are relevant, complete, and secure. Our customers also face the challenge of delivering consistent results, and answers across systems like SAP, Salesforce, Adobe, Shopify, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and across millions of digital journeys. These platforms are not designed to work together, often leading to fragmented experiences and inconsistent answers. Avail solves this with unified AI relevance. This is our ability to unify and personalize experiences across all these platforms. is the foundation that supports the unique value we bring in both commerce and knowledge. Ultimately, however, customers choose Covail not just for the power and flexibility of our tech platform, but for the complete value we bring. Let's take an example in commerce. One of our recent customer wins pursuant to our SAP partnership was with a large B2C retailer. Consistent with what I mentioned earlier, this customer's data requirements were complex, involving a large quantity of SKUs, a very high volume of consumer sessions, and needing to handle multiple languages. While our ability to handle their scale was one part of the evaluation, this customer ultimately selected Coveo for commerce-specific AI relevance, designed to lift revenues, conversion, and margins. Furthermore, they require these capabilities to be enabled through a business-oriented merchandising hub. Finally, our ability to bring together catalog data and enterprise content together offers the opportunity to add narrative and personalized advice within the shopping experience. It is strategically vital for customers to own their shopping experience and remain a destination. Relying on third-party shopping proxies or aggregators to drive sales puts them at risk of losing direct insight into what their customers want and care about, along with the opportunity to increase conversion and upsell effectively. This foundation also underpins our partnership with Shopify, where we announced this quarter that Coveo is now a Shopify Premier Partner with our solution available on the Shopify App Store. We also landed our first joint customer with Shopify. Guilvin International is one of Canada's largest distributors of electrical safety products and industrial supplies. Guilvin chose Caveo for the depth and flexibility of our platform, particularly our ability to manage the complexity of their B2B catalog and environment. Another key point of action comes from our SAP partnership, where we're seeing strong and growing traction. We've recorded three consecutive quarters of solid bookings momentum, culminating in Q4 being the strongest quarter to date for bookings originating from this partnership. We remain highly optimistic about the future of our commerce business, which has been on a year-over-year basis our fastest growing segment. Now, let's talk about knowledge. The umbrella term we now use for customer service, website, and workplace use cases where unstructured content, not products, forms the majority of the experience. As I mentioned earlier, enterprises in this space often face a common challenge. Their content is scattered across multiple systems, yet they can't accept hallucinations and require highly accurate answers delivered with enterprise-grade security and privacy. Ultimately, they turn to Coveo to solve specific business problems. more often automating self-service and improving customer service operations with AI and generative AI, where we believe we're a clear market leader. A standout win this quarter was DocuSign, which shows Coveo following a rigorous and competitive evaluation process. We demonstrated a clear ability to deliver personalized and relevant results and generated answers within multiple touch points. These answers are grounded from multiple data sources such as Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, Contentful, and others, increasing case deflection rates, thus delivering tangible, measurable ROI. This success highlights the impact of our platform in driving operational efficiency and enhancing customer experience for more than 1.7 million customers across multiple touchpoints while supporting enterprise requirements. Choose Coveo for more than just search. They value our agnostic, out-of-the-box connectivity, powerful analytics, and admin-friendly tooling, all purpose-built to solve the specific business challenge. Our platform ensures reliable, contextual, and trusted answers at every step of the customer journey. By empowering both customers and agents with AI-driven, generative knowledge, we enable faster resolution of even the most complex queries grounded in enterprise content. The result, lower support costs and higher customer satisfaction. We are increasingly seeing commerce and knowledge converge across our customer base. A great example this quarter is ADI Global, which initially adopted Coveo to support their B2B commerce experience. They are now extending to use a common Covio index to power their customer service journey as well, streamlining experiences across the entire lifecycle. As commerce evolves towards more conversational, knowledge-driven interactions, these blended use cases are becoming more common. We're uniquely positioned to help enterprises thrive in this shift, bringing together relevance, intelligence, and seamless experiences across both commerce and service. I will close by highlighting our investments in what we believe is the next major tailwind in our industry, the rise of Agent Tech AI. We're currently piloting our Agent Tech AI integration with a select group of customers and plan to roll it out more broadly soon. In March, we launched Coveo for AgentForce, now available on the Salesforce Agent Exchange Marketplace. We're genuinely excited about this momentum just as we were with the successful launch of our Gen AI capabilities last year. Many of our customers and partners are actively exploring this space. While the potential is immense, early adopters are quickly realizing that effective retrieval is essential for success. This is where Coveo excels. Our leadership in Relevance Augmented Retrieval, or RAG, empowers enterprises to securely index and search millions of documents across diverse content sources, delivering highly relevant answers, minimizing hallucinations, and enabling a coherent, trusted agentic experience. Finally, as part of this evolution, we're also investing in the development of agentic RAG, designed to power the next generation of conversational experiences. This will enable more dynamic, multi-step interactions that go beyond static answers, allowing AI to better interpret intent, manage context, and guide users through complex journeys across support, commerce, and workplace scenarios. We're currently collaborating with select customers and expect initial deployments later this year. I'll wrap up by sharing our key priorities as we enter fiscal 2026. Our focus remains clear and disciplined. First, Drive growth with strong unit economics and a high recurring margin profile. Second, deliver meaningful innovation that creates real value for customers. And third, maintain and enhance operational excellence with a focus on sales execution and customer success. We've made strong progress across all key areas, and we remain committed to investing strategically to sustain and accelerate this momentum. Our position in the market is clearly defined, and we're seeing that translate into more consistent wins and growing recognition for customers, partners, and industry analysts alike. None of this would be possible without our amazing team. Their talent, drive, and dedication continue to be a key differentiator. Looking ahead, I'm genuinely excited about the opportunities Fiscal 26 presents, and we look forward to sharing our continued progress with you throughout the year. With that, I'll turn it over to Brendan, who will walk you through the financial details. Brendan?

