Five9 - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Five9 delivered a solid Q1 2025: revenue rose 13% year-over-year to $279.7M and non-GAAP EPS was $0.62, both beating Wall Street consensus; adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 18.8% and operating cash flow reached a Q1 record of $48.4M.
• Strength was driven by subscription revenue growth of 14%, strong installed-base bookings, and 32% YoY growth in enterprise AI revenue; headwinds included a stronger seasonal downtick in consumer/healthcare and tougher comps from last year’s largest customer ramp.
• Guidance: FY 2025 revenue unchanged at $1.140–$1.144B; FY non-GAAP EPS raised to $2.74–$2.78 (vs prior $2.58–$2.62), and Q2 2025 guided to $274.5–$275.5M revenue and $0.64–$0.66 non-GAAP EPS; management expects sequential EPS growth throughout 2025 and at least a 2ppt improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin for the year.
• Catalysts: visible AI momentum (AI attached to nearly all $1M+ logos; AI >20% of enterprise new logo ACV), expanded partnerships (Salesforce Fusion, ServiceNow, Google Cloud Marketplace, IBM WatsonX), and transformation initiatives (4% RIF) aimed at Rule of 40 by 2027 on EBITDA basis and approaching Rule of 40 on FCF basis.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Subscription strength and AI momentum: Subscription revenue grew 14% YoY with enterprise AI revenue up 32% YoY; adjusted EBITDA margin reached 18.8% and operating cash flow hit a Q1 record $48.4M.
• AI-driven wins and attach: “Virtually all of our $1 million-plus ARR new logos [are] continuing to attach AI and AI making up more than 20% of enterprise new logo ACV bookings” — Mike Burkland.
• Raised FY EPS guidance: Management lifted FY 2025 non-GAAP EPS midpoint by $0.16 to $2.76 and signaled positive sequential EPS in Q2 and through 2H, reflecting RIF savings and disciplined expense control.

What Went Wrong

• Seasonal and macro headwinds: A stronger seasonal downtick in consumer/healthcare and elongated sales cycles on larger enterprise deals; growing resistance among some international customers to U.S. vendors, with a portion of deals slipping to the next quarter.
• Mix and comps: Largest customer’s multiyear ramp completed in 2024, creating tougher comparisons and modestly pressuring LTM DBRR (107% vs 108% in Q4).
• Caution embedded in guidance: Despite Q1 beat, management maintained FY revenue guidance and layered prudence into Q2 and 2H outlook given heightened macro uncertainty.

Transcript

Emily Greenstein (Director)

Thank you for joining us today. Certain statements made during the course of this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding the future financial performance and cash position of the company, expected improvements in financial and related metrics, expected ARR from certain customers, certain expected revenue mix shifts, customer growth, anticipated customer benefits from our solution, including from AI, the extent of the anticipated TAM expansion and our ability to take advantage of any such expansion, our AI revenue opportunities and current estimations regarding SAME, company growth, enhancements to and development of our solution, market size and trends, our expectations regarding macroeconomic conditions, company market position, initiatives and expectations, technology and product initiatives, including investment in R&D and other future events or results, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Such statements are simply predictions, should not be unduly relied upon by investors, actual events or results may differ materially, and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information in such statements. These statements are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties that could adversely affect Five9's future results and cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate, including the impact of adverse economic conditions, including the impact of macroeconomic challenges, including continuing inflation, uncertainty regarding consumer spending, high interest rates, fluctuations in currency exchange rates, lower growth rates within our installed base of customers, and the other risks discussed under the captioned risk factors and elsewhere in Five9's annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, management will make reference to non-GAAP financial measures during this call.

A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding reconciliation of our GAAP versus non-GAAP results and guidance is currently available in our press release issued earlier this afternoon, as well as in the appendix of our investor deck that can be found in the investor relations section on Five9's website at investors.five9.com. Also, please note that the information provided on this call speaks only to management's views as of today, May 1st, 2025, and may no longer be accurate at the time of a replay. Lastly, a reminder that, unless otherwise indicated, financial figures discussed are non-GAAP. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Five9's Chairman and CEO, Mike Burkland.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Emily, and thanks to everyone for joining our call this afternoon. We are pleased with our first quarter results, which exceeded our guidance across all key metrics. Subscription revenue, which now makes up 80% of total revenue, grew 14% year-over-year. This was primarily driven by LTM Enterprise subscription revenue growing 20% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 19% for the first quarter, helping drive a Q1 record operating cash flow of $48 million, or 17% of revenue, and an all-time record of free cash flow of $35 million, or 12% of revenue. Today, I'd like to start off by providing key highlights of an extensive operational review we recently conducted across the company. We believe the transformation initiatives we're executing will help bolster our long-term competitive position and reestablish ourselves as a Rule of 40 company as we continue to drive profitable growth.

As we pursue this evolution, our goal is to deliver increased profitability while prioritizing investment in key strategic areas, including AI and go-to-market initiatives, to drive revenue growth and capitalize on our massive TAM that we believe is significantly expanding with AI. The transformation will take time, but we're moving quickly and driving cross-functional alignment across the entire organization to achieve our goals. As a result, in 2027, we are targeting to be above the Rule of 40 on an adjusted EBITDA basis and be approaching the Rule of 40 on a free cash flow basis. Bryan will provide more details on this in a moment. Now I'd like to dive deeper into our AI-powered platform and how it's well-positioned to empower brands to elevate their CX and how they're realizing meaningful benefits through our Genius AI suite of products.

As I touched on last quarter, in order to deliver personalized and accurate self-service using GenAI, you need four key ingredients. First, you need access to LLMs, and it's critical to enable brands to easily change the underlying engine to leverage the latest high-performing models. We believe our engine-agnostic approach allows brands to future-proof their AI decision, and our AI application layer above these engines acts as the key competitive advantage. Second, you need contextual data, which includes consumer-specific and brand-specific information that is distributed across a large number of back-end systems. Our platform typically integrates into 20-plus systems, which enables contextual data to be fed into the LLM in real time in order to provide true context around an interaction. Third, you need historical interaction data.

