CXApp - Q1 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon, and welcome to the CXAI Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and please be advised that this call is being recorded. Now, I would like to turn the conference call over to Mr. Khurram Sheikh, Chairman and CEO of CXAI Inc. Please go ahead, sir.

Khurram Sheikh (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for joining the quarterly earnings call for CXAI. I plan to discuss CXAI's financial results for the first quarter of 2024. I will also provide an overall business update on our progress in shaping the future of work and creating transformative employee experiences using AI technology. By now, everyone should have access to our earnings PR announcement, as well as our new product launch in collaboration with Google Cloud. We'll also be filing our annual 10-K for 2023 shortly. All of this information will also be found on our website, www.cxapp.com. Now I'm gonna go through a couple of disclaimer slides. You can read them at your leisure. We'll get to our first slide about the company and what we're doing.

Dear shareholders, I'm super excited to share our Q1 2024 results and the incredible progress we have made in shaping the future of work. At the heart of CXAI lies a simple yet powerful belief: put the employee first and everything else follows. It's not just about the work; it's about the people who do it, the places where they come together, and the things they need to succeed. CXAI redefines how we think about work, life, and the seamless interplay between the two. And we do all of this using the latest AI technology. We're super excited about this opportunity here. So let me give you a little quick snapshot of where we are now as a company this quarter. We are headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with regional tech hubs globally.

The global presence and diversity of experience gives us a leading edge as we shape the future of work everywhere. Of the 80 team members at Sky, we like to call CXAI Sky, more than two-thirds are engineers, and we have doubled the engineering staff over the course of the last year, at the same time as reducing overall operating expenses efficiently. AI is changing the world, and we are an AI-first enterprise software company. We believe the employees are the center of this multi-billion-dollar growing workplace experiences market, and we're creating a new category in software, employee experiences. The CXAI platform is based on 37 filed patents, with 17 of them already granted. This substantial intellectual property not only establishes our company as a technological front-runner, but also secures our position as a pioneer in the industry.

This platform has been developed in collaboration with leading AI companies in the tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley, and we're super excited to be partnering with Google Cloud as we scale our business to the next level. We are proud to have some of the largest logos of the world as our customers. They are the leading edge of workplace transformation. More than 20 of Fortune 1000 companies who are scaling with us with new deployments globally every day. As you see on the chart, one of the key differentiator for our business is that we have strong security and compliance credentials globally. That is the reason you see us with so many logos from regulated industries. They use CXAI because they know they can trust us with their data and their enterprise security and compliance.

If you look from our last presentation, we've grown to now 60 countries. We're in 200+ cities. We're globally deployed. We're shaping the future of work as we scale up this business. So now let me talk about, you know, our mission statement, as you know, which we've been, we've been saying since we took the company public last year. That the Sky Platform is anchored on the intersection of customer experience, CX, and artificial intelligence, AI, providing digital transformation of workspaces to enhance experiences across people, places, and things. That has been the mission for us, and that is what's driving our, our journey of transformation. And the journey, as we talked on our last call, has really been through, you know, a transformation of our business model and our technology platform.

Our technology platform is state-of-the-art, anchored on AI, and that is what's driving all this innovation. The transition empowers us to deliver a unified work experience through our Workplace SuperApp. By leveraging AI, we can personalize the user experience, automate tasks, and provide valuable data-driven insight to our customers. The shift towards a platform model that you see in 2024+, with recurring revenue stream, positions CXAI for long-term sustainable growth. Ultimately, it's a win-win for both CXAI and our customers. We gain scalability and efficiency, while our customers benefit from a platform that leverages the software capabilities at scale, as well as provide more engaging, productive work experience. So as you look at this chart, you can see the trajectory of where we started and where we're at today.

I'm very proud to say the team has delivered on a number of initiatives that have made this possible, both on the technical side as well as the business side. More importantly, our customers are adopting this strategy of a SaaS platform with microservices, of data analytics that's core and to the offering. And finally, it's based on value-based pricing, which is really resonating with our customers as they look at the net scaling of their business. So when we thought about, you know, what are we gonna do in 2024, you know, the board and I discussed what are the key objectives of the company moving forward? And since we, you know, focused on AI, that was our, you know, initial, you know, raising the flag that we are the leaders in AI.