Thanks, Laurent. At the start of the fiscal year, we commented that we anticipated stronger bookings in Fiscal 25, especially in the second half. and I'm pleased to report that played out as expected. After a record Q3, we followed with our best ever Q4. Overall, new bookings in the second half are up over 50% year over year. As a result of this bookings performance, we are now well positioned to see our reported revenue growth rates accelerate. As you see in our Q1 and fiscal year guidance, where we expect to improve our growth rate on the Coveo core to approximately 14% based on midpoint in Q1 and further accelerate through the fiscal year. While building this momentum, we've maintained our operational discipline, and I'm also pleased to report that we delivered $11.1 million of operating cash flow, representing 8% of revenue. As we now enter our new fiscal year, we'll be leaning into our growth potential while keeping our fiscal discipline. We'll make some intentional investments to further our growth and maintain a focus on healthy unit economics. I believe we're well positioned for further improvements in our rule of metrics and long-term profitable growth. Summarizing the key points from the quarter, SAS subscription revenue is $32.6 million, increasing 6%. For the full year, SAS subscription revenue was $126.6 million, up 7%. Our focus is on the Coveo core platform, which drove subscription revenue of $31.6 million, an increase of 10% over the prior year. Please note that Q4 this year included one less day of revenue recognition than a year ago, and on a constant-day, constant-currency basis, this growth rate was 12%. For the full year, CoveoCore platform subscription revenue is $121.3 million, growing 11% and 12% on a constant currency, constant days basis. As previously communicated, subscription revenue from the Qubit platform declined by 50% and is now down to approximately $1 million in revenue for the quarter. During the quarter, we formally communicated an end of life to this platform. and expect this revenue stream to fully churn in the coming quarters. Total revenue was $34.4 million, an increase of 5% over the prior year. Total revenue growth rates were affected by the CUBA decline, along with a decline in lower-margin professional services revenue as we increasingly prioritize our partners for that line item. Total revenue for the full year was $133.3 million, growing 6%. Gross margins for the quarter and full year were 79%, more or less consistent with the prior year. Product gross margins were a very healthy 82% for the quarter and year. Adjusted EBITDA was $0.7 million compared to $0.2 million a year ago, and for the full year, adjusted EBITDA was $1.0 million compared to a loss of $2.4 million in the prior year. Operating cash flow was $6.8 million in the quarter, improved from $4.6 million in the prior year period. And as I mentioned, full-year operating cash flow was $11.1 million, or 8% of total revenue. We ended the quarter and year with approximately $125 million in cash and no debt. Before diving into bookings, I want to quickly clarify our vertical exposure and business model amid the ongoing macroeconomic environment. HITECH remains our largest vertical with a strong and growing customer base. While we do have some exposure to tariff-sensitive sectors like retail and manufacturing, thus far we've seen our enterprise customers continue to prioritize AI investments to help drive improved margins and conversion rates. Further, our revenue model is a SaaS-based subscription model with fixed annual and typically multi-year contracts. We have no direct exposure to transaction-based revenue, which insulates us well from any downturn in economic activity levels. So as we look at bookings, as I previously mentioned, bookings and ARR are important metrics which I follow in our business, and as such, I wanted to further explain