Our CCAS platform is the system of record for interactions between a consumer and a brand across all channels, including those handled by AI agents as well as human agents. Fourth, you need a platform that provides all channels, such as voice, text, email, web chat, and social, to connect consumers to an AI agent as well as to provide a seamless escalation path to human agents. The market demands AI agents that work across all of these channels, but providing a voice channel globally at scale is a huge barrier to entry. These are key reasons why AI point solutions and third-party AI vendors are strongly leaning in to partner with us and integrate to our platform. As a result, our platform acts as a control point where we are successfully monetizing that access through our voice stream and transcript stream APIs.

To further enhance the value of our platform, we announced that Five9 is deepening our Salesforce partnership with the launch of Five9 Fusion, a best-in-class native integration with Salesforce to deliver better AI-powered customer experiences. With Five9 Fusion, we combine Five9's real-time system of interaction together with Salesforce's system of customer record to create a fully integrated AI-elevated solution for customer experience. With these new product bundles, which are available today, this enhanced integration helps businesses deliver better customer experience, hyper-personalized self-service, and achieve smarter results with a future-ready foundation to drive meaningful business outcomes for our joint customers. Also, we continue to see significant AI momentum driven by real ROI that we are delivering for our customers through our Genius AI suite of products. This, in turn, drives our subscription revenue growth, as demonstrated by the following three customer examples.

The first is a fast food chain with over 3,000 restaurants globally. Following the deployment of our AI agents, they experienced a nearly 40% improvement in containment rate. Concurrently, they implemented our Agent Assist solution, which reduced after-call work time by 35%. As a result of these efficiency gains, they estimate their labor savings to be approximately $1.1 million per year. Since deploying our AI agents, their ARR with Five9 increased by 37%. The second example is a global payment processing provider in the U.K. They deployed our AI agents and experienced a 10% increase in self-service in the first year, as well as a 50% containment rate. They also recently deployed our AI Insights product in the first quarter of this year to identify even more use cases to generate additional ROI with our suite of AI products.

Since deploying our AI agents, their ARR with Five9 increased by 49%. The third example is a personalized healthcare company that provides patients with easy access to medical equipment and supplies covered by insurance. Following the deployment of our AI agents, they have driven a 15% reduction in call volume by automating common questions such as medical equipment delivery status and insurance guidelines. They also expanded the use of our AI solutions by adding chatbots and Agent Assist to gain further efficiencies. Since deploying our AI agents, their ARR with Five9 has more than doubled. Additionally, we continue to lead the CX market with key AI innovations, as demonstrated by our recent announcement of a new offering called Spotlight for AI Insights, which is designed to help brands unlock the voice of their customers hidden in troves of interaction data.

AI Insights leverages GenAI to mine customer conversations at scale and understand emerging topics, top trends, and root causes of issues through a powerful visualization interface. Spotlight takes AI Insights to a whole new level by harnessing the power of GenAI to discover specific trends and metrics that are typically very difficult to identify in an automated fashion. We believe this will not only provide key insights for contact center operators, but also empower lines of business leaders with valuable data and tailored intelligence to continuously improve their business through increased sales, enhanced products, elevated CX, and more. Another AI capability that is becoming a key part of driving AI agent adoption is our Dial of Trust. This allows brands to scale the level of GenAI that is incorporated into our AI-enabled solutions. GenAI is becoming more powerful and more accurate by the day.

However, there is a trust spectrum for brands that will vary by different topics and different industries when using AI to confidently provide customers with accurate information and answers. Our Dial of Trust enables brands to manage this risk through a continuum where the level of GenAI and fusion can be modified for various use cases. We believe that this tooling is essential for delivering trusted AI. As a result of our leading position in AI, we continue to see significant momentum in our AI business, as evidenced by virtually all of our $1 million-plus ARR new logos continuing to attach AI, and AI making up more than 20% of enterprise new logo ACV bookings. Additionally, our enterprise AI revenue grew 32% year-over-year in the first quarter, making up 9% of enterprise subscription revenue.

We also continue to further penetrate our install base by leveraging our revolutionary AI Blueprint program. It's still early days, but preliminary results are very promising. For instance, in the last several months, we have been collaborating with a growing number of our customers to help them build their AI roadmap and identify use cases to generate significant ROI with our AI solutions. 50% of customers going through the AI Blueprint process have purchased our AI products. We're highly encouraged by these results, and we expect this momentum to accelerate throughout the year. In addition to our AI momentum and opportunity, there remains a significant opportunity in our core CCAS market with a $24 billion TAM as cloud migrations continue.

Therefore, we remain very optimistic about our long-term durable global opportunity, especially at the upper end of the market, which is the largest and least penetrated part of the market and the fastest-growing category of our business. Now I'd like to touch on the momentum we're seeing with some of our key partners. As we announced in November, Five9 and ServiceNow continue to execute on the goals of our strategic partnership. Later this quarter, Five9 Transcript Stream will integrate into ServiceNow interaction management, enabling agents to focus entirely on customer issues without the need for manual note-taking. ServiceNow's Now Assist, powered by GenAI, will leverage these real-time transcriptions to generate summaries and resolution notes, significantly reducing call wrap-up activities and average handle times. Additionally, Five9's intelligent routing engine will soon route ServiceNow digital channels and cases, ensuring seamless and efficient case management.