We really focus on that AI-first technology and business model. Because it, you know, it really revolutionized that employee experience segment. You know, when we think about employee experiences, we think about consolidating all the tools in the mobile-first work super app, streamlining the workflows, boosting efficiency and productivity. Our AI-powered approach goes beyond basic automation. It's designed to create an intuitive and personalized work experience of reducing friction and promoting employee collaboration, key factors for driving engagement, affinity, and productivity. So that's been our first case. Let's get this AI-first technology business model right, and I'll talk about that later as well. Secondly, with a great set of customers that we had in 2023, we wanna grow those existing customers and build new Fortune 100 customers to scale.

That has been a key initiative, and we're making a lot of progress, as you'll see in the Q1 results. This has been our largest growth in NRR, and this is because a lot of these customers have stepped up and doubled down with us. Thirdly, we wanted to launch the Sky Platform to our key customers. The Sky Platform is built on AI first. We're deploying our first new Fortune 1000 customer this summer, and it's going on track really well, so we're proud of that achievement. And then what today we announced is our AI-based analytics product. This has been launched in concert with Google Cloud, collaboration with that. And, you know, it, it's really a revolutionary product. I'm gonna talk a lot more about it later, but this is a key achievement for the team.

Last but not least, we have been focused on strategic partnership. You saw the announcement with Google last quarter, you know, actually last month in April, and since then, we made rapid progress in terms of launching our first product with them, but also with the broader ecosystem in Silicon Valley and the world. We are working with the best and brightest AI technologists and partners to bring this capability to the workplace experience market. So I'm really excited that we're making a lot of strides in creating this category-leading segment for employee experiences. That, to us, is a first in the market. So you may ask, what is the solution? What is the key... What are the key parts of the solution that differentiates us from the rest? Because a lot of key people have been talking about, you know, AI experiences.

So let me talk about... Oh, sorry, went a little too fast. Let me talk about the employee experience solution. This is at the intersection of CX and AI. These are features that power your day. Think about the life of an employee or user across the day and what we can do for them. The first one, the most important one, is this AI experiential analytics. The use of AI to derive insights into employee engagement and workspace utilization is a core component of Sky, emphasizing the value of data in making decisions as well as measuring productivity, and we're gonna talk a lot about that later in the presentation. The second pillar, of course, is our Workplace SuperApp, which we've already deployed with, you know, tens of customers and also deployed globally in hundreds of locations.

This is a central platform that integrates various workplace functionalities, reflecting Sky's emphasis on a unified, mobile-first approach to workspace technology. Our key differentiator is Spatial Intelligence. That's the key part of Sky's technology stack, focusing on optimizing physical spaces and enhancing interactions within the workplace through location-based technologies, providing contextual awareness. This is the way we differentiate among any other booking engine that's out there. And finally, generative AI. Everyone's been talking about generative AI for the last year. We're actually implementing it right now in our platform, both on the back-end side as well as the front-end side. Gen AI and CXAI boost efficiency and productivity by enabling voice and text-activated tasks, like scheduling meetings with a simple command and features like search and discovery. This streamlines administrative duties, driving efficiency and convenience for employees, as well as personalization for on-demand knowledge augmentation.

You're gonna see a lot more of these applications in the coming months as we launch the full Sky Platform, but this is the cornerstone of the differentiation and the growth for the company. So let me talk about, you know, from the business side or from the customer side, why is this so important? Why is this really relevant to an enterprise? The reason why it's important is the world has changed. The world has changed dramatically in terms of how the modern workforce operates. Society as a whole is redefining what it means to be productive, engaged, and fulfilled professionally. The future of work is not place-dependent. It's happening in a space of endless possibilities, where technology is enabling work and life to be blended, integrated seamlessly, and augmented with intelligent personalization. And employees are at the center of this universe.

When you look at that Sky Octagon, employees are at the center of that. The future is here. The future is now. This is being led by the CXAI platform, focused on transformational employee experiences. Sky is not just a super app. It's a catalyst for transformation. Businesses that embrace Sky unlock the potential for a more efficient, collaborative, and engaged workforce. In doing so, they set the stage for a future where work truly knows no bounds. We have architected our solution as a platform that solves problems for both employees and employers as they navigate their work lives, and we have built it grounds up anchored on artificial intelligence. AI is transformative to the future of work, creating massively scalable offerings that create the flywheel effect of automating the workflows, driving engagement, enabling collaboration and productivity, leading to immense affinity in the employer-employee relationship.

