Five9 - Earnings Call - Q4 2024

Executive Summary

• Q4 2024 delivered accelerating top-line and record profitability/cash flow: revenue grew 17% YoY to $278.7M, adjusted EBITDA margin reached a record 23.1%, GAAP EPS was $0.13 and non-GAAP EPS was $0.79.
• Mix and execution were strong: subscription revenue grew 19% YoY; enterprise AI revenue grew 46% YoY and now represents 9% of enterprise subscription revenue; LTM DBRR remained 108%.
• FY 2025 guidance was introduced and effectively raised vs prior high-level outlook (company said midpoint revenue of $1.14B is $11.5M above last quarter’s outlook; non-GAAP EPS midpoint $2.60 is $0.08 higher), and Q1 2025 guidance implies typical seasonal downtick with margin progression through the year.
• Stock-relevant catalysts: expanded AI monetization (voice/transcript stream), deepening ecosystem (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Verint) and global availability via Google Cloud Marketplace; CFO transition to interim CFO Bryan Lee announced on results day.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Record profitability/cash generation: adjusted EBITDA margin 23.1% (+290bps YoY) and record quarterly operating cash flow $49.8M; non-GAAP EPS up $0.18 YoY to $0.79.
• AI momentum and monetization: enterprise AI revenue +46% YoY; 100% attach on $1M+ ARR deals; monetization pathway via voice/transcript stream (~$40–$50/month per AI agent) highlighted as moat from contextual/interaction data and channels.
• Bookings strength and large-deal focus: highest number of $1M+ ARR new logos in any quarter of 2024; installed-base bookings highest in 8 quarters; pipeline robust, aided by Acqueon pipeline +4x sequentially.

What Went Wrong

• Seasonality and prudence temper near-term outlook: Q1 2025 revenue guided to $271.5–$272.5M (−~2% QoQ) and non-GAAP EPS $0.47–$0.49, reflecting typical seasonal pattern and macro uncertainty (consumer, tariffs, geopolitics).
• Seat count metric discontinued: management emphasized subscription revenue as the meaningful metric; average seat count disclosed at 432,818 in Q4 but will not be provided going forward, reducing a legacy KPI for trend watchers.
• Legal overhang headlines in Q4 timeframe: multiple third‑party law firm “investor alert” press releases around class actions (Dec 2024), creating noise despite no new company disclosures; focus remains on operational execution (press-release listings).

Transcript

Speaker 11

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 SAM, 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 our 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, February 20, 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. And 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 everyone for joining our call this afternoon. I'm pleased to share that we finished the year strong with annual revenue exceeding $1 billion. This was driven by fourth quarter revenue growth accelerating to 17% year-over-year, primarily due to our subscription revenue growing 19%. Adjusted EBITDA margin for the fourth quarter reached a record 23%, helping drive record operating cash flow of $50 million, or 18% of revenue, and record free cash flow of $33 million, or 12% of revenue. As you all know, we take a balanced approach to delivering top-line growth and bottom-line profitability. I'm highly encouraged by the execution and bookings momentum being delivered by our sales organization, especially in the $1+ million ARR part of our business. Andy will provide more color on this in a moment.

Also, we recently held our global sales kickoff, and the passion, energy, and excitement were unparalleled as we all aligned on our formula to drive success for our customers and continue building upon our momentum in 2025 and beyond. On today's call, I will spend much of my time covering our progress in AI and how we believe platforms like Five9 are uniquely positioned when it comes to AI for customer experience. We continue to extend our leadership position in AI, as demonstrated by our enterprise AI revenue growth accelerating to 46% in the fourth quarter. AI has now grown to 9% of enterprise subscription revenue.

We believe AI revenue momentum will continue as AI bookings for enterprise new logos grew nearly 50% year-over-year in Q4, again making up more than 20% of enterprise new logo ACV bookings with a 100% attach rate on $1+ millionARR deals. We're also successfully penetrating our enterprise installed base with AI bookings growing 50% year-over-year in Q4. And now I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about how we believe platforms like Five9 are uniquely positioned when it comes to AI for CX and why we are winning in AI and why we expect to continue winning. Of course, you're all aware that we have a broad portfolio of AI solutions, but I'm going to focus today on self-service and AI agents. As consumers, we all know AI agents will only be used by consumers if they are accurate and personalized.

When we say accurate, I think that's pretty obvious to everyone. And when we say personalized, we mean that the AI agent knows enough about you as a consumer, such as who you are, what products and services you've purchased from the brand, the details of your recent interactions with that brand, including recent problems or issues you've had, and so on. And brands are learning that if they want to offer AI-driven self-service, these AI agents need to be accurate and personalized. And like I said, if they're not, consumers will not use them. CCaaS platforms like Five9 are uniquely positioned to deliver these accurate and personalized AI agents. This is our moat, and this is why we believe we will continue to win in AI for customer experience. Let me explain further. Four key ingredients are required to deliver this accurate and personalized self-service using GenAI.

First, you need access to LLMs. Second, you need real-time contextual data about the consumer and the brand. Third, you need historical interaction data specific to the consumer and their interactions with that brand. And fourth, you need channels to connect consumers to that self-service application, as well as provide an escalation path to a human agent when needed. So let's take these one at a time. The first ingredient, access to LLMs, has become commoditized now, and all vendors have the ability to use a mix of open-source and hyperscaler-provided models. Five9, however, has been at the forefront of engine-agnostic AI for many years, ensuring that brands can easily change the underlying engine quickly to leverage the latest, greatest, and highest-performing models. Our strategy of being engine-agnostic continues to be validated with every new engine that emerges, and as everyone knows, this is happening almost on a weekly basis.