ServiceNow is also integrating its metadata to enrich Five9's workforce engagement management solutions. This will reduce operational overhead for managers by streamlining routing management across both platforms, making it easier to adjust staffing dynamically during peak demand periods. Additionally, last quarter, we announced our launch on the Google Cloud Marketplace, both in the U.S. and internationally, and we saw more than $35 million in ACV pipeline added in the last two months. We're very pleased with the early traction and anticipate the strong momentum to continue. We also recently teamed with IBM to integrate WatsonX into our Genius AI platform to bring customers the option to leverage WatsonX as their preferred LLM when building AI-powered CX solutions. This collaboration is designed to enhance our platform's flexibility and help drive the next wave of innovation in AI-powered CX, enabling businesses to deliver more personalized, efficient, and impactful customer experiences.

In summary, we are pleased with our continued momentum in AI for CX and our execution against the massive core CCAS market opportunity. We believe that our differentiated approach to accelerate AI adoption, as well as ongoing innovation of new AI offerings to support the entire customer journey from self-service AI agents to agent augmentation to operational efficiency, are key drivers fueling the momentum in this fastest-growing category of our business. Additionally, I want to thank our team of Five9ers, whose passion and unwavering dedication continue to be the driving force behind transforming our business to strengthen our leadership position in the industry. We are off to a strong start in 2025, and I look forward to sharing our progress as the year unfolds. With that, I will turn it over to our President, Andy Dignan. Andy, please go ahead.

Andy Dignan (President)

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone.

In the first quarter, we continue to execute well against a strong pipeline, seeing an increased volume of new logo wins year-over-year, despite some lengthening of sales cycles on larger deals, which we attribute to the macro backdrop. From a geopolitical perspective, we are starting to see some resistance in international regions to doing business with U.S. vendors, but we are monitoring this very closely as we are operating in a very dynamic environment. For our install-based bookings, we had the highest year-over-year growth rate for any quarter in the last three years. This is a direct reflection of the investments we've made to drive upsell and cross-sell motions into our customer base. As we normally do, I will share some key examples of wins. The first example is a new business unit of our Fortune 50 financial services customer.

They chose Five9 to replace legacy systems and enable scalable, compliant voice solutions integrated seamlessly with Salesforce. The solution will improve customer outreach through click-to-call, ensuring TCPA-compliant call recording, and reducing call abandonment by routing branch calls to the right banking professionals. The solution aligns with their digital transformation goals, enhances the customer and banker experience, and positions Five9 as a trusted partner in secure enterprise-scale voice modernization. We closed this deal in early April and anticipate this initial order to result in over $2.8 million in ARR to Five9. The second example is a leading vehicle mobility solutions provider that helps consumers with vehicle repair, replacement, fleet management, insurance, and legal services. They were using an on-prem solution that was difficult to manage and did not provide holistic visibility into all of their operations.

As a result, they chose Five9 for our deep integrations into their ecosystem of applications, including Microsoft Dynamics and Teams. They were also looking to maintain continuity with our partner, Verint, to avoid the retraining that would have been required on other platforms. Most importantly, they selected Five9 for our extensive portfolio of agentic AI solutions and the significant ROI they expect to generate by eliminating simple tasks with our AI agents and gain further efficiencies with our agent assist transcription and summary capabilities. We anticipate this initial order to result in over $1.7 million in ARR to Five9. The third example is a nonprofit health plan serving roughly 400,000 members in California. They were using an on-prem system that lacked key technology capabilities.

They chose Five9 to modernize their customer experience by leveraging our comprehensive suite of AI solutions, including AI agents for self-service, Agent Assist for transcriptions, and AI Insights to identify new AI use cases and efficiency opportunities. They are also looking to enhance customer experience across text, chat, email, and voice channels, integrating seamlessly with their Jiva patient record system and HSP claim solution for efficient call handling. They also selected Five9 for our deep integration with Microsoft Teams, our WEM portfolio to optimize their operations, and our analytics capabilities to fulfill their state-compliant obligations. We anticipate this initial order to result in approximately $900,000 in ARR to Five9. I would like to share an example of an existing customer who expanded their business with us. This leading service provider of Medicaid and other government-funded self-directed care programs has been a Five9 customer for over 10 years.

This customer partnered with us to win a major state contract, resulting in a significant increase in the size of their contact center. Self-service is a major initiative with this expansion, which is why this customer selected our AI agents. With this add-on order, we anticipate the ARR to Five9 will increase from $1.5 million to over $5.5 million. I would like to turn it over to Bryan to take you through the financials. Bryan?

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Thank you, Andy. We are pleased to report Q1 revenue growth of 13% year-over-year, primarily driven by subscription revenue growing 14% year-over-year. Subscription revenue growth was driven by, first, strong revenue contributions from our backlog of new logos, which exceeded expectations. Second, highest year-over-year growth rate in three years for install-based bookings, which tend to turn to revenue quickly.

Third, 32% year-over-year growth in enterprise AI revenue, which continues to be the fastest-growing category of our product portfolio. However, as anticipated, we experienced tough year-over-year comparisons due to a stronger downtick among seasonal customers in our consumer and healthcare verticals and significant revenue contributions from our largest customer completing its ramp throughout last year. In the first quarter, subscription revenue made up 80% of revenue, while usage revenue accounted for 13%, and professional services made up the remaining 7%. Enterprise revenue from subscription, usage, and PS combined made up 90% of LTM revenue. Our commercial business, which represented the remaining 10%, declined in the single digits on an LTM basis. Like many software companies, our commercial business is more exposed to the macro environment. Also, as a reminder, this trend is partially by design, driven by our ongoing focus on larger customers.

Additionally, as expected, our LTM dollar-based retention rate came in at 107% versus 108% last quarter, primarily driven by the two tough comparison factors I previously mentioned. Turning now to profitability. We continue to generate strong year-over-year margin expansions across the board, primarily due to our ongoing focus on disciplined expense management. As a result, Q1 adjusted gross margin increased approximately 160 basis points year-over-year to 62.4%, and adjusted EBITDA margin increased approximately 360 basis points year-over-year to 18.8%, which is a Q1 record. First quarter non-GAAP EPS was $0.62 per diluted share, up $0.14 or 29% year-over-year. Also, stock-based compensation decreased 12% year-over-year from $45 million to $39 million, which equated to 14% of revenue in the first quarter. We remain highly focused on continuing to moderate stock-based compensation over time. Now I'd like to share some cash flow highlights.