how I calculate these metrics. For bookings, these represent committed customer orders signed in a period for new subscription revenue. ARR includes only contractually committed subscription amounts that can be recognized in revenue. Thus, ARR at one quarter end becomes SAS subscription revenue for the next quarter. So diving into Booking's details, we're pleased with our progress here. Our ARR growth rates exceeded our revenue growth rates for the quarter, landing at 14% as we signaled last quarter. Our Gen AI products continue to show momentum and are now up to approximately 75 customers, more than 3x increase from a year ago. Importantly, we're now crossing renewal periods, and while many in the Gen AI space are struggling for renewals, our initial results have been highly encouraging. We have a near perfect renewal rate, and the revenue from the cohort of customers from a year ago has increased their spending by more than 50% compared to their initial levels. This speaks loudly to the value we're helping to deliver. In commerce, it remains our fastest-growing customer use case, and our SAP partnership continues to accelerate, with Q4 representing the highest bookings quarter since the launch of the partnership. Looking at renewal rates, NER improved to 107% when excluding the impact from QBIT, increasing 200 basis points sequentially. As we said previously, we invested in our account management teams throughout the fiscal year, and we expected this would drive better NER rates, and I'm happy to share that much of the improvement we saw this quarter can be attributed to those investments. I'll wrap up with our guidance. We see the momentum built in fiscal 25 continuing in fiscal 26 and are targeting to return to 20% plus ARR growth rates on the Coveo core in the latter part of the fiscal year. Given the business model, recognized revenue will lag this by a quarter or so. We expect the QBIT revenue will churn completely in the next quarters, and consequently, QBIT's contribution to revenue in the year will be approximately $2 million, down from approximately $5 million this year. With that context, for Q1 revenue, we expect SAS subscription revenue of $33.5 to $34.0 million, an increase of 10% from a year ago at midpoint, and implying a growth rate of approximately 14% on the Coveo Core platform. And we expect total revenue of $34.9 to $35.4 million. For the year, we expect SAS subscription revenue of $141.5 to $144.5 million, an increase of 13% at midpoint, and implying a growth rate of 15% to 17% on the Coveo Core. And we expect total revenue of $147.5 to $150.5 million. Looking at profitability guidance, we expect Q1 adjusted EBITDA of approximately minus $1 to minus $2 million, given the seasonally high costs we incur in Q1. For the fiscal year, we expect adjusted EBITDA at approximately break-even levels. We are committed to maintaining positive operating cash flow roughly in line with fiscal 25 levels of approximately $10 million. To provide further context, with our current growth outlook and encouraging improvement in our sales efficiency metrics, we are making intentional investments into innovation and go-to-market to ensure we capture the opportunity ahead. These investments involve increasing our quota-carrying sales roles, and accelerating R&D initiatives to further our pace of innovation. This decision is straightforward to us. With 82% gross margins, NER rates at 107% and growing, and strong unit economics on our go-to-market spending, we believe the opportunity is present to further improve our growth rates. We will do this while maintaining roughly the same adjusted EBITDA and cash flow levels seen in fiscal 25, and believe this will drive even further improvements to our rule of metrics beyond fiscal 26. In closing, fiscal 25 is a great year of progress for us, and I'm excited to see this continue into fiscal 26 and beyond.