We've been strong believers in this technology and now, to be the first in our industry to offer solutions to our customers. Who are those great customers of ours? Now, our primary business is a SaaS platform that we have sold to enterprise customers as an annual subscription for 3-5 years. Today, customers deploy our cloud-hosted software across their enterprise campuses to allow employees to connect with their workplace for a myriad of use cases. Examples being desk room booking, collaboration, navigation, food ordering, and internal communications. Our large enterprise customers are mainly divided into following top five verticals: financial services, technology, media and entertainment, healthcare, and consumer. We are proud to have some of the largest logos of the world as our customers. They're at the leading edge of the workspace transformation.

We have a healthy distribution across all verticals, and we see the adoption trend developing from technology sector-focused companies to the larger Fortune 100 portfolio. Our customers are sophisticated buyers of technology solutions and do not compromise on quality, performance, security, reliability, scalability, and, and of course, technology roadmap. So as you can see, we've kept increasing the logos that are adopting the Sky Platform. We're also increasing the value of the different technology aspects in their platform. We're working very closely with them on the analytics platform that you'll see. That is driving immense affinity, immense data sets that are helping them be more productive in their work experience. So that's kind of like an overview of where we at, what we've accomplished and things we're doing, you know, overall from a product and business side.

Let me talk about the financial results of this quarter. This slide highlights several key metrics demonstrating our continued momentum in Q1 from last year. Let's take a closer look at each of the metrics. Between January 1st and March 31st, 2024, we had record increase in net retention rate, NRR, to 108%. That was accomplished primarily by renewing, expanding seven of our largest Fortune 1000 customers across all five verticals. These large renewals are very important because this signals to the market that these customers are now ready for the scale up in ARR annual renewals. That's north of $2 million, which is a significant part of our ARR portfolio.

So very, very happy with that, and we're also happy that these customers are now looking at the Sky Platform and the SkyView, which is the analytics platform we're gonna talk about, as the next generation platform they wanna scale up to. The other more important metric for SaaS is the subscription-based revenue. And I'm happy to report that our subscription-based revenue for this quarter was 87% of the total revenue, a metric which has been trending upward quarter after quarter, and this quarter marks the highest ever in our history, increased 6 points from last quarter.

This is because of the, the work we've been doing on the planning of the business in terms of, you know, working with our customers to provide value-based solutions, recurring solutions, and then minimizing project work, which traditionally has been done in a manual way, but automating those tasks using AI technology has really helped us get to this really high subscription, to one-time revenue number, and I'm very proud of the team's hard work in achieving that. The other metric that we've been trending upward is the gross margin. The gross margin was 82% for this quarter, which is higher than the previous quarters, and it's inching up and up. We're all in the right direction, all tied to the fact that we're getting more subscription revenue, we're getting less one-time revenue, and we're also increasing the profitability of the company towards that.

Part of all of this is really driven by our land and expand strategy, which continues to be a key contributor to growing subscription revenues with our existing customer base. With the new SkyView analytics product offering, we are looking to ramp up these product expansions, which will really increase the ARR, the NRR, and also the gross margin. Lastly, you know, we've been super focused on creating value for our investors. In that sense, we're really focused on optimizing the operational cost structure, leveraging our investments in AI and headcount rationalization, which we did in late Q4 and Q1, resulting in a net north of 20% operating expense reduction from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024.

This was done as part of a plan to really scale up the business in 2024 with a much lower cost structure. Looking ahead, I'm very confident that our increasing ARR bookings, strong customer acquisition, and focus on subscription revenue will drive sustainable growth. We're committed to continuously innovating the Sky Platform and delivering value to our expanded customer base. All right, so that's our financial information for this quarter. Let me talk about the exciting new announcement that you probably have seen, has hit the press, announcing Sky View, and we, we pronounce it Sky View, so it's an extension of our Sky Platform. It's the AI-based analytics platform for employee experience. It's the world's first in this area.

We're really proud of the revolutionary work we've done to enable this, and I really wanna commend the Google Cloud team that's really supported us in this effort. It's been at breakneck speed in terms of getting the platform up and running, and now it's in beta with lots of great customers who are working with us day in, day out, and we want to launch this at the end of Q2 for general availability. And what does this SkyView platform do? So the SkyView platform is actually revolutionizing the workplace environment by measuring work efficiency and providing actionable insights, driving employee engagement, collaboration, and productivity. So let me give you a little flavor of what that means and the key attributes that we focus on. And the interesting thing is, we actually work with our customers...