As Mike mentioned, I'm pleased to report that operating cash flow was a Q1 record at $48.4 million or 17.3% of revenue. This was primarily driven by our strong adjusted EBITDA and continued strength in DSO performance, which came in at 33 days. Also, free cash flow reached an all-time high at $34.9 million or 12.5% of revenue, achieving a free cash flow conversion rate of 66%. As a reminder, we're planning to retire the remaining $434 million principal balance of our 2025 convertible notes in cash when it matures in June. The next maturity of our convertible notes is 2029, so we feel comfortable with our cash position. In addition, we expect our free cash flow generation to improve meaningfully, putting us on a path to being net cash positive. Additionally, we've developed a holistic framework to evaluate our capital allocation alternatives.

Therefore, going forward, we will have a balanced approach in assessing organic investments versus share repurchases versus opportunistic acquisitions. Before turning to guidance, I would like to provide more details on the financial impact of our transformation initiatives, as well as share our perspectives on the latest macro condition and its impact on our outlook. As part of our extensive operational review, we announced a 4% reduction in our global workforce on April 3rd. This impacted most of our departments, mainly in the U.S., and it represented a net reduction of $20 million-$25 million in annualized compensation-related non-GAAP expense. As Mike mentioned, our goal is to increase long-term profitable growth and surgically invest in key areas such as AI and go-to-market initiatives in order to capitalize on our massive TAM opportunity that is further expanding with AI.

In combination with ongoing cost optimizations, we expect the net effect to drive at least a 2 percentage point improvement in annual adjusted EBITDA margin in 2025 from the 18.8% we reported in 2024. As a reminder, we expect one-time cash expenditures associated with the RIF to range between $7 million-9 million and non-cash expenditures of approximately $1 million-$1.5 million, both of which are not accounted for in the non-GAAP bottom line guidance I'll be providing shortly. With regard to the macro environment, I'd like to remind you that we started 2025 with what we believed to be conservative guidance based on the assumption that macro conditions would not change materially from what we were seeing at the beginning of the year. Given recent heightened macro uncertainty, we believe it is important to take a slightly more prudent stance in terms of our guidance.

As a result, we're keeping our full year 2025 revenue guidance unchanged at $1.14 billion, and for second quarter revenue, we are guiding to a midpoint of $275 million. As for the second half of the year, we expect revenue to increase sequentially in the third quarter and slightly more in the fourth quarter. With regards to the bottom line, we are raising the midpoint of our 2025 non-GAAP EPS to $2.76, which is $0.16 higher than the guidance we provided during our last earnings call. For the second quarter, this is the first time we're guiding Q2 to a positive sequential growth for non-GAAP EPS at a midpoint of $0.65 per diluted share. This is reflective of the net savings from our recent RIF, as well as disciplined ongoing expense management.

As for the second half of the year, we expect non-GAAP EPS to increase sequentially in the third quarter and slightly more in the fourth quarter. Please refer to the presentation posted on our investor relations website for additional estimates, including share count, taxes, and capital expenditures, as well as GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations. In summary, we're pleased with our first quarter results. We will remain laser-focused on everything we can control in order to drive strong profitability while making strategic, high-impact investments in key initiatives to further our leadership position. Operator, please go ahead.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Before we begin our Q&A session, we ask that our analysts please be on camera and limit themselves to one question to allow for as many questions as time permits. We will begin with Scott Berg from Needham.

Rob Morelli (Analyst)

Hi everyone, thanks for taking my question. This is Rob Morelli for Scott.

Congrats on the quarter. We'd like to just touch on the subscription revenue guide for the year. Do you believe 1Q is going to be the trough for the year? Just like to see how that's going to trend. Thanks.

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Yeah, I can help answer that. We haven't given specifics around the subscription growth in terms of guidance. You have our annual total revenue guidance out there. We have it unchanged at $1.14 billion from what we guided to at the beginning of the year. What's reflected in there is that, you know, if you kind of go back starting from Q1 throughout the year, in Q1, we saw relatively stable macro conditions, although we did see consumer and healthcare seasonal downtick being stronger, which was anticipated because of the strong uptick we saw in Q4.

Going into Q2, we saw the uncertainty in macro conditions increase a bit. We are being slightly more prudent despite the fact that we're not actually seeing material changes in our business through April so far. With the slight prudence built into Q2 and the rest of the year, that's what's reflected in total revenue, and a similar type of assumption can be made for subscription.

Rob Morelli (Analyst)

Got it. That's a helpful answer with color. When it comes to the Rule of 40 target you guys outlined, can you provide any color on the breakdown that you're anticipating, which means either adjusted EBITDA revenue growth or free cash flow and revenue growth? Thanks.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, Bryan, do you want to speak to the medium term?

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Yeah, so the medium term, what we have assumed for revenue growth is 10%-15%, and that's assuming a stable macro condition similar to what we saw in Q1. Now, from a bottom line perspective, we expect EBITDA margin in the 25%-30% range. If you kind of look at the different components there, the gross margin today we reported 62.4%, and we're expecting 66%-68% in the medium-term model. That's really driven by our subscription gross margin getting deep into the 70s, driven by revenue scaling against fixed and semi-fixed costs. Also, we have mixed shifts happening from our usage and professional services revenue into subscription, and those have lower gross margins than 50s and break-even levels. That's a mixed shift that helps overall gross margin. Of course, we'll expect to continue to get operating expense leverage as well.

That's coming from the RIF that we just recently did and the transformation initiatives that Mike talked about, where we'll be focused on various areas like automation, process improvement, percentage of our workforce, you know, increasing in lower cost offshore locations, and so on and so forth. We're confident that we'll get to target above Rule of 40 on an EBITDA basis and approach Rule of 40 on a free cash flow basis.