And with that, operator, you may now open the line for questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the number one on your touchstone phone app. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press tar followed by the number two. If you are using a speakerphone, please make sure to lift your handset before pressing any keys. Your first question comes from the line of David Kwan from TD Cowen. Please ask your question.

Good afternoon, guys. I was curious, you spoke a lot about the SAP partnership and a lot of the success that you're having there, which is great, and touched a bit on the Salesforce. But I'd like to dig a bit more on the Salesforce side. You, I guess, announced something last, I think, September in terms of kind of re-engagement there, strengthened partnership. Can you talk about what impact that's had in terms of joint customer wins? And have you seen an increase in the contribution from Salesforce?

Good evening, David. This is Laurent. Thank you for your question. So on March 5th, I believe, we're the launch partner for Salesforce AgentForce on their agent exchange. So AgentForce is very important for Salesforce. It's also fairly new. So we're glad to be connected and integrated into AgentForce. Now, in terms of pipeline, we are having current projects going on. Customers are deciding about their roadmap with AgentForce, and we are extremely happy to be part of that roadmap with them. Customers like DocuSign and many others are part of this overall conversation.

Yeah, David, if I may add, this is Louis. We're quite excited about AgentTik. AgentForce is one example. Every large app vendor right now is creating their own AgentTik orchestration layer, and Coveo really acts as sort of the intelligence behind. So Covil for agent force is the first manifestation of that and really comes into play whenever, you know, there are basically two conditions is, you know, that you find within large enterprises. So typically the content required to make agent force work um, needs to be, um, in, um, uh, ingested within data cloud. And, and that's not always practical, uh, for large enterprises to make that happen. And number two is large enterprises typically, uh, have, uh, very, very acute, uh, uh, requirements in terms of, uh, relevance at large scale. And this is why, uh, Coveo injecting actions within agent force is, uh, is such a powerful solution. So as this grows, as Laurent says, you know, agent force, you know, despite all the marketing is still at the early innings. And we think we're adding a lot of value. And that's evidenced by the fact that we're one of the early launch partners. If you go on the agent force marketplace of Salesforce, you'll find Kaleo. Hope that clarifies.

That's helpful. Thanks, Louis. Thanks, Laurent. And then just a follow-up question. You talked about, I think, Lou, you talked about targeting the rule of 40, I guess maybe rule of 30 exiting this year based on ARR growth and operating cash flow margin. Can you talk about, I guess, what the growth and the margin assumptions are exiting this year and how you see that playing out over the next couple of years, that next year?

Hey, David. Yeah, look, so the guiding principles in how we're running the business is trying to drive ARR growth. We pay a lot of attention to the unit economics in terms of how much we're leaning into growth versus how much we flow through the profitability line. Tried to give some comments on the call. Right now, what we're seeing is good booking performance. We see accelerating growth. revenue growth and ARR growth based on the outlook we provided and encouraged by the unit economics and what they're telling us. Our pipeline's healthy. The return on our sales spend is good. And so in this coming year, we're going to make some intentional investments. We've increased the amount of core carrying headcount that we'll have in the field for the for the year and that should bode well as we kind of look beyond fiscal 26, if all things play out as expected, to making sure that we continue to see that growth rate move up. And as long as we're seeing that, as long as the unit economics are healthy with good returns, that becomes our priority. Right now, as we look at rule of metrics, as you mentioned, based on ARR and cash flow, we do see those improve. And the mix of how that will improve, we'll let the unit economics tell us. Right now, it's about growth. And we'll continue to let those guide the way and inform where we put our money to work, whether we return that to the bottom line or invest it for future growth.

Hope that helps. That's great. Thanks, Brandon. Your next question comes from the line of Fannis Machopoulos from BMO Capital Markets.

Please ask your question.

Hi, good afternoon. You're leading into some investments and talking about accelerating growth, which is very encouraging, but the macro on the flip side has been looking worse over the last couple of months. So just help us reconcile that. Is the dynamic that customers and prospects are just becoming all the more aware that this is a high ROI solution, and so that's what's causing them to proceed despite incremental macro softness?