Pretty closely over the last year in building this platform. It came from a lot of interaction with our, with our customers. You know, the SkyView platform is really driven towards, you know, providing the first piece is space optimization, really providing those spatial analytics that allows you to, you know, understand the key space utilization data, including heat maps and historical trends, which are instrumental in optimizing workspaces and resource allocation, becomes the most efficient workplace business planning tool out there. The next thing that's important is, what are the people doing with the app and in the workplace? And with our platform, we can trace usage of application functions utilized by the users to gain valuable insights on user behavior, which will drive engagement and productivity.

And also, integrations with corporate infrastructure that tells you what kind of technology assets the people use and how they use it, gives a really good profile of how the enterprise is working. More importantly, when you look at all these pieces together, it provides a comprehensive view of the enterprise. The data that we fuse from our integrations, as well as the data we're getting from space and people information, is driving these actual outcomes, which are really data-driven. And this makes life very easy for enterprise manager or workplace experience manager or an IT manager to really decide, and even an HR manager, to decide what is really happening and what can we do to make things better. And last but not least, the most cool thing about this is the predictive analytics.

This is, you know, part of the tool that really reimagines the whole enterprise. With customizable dashboards, you can create your own dashboard and get key predictions for KPIs with a very intuitive user interface. I'm gonna show you a quick slide view of that. But this is kinda like the four cornerstone pillars of our analytics platform, and it's really driven by this, by our customers, who really wanted to see what are we actually doing with the app? What is the real value of the app? So let me talk about a little bit on some examples of this platform. So the first chart will show you a little bit. When you enter the platform, you get this global view of the work experience. This shows you a global view of the campuses around the world.

So you kinda have, at the tip of your fingertips, the ability to see what's happening in different regions of the world. Whether you're in Dubai or you're in Singapore or you're in L.A. or New York, you can actually see what the utilization per region is, what the bookings have happened, what things are happening in different markets or what functions have been utilized. It gives the enterprise manager a really, you know, sky view of the world, of, of their world. And as you move forward, you know, we talk about, you know, what is, what is most important to them, right? And one of the things is the workspace optimization, to see how many bookings are happening, what is the trend line between different years or different months, as well as different spaces and different locations.

So this gives you a very good view of statistical analysis of the data, the data sets out there. But more importantly, you can scroll in, and you can change the filter to allow you to give you different insights. So this gives really a tool that allows a workplace experience manager to really drive optimization of their assets and drive efficiency and productivity of those assets. The next exciting part is employee engagement, and this is where it gets very exciting, whereas... And we will optimize the solutions so that as a workplace manager or workplace experience manager, you can actually, you know, profile yourself and see what things are important to you. You can understand what events are happening at different places in your organization.

You can see the trends in terms of who's coming in, who's coming out, what are they doing, what features in the app they're using, and really understanding what integrations are they using. Are they using a locker? Are they using, you know, the food service that you offer or other amenities you offer? So it gives you a holistic view of what people are doing, why they're doing it, what matters to them, what's most important. And this is being driven by our largest customers, who are actually using our app for really things that are mission-critical. And mission-critical is ordering lunch every day. Mission critical is getting to the office on time. Mission critical is to find a parking spot. Mission critical is to get home at a reasonable time. And mission critical is to get your work done faster, better, and cheaper.

This is all happening because now we can tell you exactly what the friction points are for the users, what are they liking, what are they not liking, what's gonna make them more productive. This is simply awesome. And, if you get to play with the tool, we're gonna do some demos of this as we launch it with our customers on our next calls, and you'll see how powerful this is in terms of providing that intuitive nature. And to that goes to my next chart on, you know, the data-driven piece, right? The fact that now you can't have opinions on what's right, what's wrong, why is this market working this way? You can actually get real data sets to understand what are the critical things. You can compare data sets between different locations.

You can also decide what active users are using, where they're using it, and fusing that data will give you actionable insights. Meaning that once you know that how many people are actually coming into the office, how many people are actually using the product, how many people are actually being productive in some of the work functions, you can fuse the data together to create more actionable insights. And this is all data-driven, so that way, there's no opinions on whose site is better or whose campus has got better amenities. It all will show up very clearly on where the decisions are to optimize, to improve, to enhance the workspace, and also the employee engagement. And lastly, the way we've thought about all of this stuff is really to make it in the-...

In the hands of the employer to really decide how they want to create their own dashboards. People talk about lots of different dashboards. We talk about just create your own dashboard, which is the interactive predictive analytics. You can ask a question, and you get an answer that satisfies your question and gives you insights on what else could you have been asking or what else do you see in that space. We're using the latest Gen AI models for this, and we're creating really, you know, all these questions can be asked in native language and create these custom dashboards containing really relevant information. And using these, you know, predictive analytic capabilities, you can estimate the potential impact on future programs. So this is really the most advanced solution out there that provides that, you know, intuitive user experience.

So all of these tools are really cool, and they're getting deployed with our customers who are embracing them, because without this, there's no real value for the full app. Unless you have the analytics tied together, you can't really realize the full value of the workplace experience. So let me talk about, you know, our friends at Google who've been partnering with us, and really, it's been a great experience working with them, most prominently because they are the leaders in the AI infrastructure space. And when we think about that, it's not just Google Cloud capability, it's also these other capabilities that I mentioned in the slide, in terms of providing these different user interactions, whether it's through voice or images or other sources, whether it's natural language processing, to really understand user intent and deliver more relevant and personalized results.

Location is super important to us. As you know, we are the spatial intelligence company. We provide really great location data inside the enterprise, but a lot of things are around the enterprise or right near the enterprise. So we provide that full location intelligence. We call it places and things, and the regional variations, localization around different markets. We've got a really great platform play with Google on that. That's really helping. One of the key things of our business has always been about integrations. We do around 100+ integrations with different customers. With Google's API management platform, we're able to do those integrations much, much faster. Think about, you know, months become days, and we can also enable a lot more applications around it. So this is a key differentiator for us compared to our competition.

Lastly, but not least, all our major customers really care about security. Security is a prime factor for the reason why they chose us, and so for us to be at the top of the league on security is super important, and that's why we're leveraging all the features on the Google Cloud Platform for security and compliance. Last but not least, believe it or not, this business is getting to become not just a nice to have, but a must-have. When you have a must-have business, you need high reliability, high quality, high availability, and our customers are demanding that. Our customers are not happy if they can't order something on the app because they're depending on it.

So we have to provide those really high levels of reliability and quality and availability, and this is where really partnering with Google's AI infrastructure has really helped us in enabling that, and we really are looking forward to driving more and more innovation with this AI infrastructure. So anyway, you know, let me close off by talking about why we are important, why Sky, why you, as an investor, should think about it. Number one, you know, AI is changing the world. You're seeing that in every segment. I think in our space, AI is not just the future, it's the present right now. And with our solution, we're gonna be transformation to the market. We have a patented leading-edge enterprise AI SaaS platform, the first in the world.

Very proud of that, and we're gonna launch it in the summer after our first deployment with all our existing customers. This existing customer base is growing. It's very strong, very, very loyal to us and willing to go scale up to the next level. Most importantly, when you think from an AI perspective, we've got diversified deployments globally in 60 countries and 200+ cities. Those datasets are precious because they give you real datasets that allow these AI models to perform better and provide better training and better outcomes. That's what our customers want. They just don't want AI for the sake of AI, they want AI to create actionable results that will be meaningful to their business. We believe we are delivering that with this new SkyView platform, as well as the overall Sky Platform. We are an innovation team. We're based in Silicon Valley.

Our heritage is about transformation. We're super excited about this area. We're super excited about the challenges we see in the market, but more importantly, we have an experienced management team, and our board is very focused on delivering value to our investors. And we... You know, we're not gonna do everything ourselves. We're partnering with leading innovators. You've seen the Google Cloud announcements. We'll see further announcements with other folks in the coming months and years, and we are working very closely in the whole ecosystem to find the best-in-class to provide it. And lastly, as I started, this journey, you know, a year-plus ago, when we took the company public, we want to create this new software category. We really believe in employee experiences. We've been validated in the market that this is the right offering, this is the right capability.

Now we just have to deliver it, and we believe that we are at the tipping point of delivering the capabilities, getting the customer adoption, and scaling to the next level. So with that, that's all I have to say today. You know, we really believe that this is, the company is ready for the next phase of innovation. As we like to say, "To the sky and beyond." Thank you, everybody. We'd love to have you connect with us on our next earnings calls, and we would welcome interactions with you. You can go to our website, www.cxapp.com, and we can share with you all the details about the offering that we did today in terms of the SkyView platform, as well as any other investor documents. Thank you very much. Have a great evening. Bye.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.