Rob Morelli (Analyst)

Got it. That's helpful. Thanks for the coloring. Congrats on the quarter.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, thank you.

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Siti Panigrahi from Mizuho.

Siti Panigrahi (Managing Director)

Thanks for taking my question. I want to drill into the comment about, you know, longer sell cycle on the enterprise side you talked about due to macro. Could you elaborate a bit on that? Is it particularly particular in the international region or U.S.? When do you start seeing that?

Is this only on the enterprise side or mid-market? Any color would be helpful.

Andy Dignan (President)

Good question. Really focused on the large end of the enterprise market, just these bigger deals, just a little bit longer sale cycles. You know, the team's still focused on them, obviously continuing to go forward, but it's really just in that space. International, different reason, right? A little bit what's going on in sort of the geopolitical landscape, some aversion to business with U.S. vendors. We are focused on our install-based customers there, which, as you heard, had a good quarter.

Siti Panigrahi (Managing Director)

Just to clarify, did it trigger any kind of deal slippage to next quarter or anything, or is that an ongoing trend you saw?

Andy Dignan (President)

Yeah, that's so these deals just slipped into the next quarter, and you know, the teams are still focused on those deals, and things are looking good.

Siti Panigrahi (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Siti.

Andy Dignan (President)

Thanks, Siti.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Raimo Lenschow from Barclays.

Raimo Lenschow (Managing Director)

Hey, good to see you guys again. The quick question for me, Mike, you know, you and I go way back, and we've seen uncertain times before. Like, how does Genius AI now play into kind of this environment and customers making decisions? Because it does feel like delaying it or kind of showing a lot of uncertainty might have been the old good reaction, but with AI now, it feels like we kind of actually need to move faster. Can you speak to what you're seeing in the field there?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, it's great to see you, Raimo, and thanks for being back on the team, so to speak. You're right. I mean, look, uncertain times always impact decision-making of any kind, right? I think we're also benefiting from this, you know, AI revolution that is really causing a rush in a lot of ways by a lot of these companies to figure out AI. Every CIO is being told by every CEO, go figure out AI. The good news is we've come up the learning curve as an industry, not the vendors necessarily, because we've been at this quite a long time, but I think the customers are coming up that learning curve. You know, we're seeing great momentum in terms of decision-making.

It's not just in, you know, the 100% attach rate on new logo, million-dollar-plus deals that we're doing. It's also in our install base. I mean, we have this AI Blueprint program, which we've been talking about, and we came out with that, you know, a couple quarters ago, and it's really, really working well. 50%, five-zero, 50% of the customers that go through this AI Blueprint program with us are purchasing our AI solutions. We're penetrating our install base, excuse me, as well as attaching AI to new deals. It is, you know, I feel like we've unlocked the opportunity with AI, but at the same time, look, this, you know, the real scale of AI use does depend on the ROI that we're delivering.

You heard about those three, just three of many customer examples where we're delivering real tangible ROI, whether it's higher containment and self-service or whether it's reduction in after, you know, call handling time. It's an exciting time in the industry.

Raimo Lenschow (Managing Director)

Sorry, and then, Bryan, one for you. If you think about the transformation you started with, you know, following the review, if you think about it, how should you think about the impact on the organization in terms of the different divisions? Was that kind of a more like take underperformance out, think about more what is needed in the new AI world versus where we had people kind of working on before? How should we think about the implication, the impact there?

Is there like a, is there going to be like a period where everyone adjusts, or how should, you know, how's that going to play out for you? Thank you.

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Yeah, I can touch on it, Mike. You can chime in. It was across, first of all, the reduction in force was across most departments, and a majority of that was in the U.S. What we made sure is that from a sales capacity basis, you know, it's not impacted, and we continue to reinvest in that area and our go-to-market initiatives as well as our AI initiatives as well. That's where we're focused, and we'll continue to make sure that that's aligned internally strategically.

Raimo Lenschow (Managing Director)

Okay, thank you.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Raimo.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Next, moving on to Terrell Tillman from Truist.

Bobby Deon (Analyst)

Great. Mike, Andy, Bryan, thanks for taking the question. This is Bobby Deon for Terrell.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

I wanted to double-click on the Five9 Fusion announcement with Salesforce. Specifically, the press release mentioned that Five9's bring-your-own telephony adoption has doubled in 2025. What do you think is driving the growth in BYOT, and why now?

Andy Dignan (President)

Yeah, I mean, I think as we've long been partnered with Salesforce, obviously Salesforce has been heavily investing in taking their customers on the AI journey, and we've been on that journey with them collectively. They have been really driving the BYOT within their customer base, within their sales teams. The idea behind Five9 Fusion was to really simplify the go-to-market so that the Salesforce sellers, our sellers, and then most importantly, the customers, they really understand the value proposition and which solutions you need on both sides.

Certainly with BYOT, when you get to the upper end of that offering, you need our voice stream or our transcript stream and voice stream to drive Einstein. That is really what is kind of driving a lot of the opportunities in the install base with Salesforce and new logos.

Bobby Deon (Analyst)

Thank you.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Bobby.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Peter Levine from Evercore.

Peter Levine (Equity Analyst)

Great. Thank you, gentlemen, for taking my questions. Maybe just to double down, Mike, on your earlier comments, can you maybe just talk about the transformation you are going through internally? You know, one thing you mentioned in the call, go-to-market initiatives to drive revenue growth, maybe just share with us, what does that entail? Is it more partners? Do you really are you coming across new buyers, given that it is more of an AI kind of world?