Yeah. Hi, Thanos. I'll start. This is Louis. Thanks for your comments and your question. Look, first of all, we'll start at a high level. As you know, in our business, we're not really directly influenced by tariffs, given, obviously, the nature of our business selling, being in the SaaS business, number one. Number two, in fact, yes, I mean, there's clearly, we all read the same news, there's clearly some uncertainty, but AI remains a greater story than that uncertainty. And I guess you know, the answer was right within your question is we can demonstrate and we're publishing more and more of those. If you go on our website, as I invited you to, there's a section with, you know, dozens and dozens of customer testimonials where it's not only just about the technology, but it's about the fact that we measure everything we do financially. So the ROI is is the winning story here at Coveo. So whenever we put our algorithms and our platform on a commerce site, we generally succeed at increasing revenue and metrics such as conversion and margins very significantly. And the same in the knowledge area and productivity area. So fundamentally, we believe and we're seeing increased demand. And I think we might have mentioned, if not, I'll mention it, that our pipeline right now is at an all-time high. And that's predominantly driven by the fact that, A, enterprises want to deploy AI and they want to do it in such a way that they drive success. And B, They want to do that despite the economic context and uncertainty. They want to do that with high ROI, which we absolutely can demonstrate and even sometimes commit to. I hope that answers your question.

It does. Thank you. And then on Shopify, you announced the first joint win. Can you expand perhaps in terms of how that pipeline is building and how your go-to-market initiatives with the Shopify ramping?

Yeah, as you know, and as Brandon mentioned, you know, commerce right now is, you know, on a relative scale, percentage wise, our fastest growing segment. So we're enjoying quite a bit of success. We've talked about the partnership with SAP. We obviously are agnostic to the commerce platform, but Shopify is quite interesting. Shopify, if you follow the company, is making a huge commitment and investment in the enterprise space. So after core Shopify, a decade ago, growing into what's called Shopify Plus, which was really designed for SMBs up to a couple of hundred million in sales, now Shopify is committing a lot of investment around enterprise. And this is where enterprises... in particular, you know, large business to consumer, but, you know, large B2B companies, business to business companies. So think about very large distributors or aftermarket parts, manufacturers, you know, things of that nature require, you know, very complex search and relevance platforms and AI merchandising tools. And that's where we come in. So we're very committed to this partnership. We've actually, we're impressed by the velocity of this, the potential velocity of this channel and the velocity of some of those accounts. And, you know, this is still, you know, nascent, but we already, you know, have, we signed a new customer during the quarter. We already, we're at two right now joint customers. And that pipeline, I can't comment on the specifics of the pipeline, but that pipeline is definitely growing. And this is a fairly powerful channel, you know, for Coveo. And we think we bring a lot of value to Shopify in the enterprise space.

Great. That's good to hear. I'll pass the line. Thank you. Yep. Your next question comes from the line of Paul Tremer from RBC Capital Markets.

Please ask your question.

Thanks very much.

Good afternoon.

Just a question on bookings momentum. You've called out generative has been in the 20% to 25% range for several quarters now. The question is really around the non-generative bookings. What's primarily driving that? You mentioned commerce. How do you size commerce as a percent of total bookings? And then outside of that, what's driving the growth that you've seen?

Hey, Paul.

Yeah, commerce is the predominant source of the rest. We've been highlighting our optimism and conviction around some of the go-to-market partnerships we've had and certainly had a great quarter with SAP and it's great to see Shopify starting now. So that's the majority of the rest of the bookings. Take a customer like DocuSign, they are buying an overall customer service solution from us, of which generative answering is a component of it. So certainly the part of a contract that isn't specifically tied to generative is also tied rounding out that answer. But I'd say between commerce and just generative AI, generative answering solutions, that's the majority of the book is momentum.

Thanks, that's helpful. And then a question on agentic and specifically around the economics of agentic. How are you thinking about the monetization strategy there? Is there will be a pricing uplift with agentic or do you anticipate monetization primarily through increased queries?

Hi Paul, this is Laurent.