Additionally, we have a team of AI experts benchmarking these engines to ensure our customers can leverage the best engine for a given use case. On the other hand, solutions that are built on proprietary models will not be able to leverage these new innovations that are rapidly coming to market. Therefore, we believe Five9's approach allows our customers to future-proof their AI decision. And when it comes to our competitive moat, it's clear that the layer above these engines is what matters. And that layer includes our AI applications that require business logic, that require workflows, that require important data and integrations to back-end systems. The second ingredient, contextual data, is what is fed into the LLM in real time and provides true context around an interaction. This includes customer-specific details as well as brand-specific knowledge, both of which are often distributed across many back-end systems.

Unlike AI point solutions that require costly one-off integrations to access contextual data in real time, our platform typically is integrated into more than 20 back-end systems during the initial customer deployment. This means that when a brand adopts AI with Five9, they can immediately leverage our seamless integrations, which are designed to reduce cost, accelerate time to value, and deliver accurate and personalized experiences at scale. The third ingredient is historical interaction data, for which Five9 is the system of record. Historical interaction data is comprised of voice calls, texts, emails, web chats, and social interactions between a consumer and that brand, including interactions handled by human agents as well as handled by AI agents. This historical interaction data is a significant requirement for personalization.

In other words, the AI agent knows not only who you are and what products and services you've purchased, but it also knows every detail of your prior interactions with that brand, including what problems or issues you had. The fourth ingredient is channels, such as voice, text, email, web chat, and social. You need these channels to connect consumers to an AI agent as well as provide a seamless escalation path to a human agent when needed. The market demands AI agents that work across all these channels. However, providing the voice channel globally at scale with reliability is a huge barrier to entry. We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars over two decades to build that globally connected platform optimized for CX across these channels.

AI point solution vendors entering the contact center market have not made that significant investment, nor are they likely to, which is why they prefer to integrate to our platform. We believe these AI point solutions, as well as other third-party AI, will continue to integrate to our platform to gain access to these channels from us. That positions our platform as a control point in the AI-driven CX ecosystem, enabling us to monetize that access, which we are successfully doing through VoiceStream and TranscriptStream, so to summarize, the last three of these four key ingredients are unique to platforms like Five9. In addition, our AI experts act as a force multiplier, working closely with our customers to tailor an AI blueprint for their business and help them deploy our AI solutions to deliver real business impact.

We not only have the talent to ensure success, but we also provide products like AI Insights to identify high ROI opportunities to deploy AI to enhance CX and drive operational efficiency, as well as our studio products that provide the ability to build these self-service applications, workflows, integrations, and business logic. And as a result, we believe our comprehensive AI suite, combined with our deep AI expertise, will enable us to continue winning in AI. Our differentiated approach to AI is being validated by the industry, where we were once again ranked as having the best AI solutions in a semi-annual Baird survey that was recently conducted in December. Additionally, industry analysts continue to recognize our innovation, with Five9 recently winning the 2024 Aragon Research Innovation Award for AI contact centers.

Five9 was positioned as the most strategic vendor, reinforcing our leadership in AI-driven CX and our long-term vision for the CX market. Now I'd like to touch on the momentum we are seeing with our ecosystem of partners. Our partners have been an important part of our success here at Five9. We have significant opportunities in 2025 to continue our momentum following announcements we've made over the last few months with partners such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft, Verint, and Google. The partnership between Salesforce and Five9 continues to gain momentum, driving alignment across go-to-market strategies, product innovation, and customer acquisition. Salesforce and Five9 share a vision where AI agents and human agents work together to elevate customer experiences. We are strengthening the integration between Five9 and Agentforce to develop industry-specific AI agents, including patient scheduling agent and a collections agent.

Furthermore, we are harnessing customer interaction data, such as real-time voice, across sales, service, and marketing clouds, to create a seamless and unified customer journey for brands. In numerous recent wins, we've been able to work with Salesforce to deliver a unified CRM and CCaaS platform for customers to deliver AI-elevated CX in industries including telecommunications, financial services, software, life science, and other industries. In November, Five9 and ServiceNow jointly announced an expanded partnership to bring AI-powered solutions for unified employee experiences and customer experiences. By enhancing our integration, we're streamlining self-service and assisted service, creating more efficient support processes that reduce cost, boost agent productivity, and elevate customer satisfaction. Via this expanded integration, Five9 and ServiceNow are redefining the next generation of CX, expanding beyond our history of ITSM integration and into integrated CRM experiences.

Customers gain single-agent experiences for voice and digital interactions and a unified routing engine to streamline engagement. Additionally, in December, we announced the latest release of our Microsoft Teams UC integration. Enterprises are constantly bringing the unified employee communications platforms closer to the customer services platforms to enhance employee efficiency and productivity. Five9's integration with Microsoft Teams brings this to life and enhances employee productivity by delivering our game-changing bidirectional presence between Five9 agents and Microsoft Teams users to simultaneously view each other's real-time availability. This empowers agents and experts to collaborate internally with confidence. And we are pleased with the momentum we're seeing as we have had several new customer wins during the fourth quarter using this enhanced integration. And with Verint, we've made a key announcement in late Q3 regarding our strengthened partnership, announcing a new native cloud-to-cloud platform integration, which includes Verint Bots.

During the fourth quarter, we saw an acceleration of opportunities, validating demand for our integrated value proposition, and finally, we're so excited to announce Five9's global availability on Google Cloud Marketplace, including the full Five9 AI-powered CX platform, plus the release of a standalone Five9 AI Agent designed for Google Cloud. Businesses can now quickly activate Five9 seamlessly through Google Cloud Marketplace, a universal catalog of enterprise-grade, pre-validated solutions that run on or integrate with Google Cloud. This simplifies the procurement, billing, and deployment of our joint solution to deliver AI-elevated CX. Our innovative solutions, which leverage Google Cloud technology, can enable organizations to create exceptional customer experiences while leveraging their Google Cloud credits to drive loyalty and business success. We're excited about this new route to market and look forward to bringing on more mutual customers with Google.