I mean, is the sale, again, you talked a lot about sales cycles, but just curious, maybe just talk about, you know, what the, you know, operational view looked like, and then some of the initiatives, especially around go-to-market that are changing.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, great question, Peter. Again, transformational initiatives across top line and bottom line, right, to get on that path to Rule of 40 on a free cash flow basis. If you think about the top line and the go-to-market, it really is, I would say, both product as well as go-to-market. We think about from a product standpoint, we're definitely investing much heavier into AI, showing in our innovation, some of the products we just announced are evidence of that, and there will be more. It's also a continuation of some of the sales execution and sales org changes we've made.

It is also top-of-funnel initiatives, Peter. I mean, again, I have been here 17 years, and I can tell you right now there is a science to sales and marketing that we have always employed, so to speak. You know, look, we hire sales capacity based on our ability to grow top-of-funnel leads and opportunities. We have got a number of really exciting top-of-funnel initiatives that we are investing in. Again, we are being very surgical about it. We are being very scientific about it. There are some really exciting marketing initiatives that we are in the midst of, I would say, piloting. Again, we are being careful in terms of how much we spend, but so far the early signs are very good in terms of lead flow increases, which to me is the leading, leading indicator that has to drive our bookings growth.

I would say it's, you know, everything from investments in product, top-of-funnel marketing initiatives, as well as sales execution initiatives, and some of the things we've been working on, as well as, I would say, upsell into our install base as well. When we think about new logos, that's really, you know, what I've already talked about. If you think about it, penetrating our install base, things like the AI Blueprint program, as well as some of those changes we made to our, you know, CSM and AD orgs last year.

Andy Dignan (President)

Actually driving a lot of opportunities with our top partners. You know, you've heard a continuous drumbeat on new partnerships, strengthening partnerships, and so a lot of focus on area as well.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, awesome.

Peter Levine (Equity Analyst)

For you, Bryan, can you maybe just share with us, like, how you stress-tested the full year guide? I do know, like, the macro-sensitive, you know, segments of the market that you guys are having consumer, you know, I mean, that drives a lot of upsell for you guys. I think it's 3Q, 4Q in the back half, but again, there's still a lot of uncertainty, right? If you think about what you're seeing today in the pipeline, just walk us through, like, how you stress-tested these numbers to kind of reinsure us that these are de-risked.

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Yeah, absolutely, Peter.

If you think about it, at the beginning of the year, when we set the guide, we mentioned that we were assuming the seasonal uptick in the second half of this year to be more muted than the strong seasonality that we saw in the back half of 2024. Now, given the increased uncertainty, we have assumed that that muted seasonality is even slightly more muted than what we were originally assuming at the beginning of the year. That's if we beat Q1 by $7.7 million against the midpoint of our guidance, and essentially we haven't put that through, so it gives us a little bit of that cushion. On the headwind side, of course, we have the tough comparison of the largest customer that ran throughout. It's finishing its multi-year ramp throughout last year.

That still exists, but there's also positive factors like our 32% AI enterprise AI revenue growth, and we expect that momentum to continue with some ebbs and flows throughout the year. Also, as Andy mentioned, you know, enterprise install-based bookings coming in at the highest year-over-year growth rate in the last three years. When you sort of net out all those positives and potential headwinds, that's how we landed at that unchanged midpoint of $1.14 billion.

Peter Levine (Equity Analyst)

Great. Thank you for the color.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Arjun Bhatia.

Willow Miller (Senior Equity Research Associate)

Hi, everyone. I'm Willow Miller on for Arjun Bhatia, and thanks for taking our question. Maybe to double-click on is guidance de-risked. In your prepared remarks, you talked about seeing some resistance of international companies using American vendors. How much of a risk is this?

In your conversations with these customers, are you able to reassure them enough that you can still win the deal?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

I'll start. I think the, I guess, if you want to call this a silver lining, you know, international represents about 12% of our business. It's not a large portion, but it's, you know, it is greater than zero, so to speak. I think we're seeing it more on the net new side than we are on the install-based side. Andy, you could speak a little bit to that.

Andy Dignan (President)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's not all deals. I think I mentioned also in the install base in international to our existing customers, there's still a lot of, obviously, confidence in us. The other part is, I mean, we are a strong global company, right?

We have coworkers and customers across the globe. And so how we treat our data, how we treat their data in terms of our architecture, we're able to have that kind of level of conversation. It seems to be right now just a little bit of a, for lack of a better term, emotional in terms of just wanting to make sure that they fully understand what's going on. But, you know, confident that as some of that starts to dissipate over time, that, you know, we'll continue to execute on the international front.

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Also in terms of the guidance being de-risked, whether domestically or internationally, another way to look at it is breaking down the business between new logos and install-based contribution to the incremental revenue that we're guiding, right? So right now, in the last three quarters of 2025, our guidance implies $67 million of incremental revenue.

If you look at just the recurring revenue side of that, that's 93% of it or $62 million. If we assume that DBRR stays at 107%, which we just reported in Q1, that implies that $52 million of that $62 million incremental revenue comes from our existing base. The remaining $10 million is coming from new logos, but a vast majority of that is from new logos that are already in our backlog. We have good visibility into the ramp of those revenues throughout the rest of the year. A very small portion would come from the new logo go-getts that would happen in the next month or two because the rest of it will impact 2026 revenue.

Willow Miller (Senior Equity Research Associate)

Thank you. That's helpful.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Catharine Trebnick from Rosenblatt.

Catharine Trebnick (Managing Director)

Hi, thanks for taking my question.

Pressing more on international, BT, you know, that was a nice land you guys did over a year and a half ago. How is that progressing now after this April 2nd with the tariff announcement? Even though you're a software vendor, I'm just curious to see if there's any different interaction. The reason I bring it up is I spoke to a company in the U.K. that said their business really increased dramatically because they're a contact center based in the U.K. So I just would be helpful to get more color. Thank you.

Andy Dignan (President)

Yeah, I mean, our relationship with BT continues to be strong. A lot of good activity continues to win deals. Certainly, we continue to lean heavily in international on our partners, right? Because they sort of help balance out that story, you know, BT making the investment with us.

You know, I think they're just, we're just going to continue to execute with them and no real major change, I would say, in the business and the pipeline. We just got to keep executing together.

Catharine Trebnick (Managing Director)

All right, thank you.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Catharine.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Samad Samana from Jefferies.

Samad Samana (Managing Director)

Hey, guys, good evening. Appreciate you taking my question. Maybe first, just in terms of the partners that you guys mentioned, it's obviously like a really marquee list of great companies. I'm just curious, are any of these where there's a joint co-selling motion where the vendors are actually incentivizing their own sales organizations, just trying to get a sense of how much distribution you're getting here beyond your own go-to-market efforts? I have one follow-up question.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, I would say, Samad, that all of them have very, very healthy co-sell arrangements where we're just partnering so effectively in the field with our counterparts. I mean, we've always been good at that, and we've always been great at that. You know, there are some incentives in some of those partnerships as well. Andy, if you want to provide color.

Andy Dignan (President)

Yeah, there's incentives in co-selling at both sides. I mean, each company kind of has a different approach in how they do these deals. Ultimately, you know, across all of them, I can say there's incentive on both sides to deliver.

A lot of times what comes with these partnerships is dedicated people on both sides, you know, working together to make sure that they're getting out in front of their, you know, obviously these partners that we're talking about have very large sales forces. Having dedicated people on their teams to make sure that they're out there pitching, you know, the joint value proposition. Yeah, great relationships and, you know, incentives across the board.

Samad Samana (Managing Director)

Very helpful. Maybe just the medium-term operating model that's in the slide deck, I think that's new, Bryan. I'm just curious what you're thinking about in terms of what the AI revenue contribution will look like as you march toward that, maybe what assumption you've made. The reason I'm asking is maybe how the gross margin of that revenue stream looks compared to the current gross margin stream.

Is that something that can maybe push gross margins even higher than where we are today?

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Yeah, no, thanks, Samad. For the medium-term target, the 10%-15% revenue growth has sort of a general momentum of AI that we are seeing today. There is further upside in terms of potential revenue growth if AI acceleration really takes off. From the gross margin perspective, you're right in that AI gross margin, and I, you know, our AI agent portfolio is a good representation of this because when we acquired Inference five years ago, the gross margin of that business was in the high 70s and low 80s. We've maintained that, if anything, we've actually improved it further.

As AI becomes a bigger mix of revenue, that should have a tailwind to overall gross margin on the subscription margin side as well as the total gross margin.

Samad Samana (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you so much.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Samad, I'll add one other data point just to consider in the mix here relative to AI. Again, +20% of our ACV enterprise bookings were AI in the last few quarters, right? That is another good number to kind of be able to triangulate what you're asking.

Samad Samana (Managing Director)

Great. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

You got it.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Tom Blakey from Cantor.

Tom Blakey (Managing Director)

Hi, guys. Thank you very much for taking my question. I think it's on the heels of maybe what Samad was just asking about what the kind of revenue looks like, you know, going further out. Obviously, no numbers or no, you know, kind of hard, you know, guidance here.

Previously, Five9 has always kind of, you know, if you go back a couple of years, guided to 16%, you know, that was the previous line. And then you'd beat that and, you know, grow in the 20s. Now we're 10%-15%. Maybe talk about the level of, you know, kind of comfort you're in, you know, cushion you're putting into that 10%-15% and what the revenue looks like today in the future from a consumption perspective versus a seat perspective, from a partner perspective, you know, like Samad just asked about AI. That's obviously going to go up as a percentage of revenue given its growth dynamic. Any of the type of color and, you know, what kind of cushion you're baking into that 10%-15% would be, I think would be helpful.

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Yeah.

You know, this is a result of the operational review that we just completed. As Mike and Andy mentioned, you know, we will continue to invest on the curve for our sales capacity and drive go-to-market initiatives. That is what's reflected in this. The 10%-15% obviously is two years out. You know, we've been growing in the 13% in the most recent quarter. We're guiding to 10% with slightly more prudence in our guide than what we were originally thinking. You can kind of triangulate using that because we haven't given specifics around, you know, what the beat level would look like and things like that. You can triangulate using those data points. From a pricing perspective, of course, our AI portfolio is all based on some type of consumption-based pricing.

That's going to become a bigger mix of our overall revenue. That will be a nice driver going forward as well. As I mentioned earlier with Samad, if there's acceleration in the adoption of AI, then that would become a much bigger driver. Yeah.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Tom, to answer your last point there about partners, look, we continue to do more and more with partners, not just the strategic partners we're talking about, but also with just traditional channel partners, especially internationally, but even domestically. I think you'll continue to see us get more and more opportunities from partners, but also, you know, just get more reach out of those partners.

Tom Blakey (Managing Director)

Okay. Maybe just one quick follow-up on the transcript stream deal that you did there. I know you've mentioned this a couple of times now, Mike.

You seem awfully excited about it. I know you've given other color about the AI products. Sorry for the granular questions here. You know, IVA and Insights and Summaries are still leading the way here. Is there an anticipation that this could uptick here in the second half of calendar 2025? That's it for me. Thank you.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

I think it's a good question, Tom. Again, when it comes to transcript stream and voice stream and those API layers, they're becoming much more important, especially in some of these partnerships, these strategic partnerships we've been enhancing and, you know, empowering our partners to do more with our data, but making sure we monetize that along the way, right? We'll see. It's a pretty small number today, but I do think that's another separate growth factor in a lot of ways.

When we think about, again, the AI pie or the AI game, it's a team sport. We are going to, you know, be in accounts with Salesforce and ServiceNow and other CRM vendors, for example. It's going to be some of ours, some of theirs, and we're going to monetize it when it's theirs.

Tom Blakey (Managing Director)

Thank you, Mike. Thank you, guys.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

You got it. Thanks, Tom.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Jim Fish from Piper Sandler.

Jim Fish (Senior Research Analyst)

Hey, guys. I wanted to follow up on Peter's question. What are some of those top of funnel initiatives you're investing in? Is there a plan to change comp structures at all either?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, I mean, look, we're always, thanks, Fish. We're always looking at comp structures and commission plans and making sure that we've got the right incentives to, you know, drive the right behavior in terms of our go-to-market teams.

We're always fine-tuning those comp plans. On an absolute basis, you know, there's not going to be a whole lot of change, but there may very well be, you know, new metrics or KPIs that get introduced, especially, you know, in areas like our install-based sellers, right? They're selling into our base, doing certain, you know, spiffs around AI, for example, in large enterprise, making sure that we're also incenting not just one whale, you know, per rep, but a bunch of dolphins, right? There are ways that we can incent the right behavior across our sales organization based on where we see the market opportunity. I hope that addresses.

Jim Fish (Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah, that's helpful. Just a follow-up, net retention rate, you know, slipped a little bit. I know it came in roughly where you were expecting, right?

But, you know, as we think about, like, the end period number, it's down, you know, a little bit sequentially. It seems as though the enterprise net expansion rate was really the driver there. I guess what's given the confidence that we're going to start to see stability here, that you walk through the guide, Bryan, of the 52 out of 62 and so forth, that we've actually hit bottom. Is there a way to think about cross-sell, upsell mix there, even turn of seats? Thanks, guys.

Bryan Lee (CFO)

Yeah, absolutely, Jim. If you think about the DBRR coming down to 107%, that was actually anticipated at the beginning of the quarter. We had those tough comparisons I talked about with the mega customer and the seasonal downtick. Those two were the key drivers.

If you look forward into Q2 and the remainder of the year, you know, those tough comparisons still exist, but we have positive offsets as well. The AI momentum and the 32% revenue growth that we just reported. Also, the million-plus ARR customers have a much higher DBRR than the 107% that we just reported. And they're the fastest growing category of our customer base. So those, if you net it all out, you know, we believe there will be fluctuations in either direction in small amounts throughout the year.

Operator (participant)

Moving on to Meta Marshall from Morgan Stanley.

Meta Marshall (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks.

You know, just on the elongating deal cycle, I just wanted to see, were there initiatives that you guys were putting in place that were maybe helping kind of quicker time to ROI for customers to kind of help offset that or just kind of help them see that they can kind of take this in smaller bites to maybe shrink those deal sales evaluation cycles. And then maybe second, just on the Fusion announcement with Salesforce, you know, it sounds like that that's kind of step one in kind of multi-product initiative kind of over time, just kind of how we should see that relationship evolving, particularly kind of as it, you know, relates to Agentforce. Thanks.

Andy Dignan (President)

Yeah, we've deployed within the sales teams a lot of focus around delivering AI and the platform at the same time in the new logo business. That's continued to go well.

Really, when we talk about the elongation of sales cycles, it's more around just a couple extra signatures, right? There's just more focus on the spend by companies. It's not really anything we changed in our go-to-market. You know, we're continuing to execute well there. On the Five9 Fusion, yeah, really the key focus right now with this is Salesforce, like we mentioned, is driving a lot of this BYOT opportunities to drive that into Einstein. If you think about further bringing your own channel to be able to allow us to route all of the channels within the Salesforce platform and then certainly Agentforce. That is kind of a journey as well. This is kind of the start of that. You know, we're excited about it. You know, this is only the beginning.

Meta Marshall (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks.

Operator (participant)

We will be taking our final question from Rishi Jaluria from RBC.

Rishi Jaluria (Software Analyst)

Oh, wonderful. Thanks so much for squeezing me in. I had two questions I wanted to ask continuing on the theme of AI. First, look, I appreciate all the metrics and disclosures you've given us around AI. I think it really helps kind of bolster the case that you can be a real AI beneficiary. Just for the sake of our own clarity and investor clarity, can you remind us what exactly is included in that bucket in terms of products and SKUs? Because the pushback I've always been getting from bears has been, oh, there's a lot of basic automation included there that's not truly AI. I think a reminder there would be really helpful.

Then the second follow-on is if we think about your medium-term target model, and again, appreciate you putting that in the slide deck, you're guiding to a good amount of gross margin expansion, which is great to see. To what extent should we be thinking about increased AI usage and adoption being a potential headwind to that gross margin number, just given how prohibitively expensive these AI workloads are, you know, even post all the model efficiency that we've been seeing over the past six, nine months? Thanks so much.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, I'll start with the first question. Rishi, thank you for these questions. They're very good. When it comes to which products are included in our AI revenue, look, I don't want there to be no confusion. And I've said this before, no confusion. This does not include simple automation and other things, including WEM functionality.

It is not included in that. These are just the AI products since we acquired Inference and the new ones we've announced that go along with that. Whether it's AI self-service, AI agents, as we call them today for either digital or voice, whether it's Agent Assist, summaries, transcriptions, it's all the new technologies and new products we've delivered that are AI-focused. It does not include any kind of simple automation that we had before that. That's the best way I can answer that. When it comes to, you know, the medium-term model and our gross margin expansion and AI being a potential headwind, as Bryan just said a few minutes ago, we actually see it just the opposite. We see AI as a tailwind. You know, we talked about the gross margins in the rearview mirror back in the Inference days.

The model costs, the engine cost per interaction or cost per, you know, consumption has gone down dramatically. You know, again, we're pretty efficient the way we develop the software. We expect that to be a tailwind, not a headwind.

Rishi Jaluria (Software Analyst)

Wonderful. Thank you so much, guys.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

You got it. Thank you, Rishi.

All right. I just want to say thank you for joining us. We look forward to keeping you apprised as we progress through the year and as we progress toward becoming a Rule of 40 company on a free cash flow basis, again, in the future, but we're excited about the initiatives that are underway and the progress we're making. Thanks, everyone.

Operator (participant)

This now concludes our meeting. Thank you for joining.