Because we believe that agentic will consume more Covail, more generative queries and more regular queries, we're quite happy about the potential of additional consumption. So that's how we are looking at pricing right now. And we feel that Coveo being embedded in more experiences and more agentic experiences is going to be good for us and good for our customers. And we are seeing this market evolving into multiple different kind of agentic experiences. As we mentioned, we are generic in our approach. Agent force is one that is, I guess, more mature from a marketplace perspective where we are available into it, but we expect to be available into others as they come out. And again, the value we create is we get access to the entire enterprise with security, with relevance, and we make that available into the agentic framework, the agentic workflow, and plan to create a lot of value with that.

Thanks for taking the questions. Your next question comes from the line of Richard Say from the National Bank.

Please ask your question.

Oh, hi. Good afternoon. This is Mike Stevens on for Rich. Congrats on the strong quarter. Just with your strategic investment, just wondering for some more color on that, you know, the cadence of those investments, are they... how much may be going to R&D versus the sales team. And it sounds like you may be leaning in as far as the sales team on commerce, or how should we think about those investments?

Yeah, so the majority of the incremental investment will be in go-to-market. You can already see it starting to show up in the financials in the Q4 results when you look at kind of the sequential change there. We've been building out areas like account management teams. We've been increasing quota capacity. Unit economics continue to increase. dictate that we should keep doing that. And so that's where the majority investment will go. We are also going to direct some incremental money into innovation. And Laurent, I don't know if you want to comment on some of those areas of focus.

Yes, absolutely. We're spending a lot of time currently with large strategic customers around building innovation with them, around the agent take about AI, about relevance and so on. And we see an opportunity to accelerate that because we're seeing results and we feel that there's a lot of value at productizing the early results that we're seeing with customers.

Okay, great. Appreciate that.

With the qubit churn, is any of that churn actually going forward your core platform or any of those customers moving to the core platform and kind of embedded in some of this growth or, you know, are those customers essentially just left, they're no longer Coveo customers?

No, if the question is, is any of the churn just moving into a different line item? No, that is not happening. So, We continue to work with these customers to make sure we take good care of them. But as I mentioned, formal end of life has now been announced and we expect it to turn fully now in the coming quarters.

Okay, great. And then just lastly, with that DocuSign, it sounded like a pretty competitive process. Was that displacing something and who were you kind of up against? Was this like an in-house type of team or peers that you kind of usually see show up in these sorts of any color?

Yes, this is Laurent here. Thanks for the question.

So DocuSign is like a lot of our large customers into the lawless space. They are using built-in capabilities, large systems, and or they have homegrown systems that support that. Now, content is growing. Diversity of content is growing. The number of customers that serve is growing. So they need another level of relevance that is powered by AI and a new way to have access to these contents and answers across multiple experiences.

That's what we created for them. Okay, appreciate the insights, guys. Your next question is from the line of Susanne Sukumar from Estifle. Please go ahead.

Good evening, guys, and congrats on the quarter. On the first question, just on the bookings momentum, can you speak a little bit about what's changed incrementally since last quarter with respect to sales cycles, buyer behavior, and And from a go-to-market perspective, how are your priorities changing here given the investments that you plan to make?

Hi, Susans. Thanks for the questions, Louis. So what's changed is really the market dynamic. So if you go back to when Chad GPT was launched, it really, as we said on earnings calls prior quarters, it really kind of stalled the market in many ways. You know, customers were new to AI, trying to discover, trying to experiment, trying to figure out. And as I said on the call, you know, AI was a bit of technology in search of problems within many companies. And now we're seeing, and I'm repeating what we said earlier, you know, purposely here, you know, we're seeing AI fatigue. It's like, you know, companies are now turning to AI their staff and saying, you know, where is AI? Where can we apply it? Where can we, you know, generate benefits? And that's the market dynamic that we see all around. The second aspect is that it took a bit of time to figure out, for the market to figure out that search was not dead and quite the opposite. So it was kind of a market reversal. That search is really the linchpin, you know, necessary to make generative AI work. You know, you need to ground it. And LLM alone is not grounded into enterprise data and specific relevance. And so that technology becomes very, very essential. And so now it's the third quarter in a row that we demonstrate the growth and we demonstrate that. And that's really, in answer to your question, the change in market dynamics here that is fueling the growth. And frankly, there are not that many players who can deliver that kind of technology. And, you know, we certainly think we're recognized in the leader pack here. Does that answer your question?