In summary, our record results and strong traction in our AI business continue to demonstrate the power of our platform in enabling brands to elevate their CX in this rapidly evolving world of AI. At Five9, we've always been ahead of the curve. Just as we paved the way for the cloud revolution in CX, we are now leading the charge in delivering the new CX powered by our suite of AI solutions. I also want to take a moment to thank our amazing team of Five9ers, whose relentless dedication and passion empower us to continue to lead this market. We believe we are well-positioned with our AI-powered platform and trusted AI experts to continue driving durable long-term growth, and we look forward to building on our momentum in 2025. Before I turn it over to Andy, I'd like to comment on one more topic.

As many of you have probably seen, earlier today, we issued a press release announcing Barry's retirement as CFO, effective March 31st, as well as his providing assistance with the transition for six months. Barry, I just want to express my deepest gratitude to you for your exceptional leadership, partnership, and unwavering commitment to Five9 these last 13 years. You have played a pivotal role in shaping our company's growth, financial strength, and company culture. Your contributions have been invaluable. It has been an honor to work alongside you, Barry. And on behalf of the entire Five9 team, I wish you the very best in your well-earned retirement. I'm also pleased to announce the appointment of Brian Lee, our long-term EVP of Finance, to the role of interim CFO. Brian will be joining us on the call today.

As many of you know, he has gained an extremely deep understanding of our business over the last 11 years. Having worked closely with Brian during his tenure here at Five9, I'm excited to have him step in as interim CFO, and I'm confident in his ability to excel. We will be kicking off a CFO search with Brian as an internal candidate. And with that, I will now turn it over to our COO, Andy Dignan. Andy, please go ahead.

Andy Dignan (COO)

Thank you, Mike, and good afternoon, everyone. As Mike mentioned, we had another strong quarter of sequential bookings growth that exceeded expectations. We are pleased with the early results we are seeing from the realignment of our resources and enhancements to our sales motion. For instance, we had strong enterprise new logo bookings in Q4, driven by the highest number of $1 million-plus ARR new logo wins in any quarter of 2024.

Additionally, Q4 install-based bookings came in at the highest level we've seen in eight quarters. We also continue to experience heightened levels of RFP volume in the fourth quarter. And our pipeline remains robust as we enter 2025, in part driven by our Acqueon pipeline increasing 4X sequentially. And now, as we normally do, I'll share some of the examples of key wins for the quarter. The first example is a leading real estate investment company focused on healthcare infrastructure, senior housing operators, post-acute care providers, and health systems. Their contact center manages urgent service requests from existing residents and various inquiries from potential residents. They were limited by their on-premise system as they struggled with operational inefficiencies and quality.

They chose Five9 for our industry-leading omnichannel capabilities across voice, text, chat, and email, as well as our agent assist to transcribe summaries into the CRM and AI insights to gain visibility into interaction trends, identify opportunities, and deliver high ROI AI-powered outcomes. We anticipate this initial order to result in over $3.1 million in ARR to Five9. Now, the second example is a nonprofit health system with nine hospitals and hundreds of primary specialty and urgent care clinics. They had been using an on-premise solution, which was very limited. They chose Five9 for our comprehensive platform that includes our Acqueon solution, allowing the healthcare provider to manage voice, chat, and email, and improve the experience for agents and patients through our key integrations, including Epic, ServiceNow, and Salesforce.

Additionally, they leverage our quality assurance and automated scheduling through our WEM powered by Verint, while Five9 Agent Assist transcribes conversations and standardizes responses. We anticipate this initial order to result in approximately $3 million in ARR to Five9. The third example is one of the largest credit union service organizations in the country that selected Five9 to replace multiple on-premise solutions that were causing inefficiencies, missed SLAs, and poor CX. By consolidating onto Five9, they now benefit from streamlined operations, seamless integration with multiple third-party systems, and our WEM solution powered by Verint. Additionally, they adopted our IVA platform to enable self-service for account inquiries, fund transfers, payments, and more. We anticipate this initial order to result in approximately $2.4 million in ARR to Five9.

Now, I'd like to highlight a Q4 expansion at one of our largest customers, a parcel delivery company where we expanded into a new business unit that was running on an on-premise solution. This business unit provides customer support for global documentation, taxation, customs, and regulatory requirements. This was implemented live within 60 days and represents over $1.2 million in additional ARR to Five9. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Barry to take you through the financials. But before doing so, I'd like to echo Mike's comments and extend my gratitude to you, Barry, for your leadership and your commitment to Five9. Barry.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

Thank you, Andy and Mike, for your kind words. And thank you both for your leadership and support through my tenure at Five9. It has been an incredible privilege to work alongside you and the outstanding Five9 team over the years. I have been working uninterrupted for 50 years, including 13 deeply rewarding years here at Five9. That's a lot of early morning alarms, working through vacations, and time away from family. Now, it's time to rebalance and focus on my personal journey.

As I step away, I do so with immense confidence in Brian's leadership. He is more than just a safe pair of hands. He is a natural leader, a strategic thinker, and someone deeply respected both within the company and by many of you who have worked with him over the years. Few understand Five9's financial engine better than he does. I will be cheering this remarkable company on from the sidelines as it seizes opportunities of an AI-driven future backed by an exceptional leadership team and a culture that continues to inspire. Thank you again for the incredible journey. And now to business.

We are pleased to report fourth-quarter revenue growth of 17% year-over-year, primarily driven by subscription revenue growing 19% year-over-year in Q4. Subscription revenue growth was driven by, first, as Andy mentioned, strong installed-base bookings. Second, continued strength in the market, where our $211+ million ARR customers made up 56% of subscription revenue, growing 26% year-over-year. And third, by the significant traction we are seeing with our enterprise AI revenue, which grew 46% year-over-year. In the fourth quarter, subscription revenue made up 79% of revenue, while usage revenue accounted for 14%, and professional services made up the remaining 7%. Enterprise revenues from subscription, usage, and PS combined made up 89% of LTM revenue. Our commercial business, which represented the remaining 11%, grew in the low single digits on an LTM basis. Our LTM dollar-based retention rate remained the same as last quarter at 108%.

Turning now to profitability, we are pleased to again report strong margin expansions across the board, driven by the increase in revenue scaling against fixed and semi-fixed costs, a four-quarter impact of the RUF, and our ongoing focus on tight expense control. As a result, Q4 adjusted gross margins increased approximately 220 basis points year-over-year to 63.5%, and adjusted EBITDA margins increased approximately 290 basis points year-over-year to 23.1%, an all-time record. I'd like to point out that stock-based compensation again decreased year-over-year from $50 million-$38 million and improved it by 7 percentage points to 14% of revenue in the fourth quarter. As a result of both the improved adjusted EBITDA margin and significant improvement in stock-based compensation, we are very pleased to report GAAP operating income of $4.2 million and GAAP net income of $11.6 million in the fourth quarter.

Fourth-quarter non-GAAP EPS was $0.79 per diluted share, up $0.18 year-over-year. Now, for a closer look at the key full-year 2024 income statement metrics. As Mike mentioned, 2024 revenue exceeded $1 million, growing 14.4% year-over-year. 2024 adjusted gross margin expanded by approximately 70 basis points year-over-year to 61.7%, while 2024 adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by approximately 30 basis points to 18.8%. 2024 non-GAAP EPS came in at $2.47, a year-over-year increase of $0.42 per diluted share. Now, I'd like to share some cash flow highlights. I'm pleased to report that LTM operating cash flow reached an all-time high at $143 million, or 14% of revenue. This was primarily driven by our record adjusted EBITDA and continued strength in DSO performance, which came in at 34 days. LTM free cash flow also came in strong at $79 million, or 8% of revenue.

As Mike mentioned, our fourth-quarter operating and free cash flow both hit all-time records of $15 million and $33 million, respectively. Before turning to guidance, I would like to comment on Seed Count. As our business has evolved, the seed count metric we have been providing annually in the fourth quarter has become less relevant as a growing number of our products are no longer priced on a per seed basis. Subscription revenue is the most meaningful metric for our business as it reflects the growth in customers coming onto our platform, as well as the products they are purchasing. We are mindful, though, that we need to close the supporting chapter properly, and we are therefore sharing that the average seed counts totaled 432,818 in the fourth quarter, including Acqueon.

Going forward, we will not be providing our Seed Count metric given it is no longer a meaningful performance indicator. One more item before guidance. Given the CFO transition, we will not be hosting an analyst day in the first half of this year. Please stay tuned for an update on timing. Turning now to our full-year 2025 and first-quarter guidance. For the full year, we are guiding annual revenue to a midpoint of $1.14 billion, which is $11.5 million higher than the high-level outlook we provided last quarter. This, of course, is a starting point, and we will update our outlook as the year progresses. With regards to the bottom line, we are guiding 2025 non-GAAP EPS to a midpoint of $2.60 per diluted share, which is $0.08 higher than the high-level outlook we provided during our last earnings call.

Please note that this guidance reflects our assumption that we will use cash to retire the remaining $434.4 million principal balance on our 2025 convertible notes, which will be maturing in June. Also, we expect annual adjusted gross margins and adjusted EBITDA margins to improve further year-over-year. As for the first quarter, we are guiding revenue to a midpoint of $272 million. This represents a 2% sequential decline, which is similar to our typical guidance pattern in the first quarter. As for the remainder of the year, we expect a very small sequential growth in the second quarter and larger sequential increases in the second half. We expect first-quarter non-GAAP EPS to come in at $0.48 per diluted share at the midpoint, a decline of $0.31 sequentially.

As a reminder, our first-quarter non-GAAP EPS is always the weakest of the year, and the $0.31 quarter-over-quarter decrease is similar to our typical guidance pattern in Q1. For the remainder of the year, we expect non-GAAP EPS to increase slightly in Q2 and further improve in the second half. Please refer to the presentation posted on our Investor Relations website for additional estimates, including share count, taxes, and capital expenditures, as well as LTM enterprise subscription revenue. In summary, we are very pleased with our fourth-quarter performance. We accelerated revenue growth, and we have demonstrated, as the metrics make clear, superb execution on our winning AI strategy, and we were efficient. We achieved record highs for adjusted EBITDA, GAAP net income, and for operating and free cash flow.

In 2025, we will remain laser-focused on driving higher profitability while investing surgically in key strategic areas to further position as a leader in AI for CX. Operator, please go ahead.

Operator (participant)

Thank you, Barry. We will now move into the Q&A session. When I call on your name, please ensure your video is on and that you unmute your line. As a reminder, in an effort to hear from everyone, please limit yourself to one question. With that, our first question comes from Ryan MacWilliams with Barclays. Ryan?

Ryan MacWilliams (Software Equity Research Analyst)

Excellent. Barry, man, congrats on the career. This is tough, but it's been great working with you, and I'm going to have some Captain Crunch in your honor this weekend. For that reason, I'll take my first question from Mike. Mike, how have the conversations with your customers been since the election? Has there been any changes to start this year? And as you think about potential upside drivers for 2025, what gets you most excited? Is it potential improvements in cloud conversions for larger contact centers? Is it AI upsells? Is it adding more usage receipts? What could improve in 2025?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. Great questions, Ryan. Look, our conversations with customers continue to be very focused around leveraging AI. And frankly, we're investing a lot in enabling our go-to-market teams to be the AI experts and help guide our customers in this new world. Our results are showing our progress with AI, not just technically, but in our business, right? Up to 9% of our revenue mix and 46% growth in enterprise AI revenue. So it's a new world, and the customers all want to talk about the new world.

But you heard a lot of my comments were kind of nuts and bolts around self-service. And we can spend a lot of time talking about Agentic and other very advanced things that we're obviously delivering as an industry. But today, our customers, they want to deliver self-service, and they want to deliver it accurately in a personalized way. And that is so important to them. And that's why I really spent a lot of time today talking about that. In terms of upside drivers for us in 2025, obviously, look, AI is growing faster than the rest of our business, but our core business is growing very, very nicely. Subscription revenue is the key metric, 19% this last quarter. We're very excited about the pipeline we've got. Andy and Matt and the rest of the sales organization are executing in just a great way.

And I think we've still got upside on that, but we're just getting to that level where I feel like we're optimized. But I think we've still got a little headroom there too. So I think there's upside there, as well as, obviously, we've talked about macro, and the impact of a better macro is going to be significant as well. But again, we're delivering this growth that we delivered in Q4 and arguably a sideways macro a little bit better in Q4, right? It was a little bit better, and we'll talk about that, I'm sure.

Ryan MacWilliams (Software Equity Research Analyst)

Appreciate the color. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Ryan.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from DJ Hynes with Canaccord. DJ?

DJ Hynes (Managing Director of Software Lead Analyst)

Hey, guys. First question is for Barry. What are you going to do with all those ties?

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

I saved the special one for today.

DJ Hynes (Managing Director of Software Lead Analyst)

Yeah, good. Hey, Mike, one for you. So I think one of the questions that I think investors are wrestling with is if it's not the CCaaS vendors whose AI or agents that end up winning in this space, right? Maybe that business gets cut off at the pass by a Salesforce or ServiceNow or whoever that third party might be. Obviously, those other systems still need access to that contextual data that you highlighted as being so important today, right? All that resides inside of Five9. Can you talk about how you monetize that data access and what that could mean for your financial model, just given there's still some uncertainty about kind of who wins in the end with AI?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, really good question, DJ. And again, you're spot on, right? It's about contextual data. AI is only as good as the data it has access to. Our platform is a control point for a lot of that contextual data, not just information about the customer and about the brand, but also about recent interactions between that consumer and the brand. It's absolutely critical to delivering AI-driven self-service, as I said in my remarks.

The good news is, as you stated, look, we're a winner either way. We are a great partner to Salesforce, a great partner to ServiceNow. We are in the market together. Look, we're in the business of winning the CCaaS platform. We know that Salesforce, for example, is in the business of winning the CRM platform. The question at hand is, who's AI? Are they the customer? Is the customer going to choose? It's going to be a mix. We're very convinced of that.

And the good news for us is, even if in a given use case for a given business unit, that organization wants to use Salesforce for their AI, the good news is they still need access for that AI to do its job. They need access to all the contextual data in our platform. And that's why we're great partners. They know they need us, and we're very welcoming to that relationship. We want to do what's best for the customer. At the end of the day, we monetize that through VoiceStream and TranscriptStream.

Think of that as a pipe and API, where essentially we're charging on a per-minute consumption basis. That adds up to somewhere between $40-$50 per month in recurring revenue to us just for that connection per AI agent, say, on that third party's part. So, and again, that can actually scale up even higher than that on a monthly revenue basis for us if those AI agents are more efficient than, say, a human agent. So I hope that's helpful.

DJ Hynes (Managing Director of Software Lead Analyst)

Yeah, I know it is. Makes perfect sense. Thank you, guys.

Andy Dignan (COO)

Thanks, DJ.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo. Michael?

Michael Turrin (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst of Software)

Well, wonderful. Testing my reflexes with the Zoom. I'll echo, Barry. Congrats. We'll all miss you sitting in front of the firm, but appreciate you being here today. I wanted to ask about 4Q specifically and just on seasonality, if there's anything you'd call out in terms of seasonal expansion or overall deal cadence of what you're seeing in enterprise. And as a second part, Barry, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask just on your prudent guidance if there's anything else you're contemplating given the transition there as well. Thanks very much.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

Yeah. So let me start with the fourth quarter We look at it by vertical, and it is clear that for the consumer in particular, but healthcare as well, it was better than we originally anticipated and better than last year. I know that a number of you have rolled your eyes when we keep talking about the JPMorgan data, especially if you don't work at JPMorgan. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the numbers are clear. If you look at last, well, look at Q3, the numbers are 112%. That's a percentage increase in July, August, and September. And then for the last quarter, October, November, December, it was 344%. So for the first time in a long time, we've had actually positive real growth as opposed to just nominal growth. And that showed up in the numbers.

Interestingly, in the consumer side, there was actually more use, well, both healthcare and consumer, actually, there was more usage, so definitely usage. That's why it went from 13% of total up to 14%. You just can't hire an agent that quickly. You might have this longer hold time or whatever. You just can't fix that quickly, and with respect to 2025, look, we're not macroeconomists. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. What we do know is that there's a lot of uncertainty out there.

January retail sales were the weakest in two years almost, and you talk about tariffs, you talk about deportations, you talk about wars, and so on, and we compensate for that by being more prudent, and we've layered that prudence into 2025, and by the way, you should be hearing these financial answers in serials because the guy actually is doing it. He's fine. And lastly, we took an extra layer of caution in the seasonality for the second half of the year because of this massive uncertainty we're facing. Okay.

Andy Dignan (COO)

One thing I want to add is you asked about expansion. And as you heard Mike talk about in our install-based booking team, we made some changes in Q2, and this is really starting to accelerate. And so having the largest install-based bookings quartered in eight quarters with 50% of year-over-year growth and AI driving that gives us a lot of confidence on the expansion side that the teams are really executing on what we're asking them to do.

Michael Turrin (Managing Director and Equity Research Analyst of Software)

Perfect. Thanks very much.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Siti Panigrahi with Mizuho. Siti?

Siti Panigrahi (Managing Director)

Thank you. And Barry, congrats on your retirement. Suddenly, it was great working with you. And Brian, congrats on your new role. So Mike, I want to keep it at a high level. I mean, we keep hearing about how AI is going to replace human agents. Even we saw last year when Klarna announced that they're going to full-on on AI for customer support. And then we recently, I don't know if you have seen, they talked about reversing the course now to include even human agents. So my question is, as AI is becoming more mainstream, what are you hearing from your customer when they're thinking about their AI strategy for customer service? And what's your view on seat reduction we should expect? How would that offset by AI?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah, thank you, Siti. Great question. And thank you for citing that quote by the Klarna CEO. It's amazing how, look, we all get out ahead of ourselves sometimes when there are innovations like this, right? And I'm not surprised at all. We've been saying that, look, that was an over-rotation, to say the least. Our customers are doing what we've been saying for quite some time. What they're trying to do is deflect to self-service on the margin, some small percentage of their interactions, 5%-10% in the near term.

Eventually, it'll be a little more than that if we're all successful in delivering Agentic and personalized and accurate AI, which we're well on our way to doing. But at the same time, look, they're being very, our customers are being very calculated around how fast they try and push automation upon their consumer, right? It's so important to deliver a great customer experience. In the end of the day, we're still getting tremendous ROI.

Even if they're able to shave 5% of those interactions and put them through self-service, it's usually resulting in just less growth in human agents as opposed to a true reduction. But sometimes, again, they're striving to get that labor arbitrage ROI in the long run, for sure. And we're helping them deliver that very tangible ROI. So it's a real thing, but it's not anywhere near what I think people were concerned about.

Siti Panigrahi (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks for that color.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you, Siti.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

Thanks, Siti.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Scott Berg with Needham. Scott?

Scott Berg (Senior Analyst)

Hi, everyone. First of all, can you hear me okay?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yep, we got you, Scott.

Scott Berg (Senior Analyst)

Great. Nothing like being in an airport lounge right now, but all good there. So, Mike, I wanted to just talk about the bookings. Maybe Andy wants to take this. You seem pretty happy with the Q4 bookings. As you're seeing pipelines and booking activity actually hit, is it truly in kind of a normalized environment today relative to what you saw in Q2 and the improvement that you saw in Q3? Just trying to help understand where we are in that trajectory. If that's still to come, or do you think we're squarely there today?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

No, I'll start, and Andy, please chime in. Scott, it's a very good question. We've talked about this in the past, right? Q2 was kind of the pinnacle of the AI fog, as I call it, the distraction factor, right, where everybody was just really trying to figure out AI. Q3 got better. Q4 got even better on top of that. And again, I wouldn't necessarily say we're all the way back to normal because there is still uncertainty. There's still kind of this in the macro side of things. Again, our bookings were strong on both net new and installed base. But again, I do believe in an even healthier macro. There's upside there. But Andy?

Andy Dignan (COO)

Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would add, Scott, would be just, yeah, the execution of the team, right? In terms of we were focusing on mega deals. And when I look at the largest number of million-plus ARR deals in 2024 and just look what the team's executing on, we're getting more of the dolphins, right? More of the size of the customers that we, which is the engine of the company, which is the biggest part of the market. And that's good to see.

Scott Berg (Senior Analyst)

Got it. Helpful. And then, Mike, in your pre-scripted comments, you'd spoken about some agents that you're building in conjunction with Salesforce in a couple of different areas. What does the monetization of that look like relative to your own agents? Help us understand what that economic model kind of looks like for Five9.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. And it relates to my earlier comments, Scott. Again, we're monetizing third-party AI in some of these cases. But again, when it comes to Salesforce, a lot of times it's our AI, not theirs. Sometimes it's going to be their AI, but we monetize it if it is their AI through transcript stream and voice stream. And again, it's a win-win no matter what between Five9 and Salesforce.

We like to say we're better together, and we're out winning joint accounts, especially in some of these vertical markets like healthcare, where we're actually delivering vertical AI agents like patient scheduling agent, which AI agent, which is, again, if you think about it as a consumer, wouldn't it be great to be able to schedule a healthcare appointment with AI instead of a human agent? That's a perfect transaction for AI to handle. And we're doing it with Salesforce through some deep integration. It's pretty cool.

Scott Berg (Senior Analyst)

Awesome. And lastly, Barry, it's been a really fun 10 years. Thanks for all the old time.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

Thanks, Scott.

Operator (participant)

Okay. Our next question comes from Peter Levine with Evercore. Peter?

Peter Levine (Director)

Thank you, guys. My question. I'll let go. Congrats, Barry, on your retirement. Maybe a two-part question. What is on the AI trajectory, the 9%, which is up from 7%, I think, Q4 of last year? Maybe help us understand what's the trajectory of that look like? Is it steady state, or is there an inflection point where we can really see that ramp? And then the second question would be, Barry, you talked about seat count not being the right metric anymore.

Customers are moving more from a seat basis to more of a consumption token-based model. So maybe help us understand. You guys used to talk about a metric where the seat price was $150 for the core, and then there was a three to 4x uplift. Is that still the case with a fully autonomous agent today if the seat count metric necessarily isn't the right metric?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. Let me start, Barry, and feel free to chime in. Peter, great questions. The trajectory of our AI revenue is, again, it was 46% year-over-year growth in AI revenue. This is the enterprise part of, again, our SMB or commercial business. There's not a lot of AI there. So where AI exists for us is in our enterprise business. It grew 46% year-over-year in terms of the trajectory. That's up from, I believe, 40% in the last quarter.

And again, we talked about kind of our bookings as a leading indicator, and that's what I said. I said we feel very good about AI revenue growth in the future, given the bookings growth that we're seeing for AI, net new and attached as well as in the install base. So again, we're very pleased with the fact that it's growing in the mid-40s, and that's obviously growing a lot faster than the rest of our business, albeit it's only 9% today. Again, a growing percentage of the mix. We're excited about that. Barry, if you want to start on the seat count side of things, I may add a little bit, but I'll let you.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

It's very straightforward. It's a huge ROI to our customers from this. We're going to be able to charge for that on a consumption basis, as we currently are. The number that you cited, the 3X, when you do compare it to the historic seat base, which is still, of course, the majority of our business, it is in the order of 3X, particularly on IVAs. You heard Mike talk about the VoiceStream and TranscriptStream adding another $50. There's more than enough to go around for our customer and for Five9.

Peter Levine (Director)

Yeah, I think you said it. It's good.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

Thank you, Peter.

Peter Levine (Director)

Thank you, guys.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Taylor McGinnis with UBS. Taylor?

Taylor McGinnis (Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Can you guys hear me?

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

We can.

Taylor McGinnis (Equity Research Analyst)

Perfect. Barry, congrats on retirement. Sad to see you go, but very happy for you as you take that next chapter. Thank you. Barry, maybe for you and Brian too, when you talked a little bit about the usage trends earlier, and it was clear in the results that there definitely was a big acceleration in that piece. So as we get into 1Q, can you just talk about the trends that you're seeing? Are you seeing maybe a little bit of a reversal from what you saw in 4Q? Can you remind us maybe what verticals have greater exposure in 1Q? And maybe as a second part to that question, how we should think about the trajectory of NRR from here.

Brian Lee (CFO)

Got it. I'm happy to answer the first part, and then I'll pass on to Barry. But before I do, Taylor, I just want to say to Barry, it's been truly an honor and a career highlight for me to have worked with you. And I just want to thank you for everything you've done for Five9 and for me personally. And I hope you love retirement as much as you love being CFO of Five9. And to get back to your question, Taylor, in terms of the Q1 guide, you'll see that we're implying a 2% quarter-over-quarter decline. And that is right within the range of 0% to -4% that we typically guide to for Q1. But if you compare it to last year, you'll notice that we actually guided to sequential flatness quarter-over-quarter in Q1. And that reflects what Barry said earlier.

We had a stronger-than-expected seasonal uptick in consumer and health during Q4. So we're expecting the downtick to be stronger than what we saw last year. And there's actually one more component there from a tough comparison perspective. So one of our biggest mega customers was going through a significant growth phase in the ramp throughout 2024, who ended the ramp. But if you kind of look at these multi-year ramps, there's usually small contributions in the beginning and much more in the latter part. So that Q4 to Q1 transition last year compared to this year, it creates a little bit of a tough comparison. So that's what's in the 2% guide, a quarter-over-quarter decline. But I do want to emphasize the fact that we have a prudent guidance philosophy, and that hasn't changed.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

Yeah. Taylor, in terms of the DBRR, on the surface, it would look like it's quite placid. We've had three quarters at 108%, but there's actually significant cross-currents underway. On the headwind side, if you will, working against us is the fact that we have a sharper downtick that Brian just mentioned, but also on top of that, just the muted seasonal uptick that we're assuming for the time being.

On the positive side, we have the AI momentum. We have the million-plus customers that have a dollar-based retention rate that is meaningfully higher than 108%, which are growing faster. They're growing this last quarter at 26%, I believe. Yeah. And so we don't quite know how to handicap that. What we can say is that when it goes up slightly or down slightly over the upcoming quarters, that fluctuation is likely to be extremely minor. And that's the best we can say at the moment.

Taylor McGinnis (Equity Research Analyst)

Perfect. Thank you guys so much.

Barry Zwarenstein (CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.

Meta Marshall (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks. And I'll echo the congrats, Barry. A couple of questions. I know you guys kind of made it across the board risk that has been kind of flowing through results this year. Just how do you think about kind of where investments, as you kind of ramp up again, will kind of be most focused, particularly given the risk? And then maybe just second, just any disruption from Dan's kind of upcoming departure, Dan Berkman's kind of upcoming departure? Thanks.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. Thanks, Meta. I'll talk about Dan first. Again, we promoted Matt to EVP of sales. Andy has all of sales and go-to-market functions rolling up to him now. As both Matt and Andy have kind of solidified in their seats, Dan will be less involved in the day-to-day and moving to a consultant role. Again, we've been extremely lucky to not have disruption. We've been a team for forever. We're still a team. That's just kind of the Five9 way, and that's part of our culture. I would say very, very little disruption, if any.

In terms of where we're investing, it is what we believe in this market so much. We obviously are going to continue to put the pedal down a little bit on R&D investments, specifically in AI, to extend our leadership position there. It will probably not, but we are also pretty focused on our go-to-market team and our sales capacity and our quota capacity.

Again, the way we grow our business, the way we've been growing for 17 years I've been here, is bookings growth, right? And there's a formula there. Obviously, we got to grow the top of the funnel, but we have to increase our quota capacity along with that. And we're very careful about not getting out ahead of ourselves, but you'll see us continue to add quota capacity through the year as well. So it's really building product and selling product, and those will be the priority areas for us.

Meta Marshall (Managing Director)

Great. Thanks.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Meta.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Jim Fish with Piper Sandler. Jim?

Hey, guys. This is Quinton for Jim Fish. Thanks for taking our question. And also wanted to add our congrats to both Barry and Brian here. Mike or Andy, maybe questions for either of you. Avaya recently announced a change to their platform that kind of forces some customers away. It's still really early here, but as you've kind of seen this announcement, any change in the pipeline or customers coming to you, basically any early indication of the donation that you expect from kind of that competitor, or is this just they've been donating for a while, and so you expect that to be more steady from here? Thanks.

Andy Dignan (COO)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, obviously, they've been donating for a while, to use your term. But yeah, we obviously notice that we do have a lot of good processes in place to make these migrations from Avaya pretty straightforward. Now, it was their Avaya Experience Platform public, right, for 200 seats and below. So kind of one piece of the puzzle. Yeah, we're focused on that part of the market.

What I would be interested in seeing would be as customers that are higher than 200 seats, right, which is another big engine for us, did they see sort of a lack of commitment for the future from that? So something we're keeping an eye on and we're focused on, and we're good at those migrations. And yeah, we'll keep an eye on it.

Got it. Thank you.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Quinton.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Tom Blakey from Cantor. Tom?

Tom Blakey (Managing Director)

Oh, wow. I didn't get a heads-up for that. Thank you for taking the call. And Barry, congratulations. It's been great working and dining with you, and best wishes to you and your family. And just maybe a two-parter. First, we've been hearing from yourself throughout last year and from some of your peers about slowdown in close rates and elongated sales cycles related to the increased complexity of large deals and layering in AI and making these things harder to implement. I'd love to get your update there and what you're seeing, Andy and Mike, in terms of visibility on those types of deals,

and then Barry on the model and these partnerships. We're picking this up from our checks too. Congratulations on this new channel. I'd love any color, if you can maybe extend the type of color you normally give us in terms of what you believe partnerships could be over time and any impact of the model. To meet his question about investing, maybe there could be some leverage here or leveraging these huge partners. That'd be helpful.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Yeah. I'll start with the last question, Tom. Look, the partnership ecosystem is driving a lot of our business already. We expect that to continue to increase. When you think about that Google Cloud Marketplace announcement that we made, that's a game changer for us. And again, something that opens up new avenues and an easier procurement process into the Google customer base. And these are the types of partnerships, quite frankly, that to me are so important to us to continue to move the needle in terms of our penetration into this market.

So again, whether it's deeper integration with Salesforce or ServiceNow or continuations with Verint or it's a Google Cloud Marketplace announcement, we're going to continue to leverage the ecosystem in this new world of CX. It's a wonderful time to be in this space, and it's a big driver of our growth in the future. And again, we'll continue to aim to find additional leverage points like this that allow us to get, again, just like I said, leverage, right? And again, we're going to continue to build out our quota capacity, but we're also going to continue to get leverage from partners in the channel.

Andy Dignan (COO)

Yeah. And then Tom, the other part of the question was, are we still seeing elongated sales cycles? Mike talked about the AI fog being lifted, and we're seeing a little bit of that, right? We're cautiously optimistic about that. And obviously, macro as well. But when I look at the sales cycles, our teams are doing an excellent job really focusing on the ROI part of AI, right? We launched our AI blueprint, so leveraging our teams to go in and really identify those ROI use cases.

That helps in these customers that are going, "Hey, I'm going to make my CX decision, but the AI part of it is going to really drive it," and so I think we're executing well there, and again, cautiously optimistic that those very, very long sales cycles shorten.

Tom Blakey (Managing Director)

Thank you very much.

Andy Dignan (COO)

Thanks, Tom.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Michael Funk with Bank of America. Michael.

Michael Funk (SVP)

Yeah. Great. Thank you for fitting me in, and Barry, congratulations to you. Mike, I wanted to dig into a comment you made in the prepared remarks about your AI strategy relative to some of the proprietary models that are out there, how that advantages Five9. Any more color on how that does advantage you during negotiations, during the RFP process? I think I know you're talking about, but love to hear more detail on how that differentiates. Yeah. It's a great question, Michael.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Again, our engine agnostic strategy from literally day one, even before we acquired Inference, is playing out so nicely, no pun intended. I really mean that. There was nothing intended there. We started out, I think, with the right strategy. Others are now following this strategy. Again, everyone's going to have access to these LLMs. That's not going to be a differentiator. What is a differentiator is everything that we built on top of those engines. The good news for us is we didn't waste a lot of time and energy trying to build our own engines. We're now, again, able to leverage the latest and greatest for our customers to leverage the latest and greatest engines as they come to market. We just plug them in. It's easy to do through our AI studio framework. It is a real advantage.

And again, in the RFP process, we get a lot of questions around our AI strategy, including the architecture of it, including which engines we're leveraging. Customers really do appreciate the way we've approached it. We're winning because of that.

Michael Funk (SVP)

Great. Thank you, Mike.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our final question will come from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Head Tech Equity Research and Software Analyst)

Perfect. Thank you, guys. Barry, since this is your last call here, one for you to end it maybe. Just, I think this is maybe the most optimistic I've heard you sounding on some of the forward-looking trends like bookings, AI traction, pipeline, etc., in several quarters here. Yet, the guidance for next year, I think, still suggests sub 10% growth. When we're trying to reconcile those two, can you just give us a sense for where there is kind of the most conservatism? I know you mentioned Q4 seasonality, but how are you thinking about turnups? How are you thinking about cloud migrations, AI bookings converting into revenue? If you could just give us a little bit more detail there, that would be super helpful. Thank you.

Brian Lee (CFO)

And I'm happy to answer that. So Arjun, the way we think about the annual guide, I want to point out first, when we had our earnings call last quarter, we did mention that the outlook, the consensus at $1.13 billion, we were comfortable with that number. And the guidance that we gave this time for the midpoint is an $11.5 million beat and raise, right? So there's that point. And I do want to emphasize the point that our guidance philosophy is always prudent, and that has not changed. And Barry mentioned the seasonal uptake in Q4. We have to be prudent.

There's a lot of uncertainty out there in terms of macro. So we have to be prudent that there's another layer of conservatism there in the back half of 2025 for seasonal assumptions. And of course, the mega customer ramp that I talked about, that would be a tough comparison. So at the end of the day, it's prudent, and it's a starting point, and we'll continue to update you as the year progresses.

Arjun Bhatia (Co-Head Tech Equity Research and Software Analyst)

All right. Perfect. Thank you.

Mike Burkland (Chairman and CEO)

Thanks, Arjun. All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us. Barry, we're going to miss you.