That's helpful, Louis. Thank you. My second question, guys, I just wanted to touch on the expansion opportunity. You know, it's really encouraging to see NER up here to 107% and the fact that you're seeing up at least, or sounds like more than a 50% increase in spending for the Gen AI cohort. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what have typical cross-sells, use case expansions been that you've been seeing within the base? And how should we think about the, you know, what the average lift is in contract values as you start to, you know, cross-sell a given customer?

Hi, this is Laurent. Thanks for the question.

I would say that, you know, Gen AI is becoming a core ingredient in knowledge. So we're seeing variation, if you want, of the size of the deals and so on, because it's so integral part of knowledge. We're now also starting to see this. having more consistently in commerce and B2B commerce more specifically. So these are different. These are, of course, different kind of deals, but we're quite encouraged by what we're seeing there. Maybe, Brandon, do you want to add something on this?

I'll just add that, Laurent, you mentioned in the prepared remarks, customer ADI global of ours, where we are seeing the convergence of customers Commerce and service, especially in that B2B commerce segment that Laurent just mentioned, ultimately that cross-sell is something that our account management team and the newly built team has been focused on, along with just, of course, the things we've been talking about around Gen AI bolt-ons and so on. The difference between when a customer takes one use case versus more than one is quite substantial to the ACV of that customer. You know, we move from kind of one to 200,000 a year to, you know, 300 to 500 to 500 plus when we can get you know, a full suite of products inside a customer. So it's a big reason we built out this account management function. It's great to see it starting to settle in and contribute results. I love seeing NERs go up and hope to continue to report on that progress.

Thank you, guys. That's a helpful color. Appreciate it. We'll pass the line. Your last question comes from the line of Koji Aikido from Bank of America.

Please go ahead.

Yeah. Hey, thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to ask or go back to the investments for growth. And I think it totally makes sense given the opportunity and generative AI. But it also gives an element of trust us will grow. And so is the increased investment profile needed? to drive the SaaS acceleration already baked into the guide, or could it drive an even better growth trajectory?

Good question. I tried to be clear in the prepared comments on that. We are making these investments to further those growth rates, essentially with the ramp time in enterprise sellers, along with the sales cycle length of enterprise sales that we you know, investments made this year are to inflect beyond the current year. So essentially, the growth we're planning and have guided to in fiscal 26 reflects the investments we've been making in the business. So no, to answer your question very directly, the incremental spend is not directly tied to the current year's revenue plan. It's to further those growth rates. We like the returns we've been seeing over the back half of fiscal 25 here that we've reported in terms of, uh, return on those incremental investments. And so we're going to keep going.

Sounds good, Brandon. And, and just to follow up here, um, it was in the press release, but also in the, in the prepared remarks, you know, it sounds like the initial cohort of generative AI customers in aggregate are up 50% on their usage. And so I guess the question here is why or why wouldn't more recent cohorts, uh, exhibit similar expansion a year later. I guess what I'm getting at is maybe were some of the early ones just signing really, really small given how early it was, or more positively is something inflecting with customers overall where we should see some similar trends like this in the future. Thanks, guys.

From every signal we see, we should expect that to continue. I highlighted the initial cohort only because we're roughly a year into this now. We haven't crossed two renewal cycles yet, so just reporting on what that first renewal cycle is like. showing us. But absolutely, based on the signals we're seeing, customers are increasing usage. They're deploying us in kind of different use cases once they get going and have success with one. So no reason to not expect that to continue, at least at this point.

Got it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time.

I'd like to turn the call over to Louis Tattou for closing comments. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. And look, we want to thank everyone for joining our call today. I guess we hope you appreciate our momentum and share our optimism and confidence for our company and this market. And we look forward to a great year ahead, innovating and working for our customers and investors. And with that, Operator, you may close the call.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect.