Hello, good afternoon. I'd like to welcome you to Box's Fiscal Year 2025 Financial Analyst Day. I'm Cynthia Hiponia, Vice President of Investor Relations. On behalf of the entire Box team, we'd like to thank you for joining us today. We have a great event planned over the next couple of hours. Aaron is going to kick things off with a look at our vision and strategy for the future. Diego, our Chief Product Officer, will go over our product strategy and roadmap. We're also pleased to have senior members of our product team and our CTO do deeper dives in advanced ECM, security and compliance, and our AI strategy. Then we'll take a short break. After the break, Olivia and Mark will cover our go-to-market and sales strategies. Finally, Dylan will be presenting our long-term financial target model, and then we'll open it up for live Q&A.
For those of you with questions, please email ir@box.com at any time today. Now, let me remind you that this presentation contains forward-looking statements regarding our future business and financial expectations. There are a number of factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our expectations. You should not place undue reliance on these statements, and we assume no obligation, nor do we intend to update them. We encourage you to review the forward-looking statement disclosures in today's presentation and the risk factors in our SEC filings for more information. During today's presentation, we will also be sharing information on new products, features, and functionality that we are planning but are not yet available. With the exception of Box AI for Notes, Box AI for Documents, and Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, all other features, functionality, and settings for Box AI are currently under development.
Please refer to the disclosures regarding future products, features, and functionalities that are currently under development. This information is intended to outline our general product direction and should not be relied upon in making an investment decision. This presentation also includes non-GAAP financial measures. Unless otherwise indicated, all references we make today to financial measures will be on a non-GAAP basis. You can find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliation with comparable GAAP measures, in the appendix of this presentation, which can be found on our IR website. With that, I'd like to now introduce our CEO, Aaron Levie.
Hello, I'm Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, and welcome to our FY 2025 Financial Analyst Day. We're incredibly excited to be here to share a bit about our long-term strategy and how we are going to tackle the massive opportunity in front of us. Today, you're going to hear from a variety of our leaders going through really important topics. The first, I'm going to share a bit about the market opportunity that we have in front of us. Then Diego and the product leadership team will talk about how we are building the most Content Cloud to power critical workflows across the enterprise. Then Olivia and Mark will explain how we are delivering high-value solutions, complemented by partners, to our enterprise customers.
Then finally, Dylan will bring it home to discuss how our financial model comes together to drive a Rule of 45-50 outcome in our long-term model. To kick things off, I'd like to share a bit about our mission at Box. Our mission is to power how the world works together. We're incredibly honored to work with so many companies all around the world that are delivering some of the most innovative products and services and experiences for their customers. We get to work with over 115,000 companies from nearly every geography, industry, and size of organization. Our customers are doing incredibly important work every single day on the Box platform. Companies like Sony leverage Box to be able to produce new content and products for their customers.
Leading financial institutions like Morgan Stanley have been able to digitize and automate all forms of financial services for their clients, leveraging our platform. Critical U.S. government departments and agencies, like the U.S. military, leverage Box to secure and protect some of the most sensitive information. And finally, critical Japanese organizations, like the Japan Post, leverage Box to protect and manage their most important content. What all of these companies have in common is they are continuing to collaborate and work in all new ways, leveraging the Box platform. And what's incredibly exciting is that everything about how we work today is fundamentally changing. We have more data generated than ever before. 6.6 ZB of data were generated last year alone. The vast majority of organizations are increasing how they're collaborating on this data inside and outside their organizations.
Companies everywhere are looking to modernize the ways they manage this information by moving it to the cloud. We know the role of AI is going to have a massive impact on productivity across every single sector of the economy. Now, these are some of the most exciting trends happening in technology and the way we work today, but of course, there's risks as well. We know that the rate of cybersecurity attacks are increasing, and when they happen, they're more expensive than ever before. In fact, today, the average cost of a data breach has now reached about $5 million a year. We know companies also have to work with dealing with so many different cybersecurity threats in their organizations. When we talk to our customers, the three biggest challenges and opportunities that we talk to them about-...
are first, how do they digitize and automate their most important business processes? This could include streamlining their collaboration, simplifying and modernizing workflows across the organization, or connecting their applications together. Next, we're hearing from customers that they really need to accelerate with AI. We know that this means generating new insights that can lead to new product or service breakthroughs, automating critical processes to lower expenses, or supercharging productivity. Maybe that means serving more customers, or ultimately delivering just more efficiency or in the organization. And of course, they can't do any of that without protecting their most important data. So we have to deal with the various threats that organizations are facing. We have to be able to prevent ransomware attacks, and we have to meet a growing range of industry and geographic compliance requirements.
These are the digital imperatives that every single enterprise faces today, and at the center of these imperatives is how companies work with their most important information, and 90% of that information is their unstructured data. 10% of data in the form of CRM system data or ERP system data or data that goes into a database is structured data, but 90% of their data is unstructured, and the vast majority of that is enterprise content. It's the R&D materials that produce a new product. It's the marketing assets that turn into a marketing campaign. It's employee files that allow us to onboard and keep employees safe. It's the sales resources that train employees to let them go and sell new products to customers.
It's financial data that lets you close books or onboard new clients, and vendor agreements that close deals across the organization or drive the supply chain forward. All of this insanely critical information is how work is powered. The challenge is that the way that we manage this content is fundamentally broken. In the 1990s, enterprises invested in on-premises data center storage infrastructure. Then we had the introduction of enterprise content management or document management systems to manage the data inside of those data centers or inside of that infrastructure. Unfortunately, end users couldn't readily share that data, so that's why we saw the growth of enterprise file sync and sharing tools, where employees could finally collaborate with their information. And then ultimately, we had productivity point solutions that extended those capabilities even further.
Now, each of these technologies were invested in or brought into an organization for an important reason. The problem, though, is today, when you step back, we see that most enterprises are dealing with a very wide range of fragmented technology. The challenge with all of these different systems is it's producing an unwieldy mess. It means it's too costly to manage this information, it's unproductive for employees to be able to find what they're looking for to get work done, and it's unsecure. It's nearly impossible to manage the security across all of these systems in a uniform or seamless way, and that's how you ultimately have vulnerabilities introduced into an organization. Now, making matters even worse, it's nearly impossible to have AI work against all of this content inside of all of these repositories, in particular, the on-premises systems.
So in an era where companies want to be able to get ahead with the power of AI, they're not able to based on how their information and content is managed inside their enterprise. We know there's a better way. That is why we have been building the Content Cloud. it's the secure, intelligent content platform that powers the full life cycle of content.
From the moment content gets created or ingested in the cloud, or where you protect content from any type of threat, being able to enrich content by applying structure to unstructured data, collaborating inside and outside the enterprise, automating critical workflows, being able to get e-signatures on any transactional document, publishing content to teams or departments in and outside the organization, getting rich analytics and business insights on how content is being accessed or used, and then at the tail end of that process, being able to retain and govern content for any mission-critical business process that content goes through. And of course, a set of open APIs that plug into all of the technology that our customers are using.
Now, with the role of AI baked into the center of Box, being able to fundamentally transform how we work with our content at scale with the power of artificial intelligence. We have been building the Content Cloud platform for enterprises. It's backed by global infrastructure that delivers high speed, unlimited storage for customers all around the world, being able to protect and classify and manage and govern and secure data at scale, and then a layer of content services that customers can leverage to power any business process or workflow for how they're working with their content. The incredibly exciting thing about our platform is that we plug into all of the software that our customers are using, whether you want to access or work with files in Microsoft Teams or Slack or Salesforce or IBM, ServiceNow, Cisco Webex, Zoom, and many more applications.
We have over 1,500 applications that we're integrated into. More and more of our customers are building on Box's rich APIs, taking advantage of all of these services plugged into the custom software that they're developing for their customer-facing or employee-facing experiences. What I'm so proud of is how much we have delivered on our platform and the fact that we're just getting started.... We're entering an all-new chapter in an era of work that is changing with the role of AI, workflow automation, intelligence, and more. To deliver against this market opportunity, we are building the most Content Cloud. we started the company with the simple idea of: How do you access and share and collaborate on information from anywhere?
That quickly grew within enterprises to help them manage and secure content at scale, and we built all-new capabilities around security and data governance and workflow to be able to help our customers solve these challenges. But today, we're entering an era where work is more different than ever before, and we see a new chapter of innovation around workflow automation and intelligence to be able to fundamentally transform how we work with content in an enterprise. We can automate any business process that touches content, leverage AI to be able to get more insights and extract critical intelligence from our content or generate new content. We can power the full life cycle of content from start to finish, leveraging intelligence, and protect content at scale with AI.
All of this is built on and enabled by an open, AI-driven platform that connects to all of the leading AI providers from our customer, that our customers choose. So, to deliver against this opportunity, we are focused on building leading capabilities to help transform how our customers work with their content. As I mentioned earlier, there's a wide range of technologies that our customers leverage to manage and work with and collaborate around their most important content. When we look at the content market landscape, there's a variety of different categories that customers have to purchase technology from. There's core content management experiences, content collaboration technologies, security and governance tools, content workflow systems, and then there's a variety of use case markets where if customers need a virtual data room or a digital asset management system, they have to purchase from yet another set of vendors.
With just the innovation that we have in FY 2025, we will be entering into or doubling down on a number of key markets that we have in front of us. We'll be expanding in the content management market, further disrupting this legacy category. We'll be expanding into data loss prevention with AI or delivering all-new archival and retention capabilities. We'll be empowering a new era of workflow automation, forms, intelligent document processing, and doc generation capabilities on our platform, and these solutions will come together to deliver against all-new use cases for our customers, like contract intelligence and contract management, digital asset management, and much more. This has the impact of expanding our market opportunity in front of us and then ultimately expanding the total addressable market that we will be able to go after.
Due to the growth of these markets over the coming years, Box has a $100 billion market opportunity that we're going after by FY 2028. So the market has never been bigger for us to be able to go after and serve our customers in. But of course, we have to make sure that we have a go-to-market component and a set of solutions that allow us to really capture more of this opportunity in front of us. So as we advance our capabilities, we will continue to offer higher-tier plans for customers, as well as double down on additional consumption-based vectors for our platform usage.
As we have already proven over time, when we add additional plans, going from our core offering of secure file storage and access to driving add-on product suites with our bundles to our future plans, as we drive that, we have been able to increase average contract value, gross retention, gross margins, price per seat, and much more. Going forward, we'll have both higher-tier plans as well as additional platform consumption opportunities to be able to deliver more value for our customers. As you can tell, we have a massive market opportunity in front of us, with major tailwinds going forward. Diego and team will talk about how we're capturing that opportunity from a product strategy standpoint. Olivia and Mark will discuss how we're bringing all-new solutions to market to our customers, complemented by critical partners.
Dylan will bring this all home by sharing more about how we will drive accelerated revenue growth and profitability at scale to deliver a Rule of 45-50 outcome in our long-term model. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Diego to come share a bit about what we're building out in our platform to take advantage of the opportunity we have in front of us. Diego?
Thank you, Aaron. Hello, I'm Diego Dugatkin, Chief Product Officer at Box. As Aaron set out, we're entering a new chapter for Box. I'm going to share our exciting product strategy, and you will hear from three other members of the Box team. Ben Kus, our CTO, will share how we're using AI to bring intelligence to content, generate insights, and accelerate enterprises. Rand Wacker, our VP of Content Experiences, will take us through Box's workflow and automation strategy, focusing on our recent acquisition of Crooze. And then Manoj Asnani, our VP of Security and Compliance, will share our roadmap for advanced data protection and compliance. Now, this is really exciting because this is a special time for Box. We are at an inflection point with AI, where new AI models are unlocking amazing amounts of value from unstructured content, especially when paired with metadata and workflow tools.
As Aaron mentioned, we're building the world's most Content Cloud. over the past few years, we have been maturing our platform. Today, we're the Content Cloud platform that can drive the entire content life cycle for enterprises, and our next chapter is defined by bringing intelligence, automation, and workflow into Box, while always delivering robust security, compliance, and data governance. This combination simply does not exist anywhere else. We're now entering a new chapter where we will use AI to supercharge intelligent content workflows. To drive this next chapter, the Box product strategy is built on four pillars of innovation, productivity, security, intelligence, and interoperability. Now, to be the most productive, first, we must work where you do. In the office, at home, or even at the airport, we will make sure that content collaboration on Box is secure.
Second, we are focused on giving customers effective content publishing that makes it easy for people to find the accurate information they need to get work done. To power critical content workflows, we're releasing AI metadata extraction. Enriched content with metadata will transform content from unstructured data into truly intelligent data that is ready to go into special workflows. Now, new forms and doc gen capabilities will make our workflow offering even more versatile, and with our recent Crooze acquisition, we will have a low-code, no-code app builder to make building business processes on Box fast and efficient for all. Automating workflows and processes is one of the highest priorities for our customers. This is why we're investing in secure, modern, and cloud-native workflow and collaboration experiences that will ensure Box is the most productive Content Cloud.
Every time you send a message, share a document, or basically work on a process that, you know, takes a contract, you are using productivity tools. According to a Harvard Business Review study, in an average day, we switch about 350 times between 22 different applications and websites. All of that translates into managing costly systems and fragmented content in the enterprise. Now, there is a huge opportunity for Box to enter new use cases and markets with modern productivity experiences that drive those workflows. Content is some of every enterprise's most valuable data, and it must be protected from threats like malware, ransomware, and leaks. That is why we remain focused on advanced data protection and compliance. For security at Box, our mission is to help customers protect their content and deliver critical security outcomes for them.
Security and compliance are huge markets in their own right, and AI is fueling significant growth. In a recent survey, Gartner expects global security and risk management spending to jump 14% between 2023 and 2024, putting $27 billion on the table. For that, we have four principles guiding our security strategy. First and foremost, Box must protect our customers' important data. We're working to detect and prevent threats such as ransomware, and there is a direct correlation here. The more we can extend the security to all of our experiences and integrations, the more content will come to Box. Second, we must manage content through its complete life cycle. This will simplify our customers' tech stacks, making Box a key partner. Third, to support global businesses and open new markets, we must continually improve our Box's compliance certifications.
And finally, we must make sure that admins champion our security, controls, and insights. They will then be keen to expand Box to get more use cases in their organizations. So now let's take a look at enterprise-grade artificial intelligence. AI is a rapidly growing market, and a recent Gartner's estimate states that a total market opportunity will be $135 billion by 2025. We will make Box the most Content Cloud. we're building a future-proof AI architecture that handles AI in smart and secure ways. And ultimately, this architecture supports every content type and any AI model, all while providing full control and transparency over how AI is being used in any organization. Using AI to review documents, and especially sets of documents, means that we can now analyze in seconds what traditionally took more than many days.
Now, building on Box's Content Cloud, experiences like Box Hubs and our own Box AI APIs will let customers build content portals where business insights are instant. We will also use AI to automate business processes, where AI can review thousands of documents in a second and apply metadata to then use this structure to trigger business processes directly. This has revolutionary potential, opening up new use cases and opportunities that, until now, were too costly. Now, in addition to this, we have also the two focuses for security and AI that first make sure that AI is handled and applied securely to content, and then second, using AI to protect and classify and protect the content at scale. Lastly, it's a core part of our strategy to build Box on a flexible modern platform that is robust, easy to build, and easy to extend.
We want to enable customers and third-party developers to integrate Box content and products with other tools or to build their own custom applications using our APIs. This greatly increases the number of and complexity of the use cases that Box can address, and this is why we have seen a steady increase in the number of API calls that our customers are using through our integrations. This year, we're focusing on four themes for the platform: deeper integrations that embed us further into customer tech stacks and open up opportunities for those key, key partners. Then, more complex developer platform capabilities that can enable more tailored and higher-value use cases with new APIs that customers can use to build onto their own solutions.
And by being able to extend to more strategic use cases, we create more opportunities for the SIs to create and sell bespoke solutions using Box. We will continue to grow our technology partnerships, especially those that can result in deeper integrations or help address key gaps for certain use cases and industries. So now I will hand it over to Rand Wacker, who will give us an exciting overview on how we're using AI and metadata to accelerate critical business processes. Rand?
Thanks, Diego. This really is an exciting time at Box. Hey, everyone, my name is Rand Wacker, and I'm leading a new product group here focused on content experiences.... Our mission is to help customers bring more and more important business processes into Box in order to make our service stickier and higher value. In the past, a lot of these business-critical content processes have been run on what's known as Enterprise Content Management, or ECM systems. Every industry has some key processes that run their core business, where documents have to be approved, tracked, versioned, and the like. Regulated industries such as financial services, life sciences, and of course, government, have relied heavily on these legacy on-prem ECM systems. There are critical business documents that every company has a need to be managed as well.
Legal contracts, finance documents, employee records, these have been files that have often been unmanaged or stored in expensive third-party systems. ECM is a large but really dated market, with almost all deployments still stuck in on-prem data centers. These legacy systems have had very high implementation and maintenance costs. Often, these price them outside the reach of smaller organizations, which nonetheless require the structure and governance for their regulated processes, especially in regulated industries. These on-prem systems were designed in the 1990s, with very dated user experiences, often with no easy mobile or remote access. And since they're all deployed on-prem, they lack integration with modern IT stacks, such as other core SaaS business applications and productivity tools. As a result, these systems are used for only a small portion of content in an organization.
Typically, less than 5% of a company's most important data is managed in an ECM system like this, and that means that they're losing context across all the rest of their information. We believe that with cloud-native architectures and advancements in AI technology, we can redefine and expand this market. In addition to the traditional ECM use cases, we can bring this AI-powered process and automation to other departments' critical content workflows, and we can bring this to organizations of all sizes. Customers have been asking about moving to the cloud of Box for these use cases for a long time, but it's been on the pace of their own cloud migration. They want modern UIs and integration into the rest of their SaaS stack, as well as a security architecture integrated across the platform. But the real driving force is now AI.
With AI and the cloud, they have the opportunity to unlock tremendous potential from their content. We'll dive in a little bit, but first, let's talk about everything process-related. We're significantly expanding our process portfolio to capitalize on this power that AI unlocks. We already have Box Relay for approval workflows and Box Sign for e-signatures, and in development this year, Box Forms will let you kick off processes and collect key information from users across the org. With Box Doc Gen, we can create new content from forms and templates, such as NDAs and account applications. Of course, Box AI will let customers automatically extract the most important context in their documents to speed up process and improve security. Helping tie everything together, we're really excited about our acquisition of Crooze, which lets people build metadata and workflow-based apps on top of Box.
Crooze is a longtime partner that's created a no-code app builder on top of Box, allowing customers to build dashboards and processes based on documents and their metadata stored in our platform. This gives teams a way to coordinate their work, organize their most important information, and meet compliance requirements for key corporate records. These dashboards are easy to build, and all the files and the metadata is stored in Box, which makes it possible to integrate into other key systems as well. Crooze has dozens of existing customers, 100% all on Box, and by bringing this offering into our portfolio, we can accelerate our vision for advanced business process. Crooze fills a gap in our portfolio.
In the past, customers would either use our excellent web, mobile, and desktop apps for working with content in ad hoc ways, or they'd build completely custom applications from the ground up with the Box Platform APIs. This let you build really powerful apps on top of Box, but it required a heavy investment by the development teams. Now, by integrating the Crooze technology, we're able to provide a simple way for IT to work with departmental teams to create business applications for their most important data. This lowers the bar for customers to create really sticky apps for their business teams across the organization. So we're building this as an integrated experience into Box, allowing customers to deploy these dashboards where people get their work done right in Box. Take contract management, something that every organization needs to do.
With our integrated solution, a legal team can get a bird's-eye view of everything in process, what's coming up for renewal, and anything that's stalled. You can click in, and you'll see a metadata-driven list of files and tasks. And remember that much of this metadata will be automatically extracted by AI, speeding up the process. Or organize your digital marketing assets, making internal teams more productive and connect them better with external partners. With this combination of Box and Crooze, we're really expanding our ability to solve these critical content management use cases in a modern way, in the cloud, with a great user experience and embedded security, all built on the power of the Box Platform. In addition to Crooze, this year, we'll also release Box Forms to ingest new content and data from users and initiate a business process natively in Box.
Intuitive form builder makes it easy to create user-friendly ways to initiate service requests, document reviews, and other key workflows. Also, we'll launch Box DocGen this year to dynamically generate documents from flexible templates and metadata fields. This provides custom and dynamic content generation across the platform, and at the heart of all these processes is metadata about the files. Metadata is stored alongside a file, and it contains all the most relevant information in and about the file itself. This lets you organize and find key corporate documents. This lets you trigger actions, such as initiating a renewal conversation, and this lets you determine the sensitivity of a document to automatically apply security and governance policies. But in the past, working with metadata at scale has been the Achilles' heel of ECM.
Almost everything was done manually, requiring users to input sometimes dozens of fields when they upload a file. There's been some tools that can help with this, but they've required extensive configuration and training, and so they end up working for only a few file types in an organization. A lack of broad metadata limits the value of customers' content and slows down an organization. With LLM-based AI, though, we can change the game here. What we've seen is that basically, with zero training, the Box AI platform is able to read and understand hundreds of types of documents and automatically pull out important metadata. We can automatically populate this, present it to the user to verify, and speed up their work significantly. Let me show you a demo. So what we're looking at is a corporate policy stored in Box.
See that there's over a dozen fields that need to be entered to track the right policy information and to keep up to date with compliance requirements. Now, instead of filling this in manually, with Box AI, we can read through a document and extract its critical information automatically. In this case, AI detected 11 out of 12 fields based on its native understanding. Since AI LLMs use natural language instructions, we can go into the definition of the template and give it notes on how to find this field. No keywords, no pattern matching, just flexible English instructions. We save this definition, we go back to the preview, and we update the files that weren't captured before. Now, AI knows what to look for in the document and fills in the field automatically.
This can be done across hundreds or thousands of documents, all automatically, saving time, money, and increasing accuracy, and that's the power of AI with metadata. So as you can see, there's a huge expansion to our process platform this year. All of this lets us continue expanding into high-value use cases across an organization. Business processes across teams for contracts, policies, and engineering documents, managing libraries of critical enterprise docs such as employee records, finance, and legal. And this continues to move Box up the pyramid of more and more important business impact, making us stickier and more valuable to customers. So that's what's going on in our workflow and process portfolio, and of course, all this business-critical content needs to be kept safe and compliant. So for more on data protection and compliance, here's Manoj.
Hi, everyone. I'm Manoj Asnani, and I lead security, compliance, and governance products at Box. I'll spend the next few minutes talking about our strategy and plan for this critical area. Content and data security-centric security breaches continue to cause havoc, and it is because security controls tend to be disparate and not very well coordinated. They're also detached from the content itself, which leads to having very little context about that content, and thus making it harder to secure it. Which is why you need a security and governance platform which is deeply integrated with the content, and that is what we have built at Box. We want to secure and govern the content through its full life cycle, from the moment the document is created or ingested to the final step of archiving it.
In addition, our platform is built with fundamental compliance controls to help customers comply with federal and industry regulations. There are a specific set of challenges we hear from our customers in each of the steps of the security and governance life cycle. For example, they want to identify where all their content is, how sensitive it is, and what kind of risk it poses to the organization. They want to protect that content from accidental or malicious leakage and also protect it from ransomware. They want to be able to detect not just malware and ransomware, but also anomalous activity related to the content. They want to be able to respond or recover from content breaches if they were to happen. Finally, they want to dispose of, retain, or archive content while meeting their legal and compliance obligations.
We solve these challenges for them through our security and governance portfolio. With Box, customers can auto-classify the content based on file types and keywords in the files. They can enforce access restrictions based on classifications and watermark the content for better security, leverage our AI and ML capabilities to detect malware and anomalous or suspicious file and user activity. They can drive downstream security investigation workflows through our integrations with best-of-breed security operations tools, and they can author policies to retain or dispose of content and meet compliance requirements. Across all these pillars, they can drive deeper insights around content usage, risk, and productivity. Underpinning all this, they get core security capabilities, including multi-factor authentication, access permissioning, and risk-based access to the content. Here's a product lens on these capabilities.
Box Shield, Box Governance, Box Enterprise Administration, and Box Core Security are the products that deliver these outcomes for our customers. We have a ton of innovation planned across all these products in the coming year, but there are a few that are most interesting to dive deeper into. The first one is around content classification. We have made tremendous strides in classifying content based on keywords present in a document. Specifically, we can detect PII, such as Social Security numbers, passport numbers, et cetera, and customers can also classify files based on file type. This whole process is done automatically so that customers don't have to spend any manual cycles on it, and Box Shield does it at a very high scale today. Just in the past year, Box Shield has auto-classified more than 1 billion files.
But now we have an opportunity to take the next big leap in this area with the advent of large language models. We can now evaluate the full context of the content and gain a much deeper understanding of the sensitivity of a file. We can take tens, if not hundreds of factors into account, such as the title, author, document type, the actual content of the file itself, and classify it appropriately. You can now have a system which can tell the difference between an internal memo of an M&A deal versus a public announcement about it, between a product design document versus a product data sheet. Now, we're going to leverage Box AI for this deeper understanding of the context. Once we have this deeper understanding, we will classify the document automatically....
Then customers can apply appropriate security controls and restrictions within Box Shield to protect this content. According to our customers, this is one of the top applications of Box AI. We are also expanding to protecting content at the endpoints, such as laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. Endpoints are an important vector, and if compromised, can lead to disastrous security consequences. We focus on two use cases here. First, we will get real-time security risk signals from the device before granting access to content in Box. This risk computation will look at a multitude of factors, such as patch status, OS or app version, malware activity, which will enable us to get a truer and real-time picture of the security risk of a device being allowed before allowing access. Second use case is preventing leakage of sensitive content from the device itself, specifically within Box Drive.
We will enable customers to set policies in Shield to apply copy, print, or email restrictions for sensitive content downloaded to Box Drive on the device. Our approach is to integrate with top endpoint security solutions. Customers already have one of these solutions in place. CrowdStrike is the most common one, which is why we are starting with them first. Now, we all know ransomware continues to be a huge pain point for security teams and is a top-of-mind item for CISOs. One statistic worth highlighting is that in 2023 itself, more than $1 billion was paid out as ransomware payments. And we're gonna help our customers detect ransomware and recover from it if they were impacted. We're going to detect ransomware using machine learning heuristics, and alert on it, and also stop modifications to the files.
We're also going to help them not pay a ransom if impacted, by enabling them to recover content to a last known good version or a version of their choice and ensure business continuity. This enables them to not only have monetary savings, but also avoid productivity loss brought on by ransomware activity. Now, we all know that the content has been growing at an exponential rate in enterprises, and historically, customers have not had a great solution for managing this growing content. Cloud provides them with an opportunity to manage it in a much more efficient way. When we talk to our customers, what we hear is that they want to manage this unused content in a compliant way. They want to have the ability to do long-term data management, including restoring that content when needed.
They need to meet any legal obligations they might have to address, and they want to do it in an intelligent and automated way. We're gonna solve this exact use case for them. Our customers have more than six years of less often used but valuable content that they want to be able to manage. We're going to use AI and metadata to intelligently archive content. This is also a great way for them to address the content sprawl. It is also worth calling out that with this, we are entering a market which, according to IDC, will be worth $3.7 billion by 2027. Now, you've heard a lot about intelligent use cases so far. Let me hand it to Ben, our CTO, who will dive deeper into Box AI.
Thanks, Manoj. Hi, I'm Ben Kus. I'm Chief Technology Officer at Box, and I'm here to talk about enterprise-grade AI. This is a very exciting time for us, because historically, the technology just wasn't really available to have AI operate directly on content. So being able to extract key insights was not really automatic nor easy. With the new power of foundation models, including large language models, we're now able to take AI and operate directly on your content. This gives us some exciting new capabilities, such as being able to extract key insights from data across industries, across lines of business in ways that were never really possible before. For instance, AI today actually has a very deep understanding of legal contracts.
It can understand the nuances of legal language and then help you, as you're experiencing your content, to be able to extract some key legal insights. Being able to understand financial information. The AI today understands a lot of the nuanced language that goes into accounting, finance, and in general, the type of information that the financial professionals will be looking into. So across almost all content types, AI today is able to help you as a user, almost like you have a personal assistant who's there as an expert in the content to help you be able to understand and, and utilize your content. And this is why we have introduced Box AI, so that, to bring these capabilities to your content. So we...
This is, for Box AI, we take the advanced AI models, and we combine them with our enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy to allow customers to perform AI directly on their content. Now, we've already introduced the idea of Box AI for Documents, and we've released this to our customers. This allows us to do things like better understand and interact with a single document and to use AI to help you with that. This is useful in a variety of use cases, including things like summarizing your market conditions from an investor document, being able to extract key answers from HR documents. We're excited to announce that we have now this capability, not just across a single document, but across multiple documents. And we've been able to expose this in Box AI for Hubs.
This gives us the ability to take a corpus of data and to be able to extract these key insights. For instance, if you have material at your organization, like maybe a lot of detailed product information, to make this available to your sales team, so they can quickly understand, answer customer questions as they're in real time interacting with their clients. Similarly, if you have some information around, let's say, your internal employee information, and you wanna make it available so that people can not only experience their data, but also get important questions answered quickly, then we allow you to do that within Hubs. And this works across Hubs of all types, and across our content that comes in all the different ways that Hubs provides. Let's take a look at a demo.
So here we have an example of Box Hubs. If we go to our sales enablement hub, we'll see that you have here some product information that would be very useful for a salesperson about their products, MotionLoop and DataCrate.... Now, imagine that they're on the phone with a customer, and the customer asks some questions. They can easily go to Box AI, and they can actually start to ask these questions directly to the AI in Box. For instance, "What are the four major differences between MotionLoop and DataCrate?" The AI will be able to give them a answer that's based upon the data that exists in this corpus of data. They can look up specific information, for instance, "What is the price of MotionLoop?" And be able to get the answers quickly.
And then they can even ask more generalized questions like, "Can you explain the value and the top use cases for file management software?" And the AI will both be able to provide to them data as well as insights across multiple documents, and this is the power of using AI across multiple documents in Box AI for Hubs. Now, these capabilities are available not only in our user experience, as you've seen, but also available via API. So these capabilities around text extraction, metadata extraction, document Q&A for single or multiple documents, they're available for our users to use on their content in Box, all backed by our enterprise-grade security and privacy. This helps us because at any time people are thinking about using AI with their content, they can be thinking about using Box, our Box AI API.
And we're also very excited to announce that we also, that we operate with one of our strongest partners, including Microsoft and their Microsoft 365 Copilot. And so we'll be able to use the capabilities of Copilot to operate on their data inside of Box. Now, whenever you're using AI on content, it requires that we have a deep understanding of security and the architecture so that you're able, we're able to ensure that we can do AI safely and securely. For instance, how do permissions work with AI? What are the controls on model training? What if the AI has access to sensitive employee information or medical information or some key financial data that's not public? How will the controls on this work? Because if you're not careful, you'll end up in a situation where AI itself can become a source of data leakage.
This is why we built these principles into Box architecture from the beginning, including being able to utilize our enterprise-grade security that we're well-known for, being able to take that and apply it to AI, including things like model isolation, being able to ensure that we support multiple models and work across multiple content types, and always ensuring that we are respecting the granular access controls that our customers have set on their, on their data. We do this with what we call the Box AI platform. Now, the way this works is that for all of the queries that you've seen in, in through these examples, is the very first thing that we'll do is we'll check permissions and security policies on your content. If you don't have access to content, you should not be able to do AI on it.
And then we take this, and then we perform retrieval augmented generation, where we use vector embeddings to understand the most relevant parts of the data and extract that. Then we take that, and we augment it with our prompts and any customer instructions that they want to provide so that we're able to reduce hallucinations, and we're able to give the best, most accurate answers for an enterprise. And then we take that, and then that's what we send to the AI models and then give the response to the users. And this all happens in under a second. And we work not only on text-based types, but as models are improving, we're able to extend this to images, audio, video, spreadsheets, multimodal content, and more. And we know that flexibility is important for our customers.
Although we will select for them the best models that we have found to do all these different capabilities, including from our, some of our strongest partners, like Azure, Google, IBM, and others, we give customers the capability to bring their own model. If they've custom trained or fine-tuned a model, or if they, they have a model they believe works best for their use cases, we let them use that within the Box AI platform. We know that customization and administration is really critical for our enterprise customers. This is why we, we provide these capabilities, like retrieval augmented generation as a service, but we do it in a standardized way that allows them to have one set of security and compliance controls and audits, and then be able to use the, this across multiple use cases.
And we provide full customization of the underlying AI capabilities to give full control to our customers, and in all cases, we let them be able to extend the capabilities. So it's not just usable inside of the Box entire experience, but also available for any custom integrations that they want to enable. This is why we say that Box is the content platform for future-proofing your AI content strategy. And with that, let me turn it back to Diego.
Thanks, Ben. All of this incredible innovation is built on our extensible and interoperable platform. Before we wrap up, as a refresher, our platform focuses on two very important strategic goals. First, with over 1,500 integrations, it lets customers integrate Box content and products throughout their full tech stack. It protects their investments and ensures that they have a single content layer protecting all their data across all their apps. Second, with powerful tools, APIs, and a growing developer community, we extend the power of Box through custom development and partners that unlock growth areas in a variety of industries, use cases, and markets. Now, how we take all of this great innovation to market, including our maturing platform offerings, is so important, which is why I'm excited to have Olivia and Mark coming up to take us through our GTM strategy for FY 2025.
But first, we'll have a quick 10-minute break, so thank you, and see you soon.
Hi, my name is Olivia Nottebohm, and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Box. I recently joined in October, and it is good to be with you all today. Aaron provided an overview of our $100 billion market opportunity, and Diego shared how we are building the world's most Content Cloud. i am now going to share our go-to-market strategy for FY 2025, focusing on how we will be delivering high-value solutions through suites and platform, complemented by partners. We are evolving from being a platform that was about storage and sharing, to a modern approach to content management, to now bringing intelligence, automation, and workflow into the platform, backed by a level of security, compliance, and data governance that does not exist anywhere else.
Now we are entering this new chapter as a company where we can power a much more intelligent set of workflows. We can use AI to structure unstructured data, and we are able to build with no-code interface to manage content at scale. Some examples that we've already seen include critical business processes like contract management, digital asset management, invoice processing, or even controlled documents. Finally, we are working on new ways to transform the content life cycle by being able to better secure content with AI and being able to govern content at the end of the life cycle through data archival and data governance features. Okay, now let's dive into the FY 2025 go-to-market strategy. First, we have already begun engaging our customers and prospects on advanced content management capabilities to disrupt the traditional or legacy enterprise content management space with our solutions.
Second, we will be bringing even more functionality to our customers through our platform, which will also serve as a way to capture and partner more deeply with our SIs. Third, we are investing in building our partner ecosystem, specifically focusing on system integrators and ISVs. And finally, we see the momentum and the positive reception from customers around our new capabilities, and we will be investing in awareness and consideration to spread the word. Okay, let's dive in to expanding into new categories and monetizing this approach. We have already started to see new customers wanting to leverage our platform for new capabilities like automating content workflows. At the end of last year, a manufacturing company decided to use our platform to better enable their field service technicians as they traveled from customer to customer to check on and fix their machinery...
They needed a solution that could handle the online/offline nature of their work, while seamlessly updating their customers. The solution they came to was powered by Box, integrated with Salesforce, and was linked to SAP through Box's metadata-based automation. As we expand into these new categories, it will align closely with a higher-tier Enterprise plan that we are planning for the back half of this year. We want to make sure that we have a path for upgrading customers to deliver these new capabilities. Through our product innovations, we can address many complex, enterprise-oriented use cases around ECM, document workflows, security, and government, and this new SKU will allow us to monetize. We have also seen existing customers who have been excited to upgrade because of our AI applications, and we expect the offerings contained in the new Enterprise plan to drive an additional upgrade cycle.
Here, you see an example of a global professional services firm that joined us on Enterprise product, went through two seat expansions, and then at the end of FY 2024, upgraded to Enterprise Plus because of their excitement around what they saw on Box AI. In fact, they were so excited that they signed a multi-year contract. Turning now to advancing our platform opportunity. As a reminder, we have driven a healthy portion of our growth historically from innovation in our suites, monetized through suite upgrades. Here, you can see the ARPU progression over time, and it's also good to see that the ARPU has steadily expanded over the course of that period. Now, we expect to layer on top of that seat model, additional growth from our platform, and I'm excited about this opportunity. Aaron spoke to this earlier.
Our platform underpins our offerings with a level of security, data governance, and lifecycle management that really no other platform offers. But what am I excited about this year from a go-to-market perspective? I am excited about the evolution of our platform and what it means for our customers, SIs, and developers. So number one, richer APIs for metadata, doc gen, AI. These will open up solutions for us, as you heard from our product team. No-code app development through our Crooze acquisition. Rand described the functionality earlier, and we will monetize this in our new Enterprise plan, as well as through a new standalone SKU at the end of this year. Third, you will see improved UI elements for developers, and this will help us deliver solutions like workspaces and portals.
Fourth, our expanded sandbox experience will enable our customers, developers, and partners to get started, and this will also help our Box Consulting and SI partner teams engage in that broader ecosystem. These are underpinned by an investment in developer relations, which allows us to go even broader in the number of developers we reach and engage, and build more internal champions that speak for Box. Secondly, investing in SIs, and this is an opportunity to engage those SIs on our bigger and more expansive platform. We will continue to monetize our platform, and I see even more opportunities going forward. Here, you see an international accounting service and business advisory customer. Their seats continued to expand, and they upgraded twice. They also continued to expand their platform usage.
This customer has created a portal that enables seamless content exchange between financial advisors and their customers, with an extensive set of automations that simplify workflows for the advisors and the clients. Their significant API investment also reflects their plan to leverage Box AI and other automations in the future. Okay, now on to our partner ecosystem. As many of you know, there are three key components of a partner ecosystem: the reseller channel, system integrators, and ISVs. In 2025, we are leaning into SIs and ISVs. We will be further augmenting our direct model with a more robust, indirect model. We need to expand our reach and need the help of our partners to do that. Our goal is to be brought into more deals that we can access purely through our sellers today, and we will drive our broader reach through a focused set of SIs and ISVs.
In terms of SIs, we are focused on three-four in North America, including government, and two-three in each of the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. Then we will focus on a handful of ISVs, like Google and Salesforce. As we think about our evolution over time, we have also continued to layer on ways to drive implementation and solutioning. Early in our history, it was self-serve. We then layered on customer success managers to work closely with our customers over their lifetime. And then we started delivering integrations and other elements that required hands-on keyboards, and we began to deliver that through Box Consulting. Now, as we move into this new chapter, where we'll be able to enable automation of content workflows and other capabilities, we will be engaging even more intensely with SIs and partners.
The exciting part is that we are already able to leverage this SI ecosystem to really drive solutions that are specific to industries. We have begun to partner in delivering solutions for specific industries like public sector, life sciences, FinServ, and M&A, and we are leaning into those partners in 2025 and lining up repeatable use cases.... Let's turn now to how we are investing to amplify this momentum through increased awareness and consideration. We want to increase the number of target decision-makers and influencers who know about these new capabilities. We are investing in getting this message out to customers and prospects, as well as to developers and our SI partners. We are investing in three key areas: campaigns, Box-led events, and third-party engagements. We will also have a constant drumbeat throughout the year.
A couple of examples are Content Cloud Summit in the spring, CIO Works in the summer, BoxWorks in the fall, Evanta events throughout the year, and AI Connect events through the calendar year and across each of our key markets. We will also be partnering with ISVs as part of this, so for example, being at Google Next in April and Dreamforce in September. We have an exciting year lined up, and I'm looking forward to the prospects, customers, and developer engagement that we will be driving. Our go-to-market priorities also come together to drive international growth. Outside of the U.S., we are focused on Japan, the U.K., France, Germany, Australia, and Canada. We will stay focused to ensure that our dollars get the greatest returns. For these geos, we are delivering the full go-to-market stack, and we will be investing deeply in local marketing in these six countries.
In terms of partners, outside of Japan, where we have good coverage, we will be activating regional SIs and two global SIs, and we will also be working with a focused set of ISVs. Thirdly, we'll be growing the go-to-market team in a paced manner to really enable this localization. And fourth, we are going to be more deeply localizing all of the go-to-market teams in each of these countries. So to recap, our 2025 go-to-market strategy is to, first, expand and monetize new categories, second, to advance our platform opportunity, third, to grow our partner ecosystem to expand our reach, and finally, to invest in awareness and consideration to continue to educate the market about this next chapter for Box. Next up, I'm going to hand it off to Mark to talk about our sales strategy.
Hi, I'm Mark Wayland, Chief Revenue Officer at Box, and I'm excited to be with you here today to talk about our sales strategy for FY 2025 and beyond. We're going to do a double-click here on the growth pillar of our long-term strategy for profitable growth. As a reminder, we have a very balanced business, with 97% of our business coming from subscription and just 3% coming from consulting services. We're very balanced from a geography standpoint, with about 2/3 of our business coming from here in the U.S. and about 1/3 of it coming abroad. We're balanced across industries, and as you know, we do very well in industry verticals where there's lots and lots of highly sensitive content. We'll talk more about that in a bit.
From a segmentation standpoint, we do about 2/3 of our business in enterprise and the balancing third in our commercial business. We are really focused on the seven countries on Earth that have the highest addressable market for enterprise software. You know, when we go into a market to win new customers and to make them successful, it's not just a seller on our team that we have to bring into that market. We need salespeople, we need solutions engineers, we need partner managers, we need marketers, we need legal support, and on and on. It ends up being 10-15 Boxers to make a customer successful in a different geographic market.
So we're focused on these markets because they're the largest enterprise software markets, and when tempted to go into some of the countries on Earth that have huge populations, take a Brazil or an India, we need to remind ourselves that the large opportunity for us is in the big enterprise software markets. It's always best for us to double down on the countries where we currently have employees in-market, because those, in fact, are the largest markets. We do very well, as I mentioned, in industries that have large volumes of highly sensitive content. We've been tremendously successful in public sector last year and in prior years. It's a huge growth area for us. Here in the U.S., we do very well in the SLED market, also in the FED market. In FED, we do well in the civilian agencies like the Department of Energy.
We also do very well in the Department of Defense with the Air Force and other branches of the Department of Defense. And then globally, we've been very successful in public sector with customers like the Japan Post and the Met Police in London. In financial services, we've won some really great big-name logos like Nomura, Regions Bank, and Zurich, and these customers use Box to manage sensitive content for wealth management, for different portal use cases. It's been a huge growth market for us. And then in life sciences, as you're likely aware, the next generation of drugs are very often being built using Box. Long-term clinical trials with highly sensitive data, that's all stored in Box during that drug development process.
From a segmentation standpoint, we cover the market by employee bands, so as I mentioned, about 2/3 of our business comes from our enterprise business, about 1/3 from commercial. That's a combination of SMB and mid-market, and then we do about 6% of our business through a fully self-service online model. This is a really great way for us covering the market for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it creates great career progression for the sales team, where we can hire sellers early in their career in our commercial business, and as they become more sophisticated and more capable in their selling model, they can move up that pyramid up into our enterprise teams. And also from a product and an overall company strategy standpoint, it forces us to create Content Cloud platform...
that will meet the needs of the world's most sophisticated organizations from a security and a compliance and an integration standpoint, but also be easy to use to satisfy the needs of the world's smallest companies, and that's a very powerful blend for us in software. So with those customers across those segments, we have three primary growth levers. First, we have to constantly be bringing on new logos. They are, in fact, our future, and we had a great year last year on the new logo front. Once we bring those customers onto the platform, they very often start with a departmental deployment, and we want to go wall to wall, where every employee has a Box license. And then while we're doing so, we wanna move them on an upgrade cycle and drive them up into our suites.
And then the third growth area for us is around our platform and these API-enabled use cases that have become a growing part of our business. As you heard from Aaron and you heard from Olivia, we are moving into this new chapter. It's a new and very exciting chapter of our growth here at Box. You know, we started the company really around file sharing and storage, and then we carried those capabilities on to that chapter two, where it was really all about managing and securing content. During that chapter two of our growth, we made significant investments into our platform to make it the very best environment on Earth to store highly sensitive content. Best in class in terms of security, reliability, governance, data residency, external collaboration, and the like.
But now we're moving into this new and even bigger chapter of our growth, which is unlocking a tremendous growth opportunity for Box and huge opportunities for our customers to get more value from the platform around workflow, automation, and intelligence. Now, as a level-setting statement, I wanna share again this IDC study that you saw from Aaron, and in this study that was launched last year, we found that 90% of an enterprise's data is, in fact, unstructured. Most of the investments go into technologies to manage structured data, while, in fact, 90% of the data is unstructured. And it's been a really interesting study to bring out into the market and talk to customers about.
Over the last year since this study was launched, I've shared this data with hundreds of CIOs and their direct reports around the world, in all industries, in all countries, in all segments, and I thought we'd get a little bit of pushback on it. Every time I share this data, I pause and I ask: "Do you think this applies for your business?" Zero times has anyone said it does not. In fact, 100% of the time, the customers generally say, "Yes, we think that 90% applies to us, and it's likely more in our environment." That's the world that we're in now. We're in an unstructured world where enterprises are really powered. Their business is their unstructured data, and we have a tremendous opportunity to put structure around that unstructured data.
So in this new chapter, it unlocks three new growth opportunities for Box. Firstly, we have new solution areas that are creating new conversations for our sellers with IT buyers. We're also opening up new buying centers in lines of business that we've had access to before, but we're creating new buying center opportunities within the enterprise. And then third, we have new partnering opportunities, and we're making significant investments in our partner ecosystem. So you've heard a little bit today about all these solution areas around secure, external collaboration, compliant content management, workspaces and portals, content workflows, and e-signature processes. We've done a huge enablement effort around the solution framework, and these new solutions and the supporting use cases are creating new conversations for our sellers with IT buyers. And with that, we have some really incredible new wins.
Last year, a great example of one of these content workflows is a financial services customer of ours that's been an existing Box customer for quite some time, but while they're using Box, they've been making huge investments in Salesforce to manage their loan origination process. So Salesforce is the workflow engine, where when a customer is applying for a new loan, they're running that process through Salesforce. But as you can imagine, those sorts of workflows involve lots and lots of documents and content. You can imagine, pay stubs, tax returns, bank statements, and those are uploaded into Salesforce and then stored in Box. And using our APIs, they're avoiding all the manual intervention that was required before.
Through our APIs, they're extracting data from all those statements, inputting that data into fields in Salesforce, and firing those workflows through with Salesforce in the Box and the content being managed by Box. They're saving tons of money by taking out all of that manual intervention and all that manual involvement and doing it with automation. Now, we're opening up these new buying centers in the enterprise, and as you know, for years and years, we've been powering high-value use cases in sales and marketing and R&D and legal and HR and operations, but the conversations in this new chapter are entirely different, and that is because this impact of automation and AI in the enterprise is different than anything we've seen before. I'm in my fourth decade of technology sales, and this is...
I've not seen anything like this before, even the advent of the internet itself. I recall in the 1990s, meeting with CIOs of Fortune 500 companies who would say to us, "We are not an e-commerce company. We have no use for the internet except for to put up directions to our office." You do not hear that about today about AI. In every industry around the world, line of business leaders are currently evaluating AI technologies for how it will help their business, or they're in proofs of concept, or they're in production, every single enterprise, every line of business, all around the world. So this is creating new buying centers for us, where the budgets for purchases of Box are actually coming out of those buying centers themselves....
We've had some incredible new wins, importantly, since our acquisition of Crooze, and one of those really fun ones is this company, Prose. Prose is a direct-to-consumer beauty products company. They make hair products and skin products that are custom-tailored to the individual consumer. Rather than going to the grocery store or the drugstore and buying a haircare product or a skincare product that's made for the mass market, with Prose, you go onto their website, and you go through this sort of wizard that asks lots of questions about your skin type or your hair type, and it custom tailors a product just for you. The problem that they had is they had lots of content in Box, but they really needed more powerful metadata tagging capabilities on that content.
They were thinking about maybe moving to a different digital asset management solution. With our acquisition of Crooze, they were able to take these thousands and thousands of digital assets, lots of photographs for all these different use cases for their products, and tag those photos with metadata. That could be what type of photo it is, which one of their products it's related to, but also importantly, what's the licensing agreement that they have with that digital asset, and how long are they able to use it? They're able to save a ton of time and money by using the power of Box with Crooze, and it's a really fun use case that we think will be repeatable over time. Also, lastly, in this new chapter, we have this tremendous opportunity to expand our partner ecosystem.
Now, for many years, we've had a robust partner ecosystem that is a combination of resellers, systems integrators, and technology partners. The path forward really gives us an opportunity to massively grow that systems integrator ecosystem. Systems integrators are interested in working with platforms like Box because when you implement Box in these advanced use cases, there's tremendous opportunities for business process change, for integration points, and that's how that ecosystem really, really scales and grows, and we're starting to have tremendous success in this space. But we're making investments into SIs like never before. Three areas that we're making investments: firstly, we have dedicated headcount that are focused on partnering with these systems integrators, so dedicated headcount that are there to cultivate relationships with new SIs that we haven't worked with before, and then also to grow the relationships that have been in place for years.
But you can't just have partner managers working with SIs. You also have to make investments in the supporting cast that gets those relationships to work, so that can be operation support, program management, enablement resources to make sure those SIs know how to work on our platform, and partner marketers. And then along with that, we're making the marketing investments themselves, so for co-marketing investments and also investing in the events that the partners are hosting themselves, where they bring their own audience, and then we bring our message around Content Cloud. and one of the really great examples of a win in our partner ecosystem last year is with the Nevada DMV. So this is an incredible multiyear digital transformation initiative that the state of Nevada is heading out on, and you can learn about it online. It's a very public use case.
The cornerstone application for the digital transformation of the Nevada DMV is Salesforce. So imagine your experience as a citizen with the DMV. Those are all moving digital. None of us like waiting in line at the DMV. Everyone wants more self-service, more of an ability to do it online. So they're using Salesforce as that case management and workflow primary application for all those use cases: a new driver's license, a license renewal, a vehicle registration, or a renewal. That's all gonna be powered by Salesforce. But as you can imagine, those use cases also involve lots of files and lots of content. So along with Salesforce and with the lead SI on the deal, Slalom, we're a part of this overall multiyear digital transformation for the Nevada DMV.
And make no mistake, every other state in the union is looking at this digital transformation effort and looking at how they can learn from it and duplicate it as well. And it's not just in departments of motor vehicles, but we're seeing similar digital transformation initiatives in child protective services, in the court systems, and really in every agency in our state and local governments. All right, so with that, that's our growth strategy, and I will hand over to Dylan, who will take you through our long-term strategy for profitable growth.
Thanks, Mark. I'm Dylan Smith, Box's co-founder and CFO. Today, I'll start with an overview of how our financial profile has evolved over the past few years, including a brief recap of last year's results. Then, I'll walk through how our continued suites momentum will continue to drive steady improvements in our underlying customer economics. Next, I'll discuss why we're confident that the foundation we've been building will allow us to deliver sustainable double-digit revenue growth while also continuing to expand gross and operating margins over a multiyear period. I'll close by sharing how everything you've heard today will allow us to generate significant shareholder value as we steadily execute toward our long-term target model. This past year, we experienced a challenging macroeconomic environment, as well as escalating currency headwinds throughout the year.
Despite those headwinds, we continued to make progress toward our long-term target model, and we delivered a strong finish to the year in Q4. You can see this in our remaining performance obligations or RPO. In FY 2024, on a constant currency basis, RPO grew faster than both revenue and billings, up 9% for the year. This growth was fueled by a combination of a strong Q4, as well as customers continuing to make longer-term commitments to Box as we've become a more strategic part of their IT strategy.... Importantly, this provides us with better multi-year revenue visibility as well. A key component of RPO is billings, which grew 6% in constant currency for the full year and 10% in Q4.
Even in this constrained spending environment, we're seeing more and more customers elect for early renewals and Suites upgrades in order to take advantage of the full value of Box's platform ahead of their scheduled renewal dates, which demonstrates the demand we're seeing for our newer product offerings. Turning to gross margin, in the back half of last year, we completed a multi-year effort to migrate our infrastructure to the public cloud. Achieving this milestone has already had, and will continue to have, a laundry list of benefits, including improving our scalability, accelerating product innovation, and expanding gross margin. We've been able to expand gross margin by four points over the past few years, even as we've experienced duplicative costs associated with this migration.
Now, with the significant majority of those data center and server expenses in the rearview mirror, we're on track to deliver 80% gross margin this year, achieving the low end of our previous long-term target model ahead of schedule. On the bottom line, the combination of those gross margin improvements, our lower-cost location strategy, and our overall cost discipline have allowed us to more than double our operating profit over the past three years, while expanding operating margin by a full 10 points. These initiatives will continue to deliver operating leverage in the coming years as we march toward our long-term target model. Our free cash flow generation has followed a similar trend, improving by 10 points and more than doubling over the past few years, and going forward, we expect operating margin and free cash flow margin to remain closely correlated.
We've been leveraging the majority of our free cash flow to return capital to shareholders, which has allowed us to fully offset equity dilution and gradually reduce total shares outstanding over time. We've also used a portion of our free cash flow to make targeted acquisitions to accelerate our product roadmap, including an acquisition that allowed us to enter the e-signature market, and more recently, the acquisition of Crooze to enhance our metadata and workflow capabilities. You've already heard how customers are resonating with and adopting Suites, leading to higher-value, stickier use cases. Now, I'm gonna dive into our customer base and our customer economics and how they're evolving as a result of this momentum. As we've continued to diversify our revenue base and generate stickier use cases, our business model has become more resilient to any headwinds that impact specific geographies, industries, or segments.
The enhancements we've made to Box's offerings overall, and Suites adoption in particular, have been critical in achieving strong customer economics, even in a challenging environment. We now have roughly 1,770 customers paying at least $100,000 annually, up 8% year-over-year, ahead of our revenue growth, given the enterprise momentum I mentioned earlier. Suites customers now account for 55% of total revenue, up 9 points over this past year. Virtually all of our Suites sales this past year have been Enterprise Plus, our highest-tier Suites offering. This strong Suites momentum is the primary driver of the pricing improvements we've delivered for several years, which have improved at an average rate of 4% annually since we introduced our first Suites offering nearly five years ago.
In FY 2024, pricing improved by 2% overall, as while the value that Suites is delivering and capturing is stronger than ever, the lower seat growth that we've experienced this past year has offset some of that impact. Lastly, our full churn rate has remained strong and stable at 3% on an annualized basis, even in a constrained IT spending environment, as Box has become an increasingly critical component of our customers' IT stacks. Let's now shift to our largest customers, which we segment into 100,000+ customers, 500,000+ customers, and $1 million+ customers in terms of annual contract value. All three populations have grown at an average rate of 13% over the past three years, ahead of our revenue CAGR, which demonstrates the power of our land, expand, and retain business model.
While this is primarily driven by our enterprise customers, we're also seeing a greater contribution from, and a huge opportunity in, our commercial segment, as high-value platform use cases are more regularly driving six-figure customer contract values in even our smaller customers. We've talked about Suites quite a bit today, as driving Suites adoption has been a company-wide focus for the past few years, and this slide demonstrates that these efforts are paying off. As mentioned, we ended FY 2024 with 55% of our revenue coming from Suites customers, ahead of the 50% target we laid out a year ago, and that target was pulled forward by a year from our initial expectations. In Q4, our Suites attach rate on 100K+ deals set a new high-water mark at 81%, which helped to fuel the 9-point improvement we saw year-over-year.
As we plan to launch a higher-tier plan this year, we expect Suites adoption to continue to be a key component of returning to double-digit growth. Suites customers continue to have higher contract values, higher net and gross expansion rates, and higher pricing outcomes versus non-Suites customers. Here, I'll revisit the pricing component that you saw earlier to emphasize the importance of Suites to our overall growth. Suites have fueled a steady increase in price per seat over time, roughly 4% per year on average. As we introduce a new plan tier and as the macroeconomic environment eventually improves, we expect pricing to be an important driver of our overall growth, possibly more important than it has over the past couple of years.
As we've discussed previously, the macroeconomic environment that we've experienced over the past couple of years has had the most pronounced impact on our seat growth and on our overall net retention rate. The other components of net retention are pricing improvements and full churn, which have been more resilient. As net retention is a trailing twelve-month metric, and as we have good visibility into upcoming renewals, we're confident that 101% represents the floor that we'll see in this result, and over time, we expect net retention rate to deliver a mid-single-digit percentage contribution to our overall growth rate. The customer momentum and customer economics that we just discussed provide the foundation for us to return to durable, double-digit revenue growth and continued margin expansion. Everything you've heard today will have a direct impact on our ability to deliver double-digit top-line growth.
The investments we're making in our go-to-market initiatives should expand our reach and traction, particularly in the industries and segments where we're currently underrepresented. As we continue to improve the ROI of our various demand generation programs, and as the macroeconomic environment improves, we expect to improve sales force productivity over time as well, which will help us to deliver additional leverage in sales and marketing. A new wave of Suites upgrades from our upcoming product offerings and the new higher-value use cases that this unlocks will further fuel our penetration into key verticals and should be a catalyst for stronger overall growth, including a higher net retention rate. As you've already heard, delivering these newer offerings to our customers also significantly expands our platform use cases and monetization opportunities, in addition to making Box a more compelling partner for systems integrators.
We've built a billion-dollar business, and as you can see here, we still have a huge untapped opportunity within the world's largest companies. Box currently has a presence in a little more than a quarter of the Global 2000. Even in Japan, which has been an incredibly successful market for us, more than 3/4 of enterprise and mid-market customers in Japan haven't yet adopted Box, and we have even more opportunity in verticals such as financial services and the public sector over there, where we only recently achieved key compliance certifications to address those customers' needs. Our new logo opportunity in the U.K., which is the largest market in EMEA, is even greater still.
SIs and channel partners are key influencers in this market, so the investments we're making this year in those ecosystems should expand our reach and have an outsized impact on our ability to accelerate growth in EMEA. In addition to this new logo opportunity, we also have an $8 billion opportunity to grow within our current customer base through both seat expansion and the impact of moving more and more of our customer base over to Suites. As a reminder, roughly three-quarters of our new bookings have historically come from our install base, and we expect the growth contribution from existing customers to remain in this general range going forward. More recently, the majority of customer expansion has been through plan upsells and pricing increases. In steady state, we expect each of seat growth and pricing uplifts to contribute roughly half of our overall customer expansion.
As you've heard, with the product innovation that we're delivering, comes a significantly expanded platform monetization opportunity, and we've outlined some examples of that here. Capabilities like AI and Hubs will help us unlock high-value platform use cases in the cloud content services market. Box Sign, DocGen, and Forms will do the same in the e-signature market, and Crooze enables us to address the intelligent document processing market alongside the insights that AI will provide. Importantly, all of these categories are components of the enterprise content management market, the majority of which is currently being addressed through on-premises providers. In the coming years, many customers will have to reconcile their spend on these systems with their desire to leverage AI-driven use cases, which could catalyze a number of companies deciding to finally move off of those legacy solutions to adopt a cloud-based solution.
And when that happens, and with all of these newer capabilities coming to market, Box will be ready and happy to have that conversation. Putting it all together, you can see how we expect these three categories of growth catalysts to contribute to our overall improvements in top-line growth. In the coming years, we expect to accelerate our revenue growth from 5% this past year to 10%-15% in our long-term target model, three-five years from now. Going from left to right, we expect 1-2 points of incremental growth to come from bringing on a higher volume of new customers, driven by the increased reach from partners in capitalizing on the opportunity we have in underrepresented verticals and geographies.... We expect that middle bar, customer expansion, to have the greatest impact on our return to double-digit growth.
I've already talked about the product-led pricing and expansion drivers, and I'd note that in many cases, when a customer recognizes the full value of our offerings and moves to Suites, that opens up new use cases and leads to a simultaneous increase in seats. On top of this, as the macroeconomic environment improves over time, the pressure that we've been seeing on seat growth should subside and enable us to grow seats closer to their historical growth rates. Finally, we expect the API monetization levers that we've discussed to contribute between 1 point and 3 points to our overall growth. The foundation that we built to execute against these growth opportunities, combined with the growth investments and product releases that we're set to release going forward, is what gives us confidence in our ability to achieve double-digit revenue growth a few years from now.
In that same time period, three-five years from now, we expect roughly 80% of our revenue to be coming from Suites customers, up from 55% today. As I noted previously, continuing to deliver strong Suites momentum translates directly into strengthening our financial profile from top to bottom, including contract values that are 4x the size of non-Suites customers, and net retention rates that are seven points higher than non-Suites customers. Turning to the bottom line, we remain committed to our lower-cost workforce location strategy. This strategy will be focused on our engineering center of excellence in Poland, which, after standing up just about three years ago, now houses more than 10% of our total employees and nearly 40% of our R&D team.
This has allowed us to accelerate our product innovation without a commensurate increase in cost, and we've been very pleased by the quality and the size of the talent market in Poland. We plan to hire the significant majority of our engineers in Poland in the coming years, and over time, we'll be exploring other locations to help us scale efficiently as well. three-five years from now, we expect a quarter of our total employees to be in these lower-cost locations, including roughly 60% of our R&D teams. As for Free Cash Flow, on the heels of the 10-point expansion we've delivered over the past three years, in our long-term target model, we expect to expand Free Cash Flow margin by another eight-11 points from last year's 26% result.
As we simultaneously re-accelerate our revenue growth rate, this should translate into consistent free cash flow growth in the mid-teens range, which supports both a robust capital allocation program and our M&A strategy to deliver rapid product innovation to our customer. Similarly, we remain committed to consistently improving our overall financial profile in the years ahead, and we expect to expand operating margin by roughly 10 points as we execute toward our long-term model. This year, in FY 2025, the bulk of our operating margin expansion will come from gross margin expansion on the heels of our public cloud migration. This enables us to expand operating margin by more than 200 basis points this year, while also increasing our investments in the critical growth initiatives that we've been discussing today.
Beyond FY 20 25, we expect to deliver operating leverage across all areas of the business, with roughly half of the total operating margin expansion coming from gross margin expansion and the other half from OpEx leverage. We're confident that by delivering those steady improvements in our financial model, and by continuing to focus on prudent capital allocation, that we're well-positioned to generate sustained long-term shareholder value. Ultimately, we think about our capital allocation strategy in terms of what will deliver the most value to our shareholders. It all starts with our cash flow. We expect to generate roughly $300 million of cash flow this year, and we expect that to compound at a rate in the mid-teens annually going forward. We plan to use our strong balance sheet and our increasing free cash flow to accelerate our product roadmap via disciplined, targeted M&A.
Crooze is the most recent example of this, which will allow us to address more ECM use cases and to expand our platform monetization opportunities. We ended this past year with $400 million in cash and short-term investments, and with $160 million in buyback capacity, including the additional $100 million authorization that we recently announced. You can expect us to use the majority of our free cash flow generation to execute a robust share repurchase program. We're also squarely focused on managing equity dilution, which is supported through the location strategy I discussed earlier. These efforts will allow us to consistently reduce total shares outstanding on an annual basis in the years to come.
While stock-based compensation is a four-year lagging indicator, we view this as a very real expense, and we're committed to reducing our stock-based compensation as a percentage of revenue in the coming years. Putting it all together, executing against the product and go-to-market strategy that we've outlined today sets the stage for us to deliver double-digit revenue growth alongside significant margin expansion over a multi-year period. I'll now walk you through our long-term target model from top to bottom. Starting with revenue growth plus free cash flow margin, we expect to deliver a combined result of 45%-50%, three-five years from now, a 10+ point improvement from our constant currency expectations for this year.
... For revenue growth, we're confident that the growth initiatives we've shared today, combined with our strong and improving customer economics, will enable us to deliver a sustainable 10%-15% revenue growth rate. We're extremely focused on delivering profitable growth, and we expect to deliver leverage across all the line items of our P&L. We expect overall gross margin to be in the 82%-83% range, with subscription gross margin 2-3 points higher. Note that this is above the long-term gross margin range we provided at last year's Analyst Day, as the efficiencies that our team has delivered over this past year have exceeded our expectations. You can expect that our sales and marketing spend as a percentage of revenue will be correlated with our revenue growth.
So if we're on a path toward the higher end of our revenue growth range, sales and marketing spend will likely be at the higher end of this range of 24%-26%, and vice versa. On the bottom line, we expect our long-term operating margin to be in the 34%-37% range, driven by fairly consistent operating margin expansion on an annual basis. Box is well positioned to capture a growing portion of the massive market opportunity in front of us. As we execute against this opportunity, we're committed to driving meaningful improvements in our financial profile from top to bottom. Today, you've heard from Aaron about our $100 billion market opportunity, as well as from Diego and his team on our product strategy, and from Olivia and Mark on how we'll be evolving our go-to-market strategy.
Finally, I took you through how we plan to strengthen our financial model and return to double-digit top-line growth in the coming years, delivering a revenue growth plus free cash flow margin outcome of 45%-50%. Now, we'll open it up for Q&A.
Hello, Josh, our first question is from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley. Josh?
Great. Thank you for the question and great presentation. Lots of info, and Dylan, really appreciate all the building blocks to the long-term model. I was hoping to start with a kind of broad-based question, like getting to executing to the, to the long-term targets, you know, there's a lot of value there and to get back to double-digit growth sustainably. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about customer interest, indications from customer like customer demand for all of these new use cases, new parts of product. Like, how can we get confident that you don't have to go out and, like, kind of sell all these new initiatives from scratch, that there's like, what you're providing is already what customers want?
Yeah, maybe I'll take the first part of that and then hand over to Mark, specifically just, you know, based on some recent customer interactions with some of these capabilities. But, I think the reason why we have extreme confidence in the long-term plan, and especially based on a lot of the near-term innovation, is, it's really building on the foundation that we've already laid with our customers. So we have well over 115,000 customers on the platform.
And when you look at the expansion rates, as we've had added these new capabilities, whether it's Box AI, moving customers into Enterprise Plus, the use cases that we now are seeing with Crooze, these are just even the early kind of inklings of what's going to be possible as our workflow automation, intelligence, and content management portfolio continues to get built out. And these innovations come, you know, by and large, as a reflection of what we're hearing from customers and the kind of use cases that they're trying to solve with content and workflow software.
So we're really driven by what we're hearing from our customer base, what they're asking for, and then obviously, with the elements of our internal product management efforts, where we can kind of see a little bit into the future of where technology is going. So that's how we've built what's on the roadmap and why we're very confident that there's a high degree of uptake opportunity from the customer base. Mark, I don't know if you want to add anything from customers that we're talking to.
Yeah, the conversations with customers have really taken a new tone over the last year, and that really is, you know, part of what I covered in my presentation. But we're in this environment now where 90% of an enterprise's data is unstructured. So that's just an incredible opportunity for us as the stewards of one of the largest single content stores of unstructured content on Earth. So customers that have their content, their unstructured data stored in Box, have a unique opportunity to take advantage of these new innovations that we're bringing to market. And so being able to automatically apply metadata to that data, be able to automatically extract intelligence from that data, that intelligence that is, you know, historically sort of locked up.
So this sort of environment that we're in now, where you have metadata and workflow automation and generative AI all sort of happening at the same time, really creates a very, very special opportunity for our customers who have their content on the Content Cloud.
Maybe I'll just add one more quick, sort of fun fact in all this. We did a survey near the tail end of last year on sort of a kind of decent sample size of IT kind of leaders within our customer base, and we asked, "What are the top features that you would want from a content management platform?" Specifically Box in this case, but what are kind of the next set of things that you need? This year's roadmap covers the majority of the most important features that customers were asking for.
So the combination of Crooze, which is, you know, no-code ability to build metadata-driven views, the ability to use AI to process and extract metadata, workflow automation, and our Hubs functionality for content portals and distribution of content, that represents a significant portion of the top set of things customers have sort of the next set of things they wanted solved with a content management platform from what we're building. So I think it's very aligned to the innovation that our customers are looking for. And now, obviously, from a pricing and packaging standpoint, it's about making sure we can very efficiently get this in the hands of our customers.
... That was very helpful. If I could just squeeze in a quick follow-up. Like, where are the budget dollars coming from for these customers? Is it largely replacing other vendors, or do they go out and kind of justify the incremental budget for all of these great, great value coming from Box? Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah, I think what's so exciting for us is that you've got the kind of core IT budget of, you know, storage, infrastructure, document management software, content management tools, you know, e-signature solutions. These are areas where, you know, IT budgets already exist. We can offer a lot of efficiency of being able to get all of that value in a single platform. So in some cases, that might be displacing spend that would've been going to another set of vendors, maybe one or two, or a collection of them, when we prove out that we can go and retire, you know, more legacy systems. At the same time, we also see an opportunity, you saw this in Mark's presentation, for going after additional buying centers.
So for us, this is just pure net, net expansion of the budget dollars we're going after, where you might have the marketing team's budget or the legal team's budget that would get applied to business process automation or software in their particular budgets. These are not always budgets that we've kind of classically gone after, and so it's really represents an expansion of opportunity that we have, where we can, you know, again, help each of those individual organizations automate and drive modern business processes. So for us, this is about kind of both going after additional white space that we hadn't previously touched, as well as expanding our foothold into kind of core IT budget, which we know how to do quite well. It's gotten us to over $1 billion in revenue.
Thank you, Josh. Our next question is from George Iwanyk with Oppenheimer. Hi, George.
All right. Well, thank you for taking my question. Olivia and Mark, maybe starting with you, can you give us a sense of, you know, when you're looking at doubling down on the SIs and ISVs, like, how many of them already have practices built around Box? You know, how much of your current business flow is coming through those channels, and, you know, where do you think that can go over time?
Yeah, I'll take a cut at it. So we do have long-standing relationships with a number of systems integrators around the world that we've been working with for the past five plus years. And so we're investing in those relationships to get them to grow. In terms of fully built practices, we have those with regional SIs and NSIs that are historically out of the ECM marketplace. And then we're now working with the global systems integrators that have SI practices or Salesforce practices, where there's a lot of connective tissue between what we're doing. I shared some examples in public sector. It's one of the areas where we have the most uptake in the SI community on working on our platform, in particular, with regard to these Salesforce use cases.
So if you think about in public sector, when a government agency brings in Salesforce, you know, obviously, they don't use Salesforce for pipeline and forecast. They don't have sales teams, the original sort of product for Salesforce. They're using it generally for case management and workflow in the cloud. And in those citizen engagement use cases, there's always content involved. So it ends up being a very elegant solution, Salesforce plus Box, plus the work of stitching all that together for an SI. That's where we're seeing huge, huge uptake, and then inside of those global SIs, those use cases and those capabilities are then bleeding into other practices and other industry verticals. So, that's kind of where we are.
And just in terms of the sort of historical context, you know, when the platform and the company originally launched, like, the original value proposition was a content platform that was very easy to use and very fast time to value. The design principles were not, did not lend themselves to huge systems integrator engagements. But as the platform has evolved, and now as we enter into this new era that's around workflow automation and AI, that's where these larger projects open up, which gives us much more of an opportunity to build that SI ecosystem. Do you have more to add, Olivia?
Yeah, so exactly what Mark said, and as I mentioned in my presentation, we are going to be very focused, which will allow us to be programmatic in each of the regions. So really narrowing in on the SIs that we already have relationships with, but also enabling them. So we'll put technical enablement in place, and we actually are gonna use our Box Consulting to really drive that repeatability and get to a playbook phase where we can then just be handing it off to SIs. So really making that enablement smooth and allowing them to scale quickly.
Yeah.
Last thing I'd add, just to address the question about the traction that we've been seeing. Historically, about 1/3 today of our deals and our revenue has been co-sold with partners. But a lot of that is driven by the strength in Japan, which is effectively 100% co-sold with partners, given the model there. Excluding Japan, that's roughly 20% of our business is co-sold with partners. I think you'll see as we've been talking about, that's increasingly gonna be with SIs, and we have a huge opportunity to really expand our reach and grow the business through that channel, which is why we're making those investments.
Great, and maybe just one more question for you, Aaron, and maybe Diego. You know, M&A has been a really important part of, you know, the enhancing the Box platform and, you know, adding growth catalysts. So when you look at continuing to do this after Crooze, you know, can you give us a sense of, you know, what type of areas you might be looking at? And, you know, whether these are more toolbox or transformative type of M&A opportunities?
... Yeah, so, maybe just I'll frame, I'll frame the philosophy, and then Diego, if you wanna build on anything, just from a roadmap standpoint. So as a reminder for everybody, we think about M&A really as a way to accelerate our product roadmap. And it's a real driver of just product innovation. So we start first with what's our long-term product roadmap? What do we wanna be doing in security, in data governance, in workflow automation, you know, document and content management?
So one thing that we obviously identified as being increasingly important in an era of AI and workflow near the tail end of last year was we needed ways of customers being able to stitch together interfaces very quickly that would turn into real robust applications for their business processes powered by AI, powered by our workflow engine, and so that led to the Crooze acquisition. So perfect example, like right just down the kind of target zone for us, which is a technology already built within the Box ecosystem, a company and a product that we knew quite well, validated and kind of vetted by our customer base. So it made sense to quickly bring them on, and now we're obviously working on technically integrating them for this year.
So that's the general philosophy. Diego, if you wanna maybe just share high-level on our roadmap, but just noting that these will continue to be really kind of core technology and team, kind of plugins into the platform.
Yeah. So in addition to these areas, we are going to keep accelerating DocGen, so document generation, as creating templates and basically creating documents to kick off the workflows, more on workflow automation and more on the ECM space in general altogether, to extract metadata and automate that, with the power of AI embedded in it. So companies that work in that space are of interest, but typically we're building a lot already, so there's no, no special announcement today.
Thanks, George. We now have a question from Pinjalim Bora with JP Morgan over email. If NRR is reaching a trough level, would you say that the revenue growth guide of 6% might be at trough level? And how should we think about the trajectory from 6% growth in fiscal year 2025 to your three- to five -year goal of 10%-15% growth?
Yeah, maybe I'll have Dylan answer that.
Yeah. So, would say, while we haven't given specific guidance from a multi-year standpoint in terms of that, that trajectory, what I would say is you could think about on an annual basis that revenue growth for this year that we expect to deliver 6% in constant currency, about 5% on an as-reported basis, to be the kind of floor to build from there in future years, just as it is with our net retention rate. And as a reminder and for context, we tend to see both our net retention rate and our revenue growth rates, you know, being fairly closely correlated, especially because about 70% or so of our new bookings come from existing customers, which is what that net retention rate really represents.
So, those do tend to move roughly in lockstep. And, to your question, and as such, we do expect this year to be the lowest, or for our revenue growth to improve off of this year's levels over time.
Great. Thank you, Dylan. Our next question is from Richard Hilliker with UBS.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the really informative and helpful presentation today, and for taking my question. I just had maybe one quick clarifying question at first for Dylan. I think during your presentation, you'd mentioned that pricing might be a more important driver of growth than in previous years. I just wanna make sure I heard that correctly, and if that is the case, how do you think about the mix of price versus seats in the long-term guidance that you gave us?
Yeah, so would say that, to clarify, I was mentioning the importance, the relative importance of pricing in the current period for a couple of reasons. The first of which is it's driving a larger percentage of the customer expansion than we have historically seen, largely because the seat growth, as we've talked about, has seen some pressure in this macroeconomic environment. So pricing is doing more of the heavy lifting on that. And then the second piece is, as we introduce these additional products, new plan tier, that is a pricing as well as a seat catalyst, so will be an important driver from that standpoint as well.
So from a longer term point of view, not saying, "Hey, we are now, you know, pricing is just a lot more important, you know, seat growth doesn't matter." Both are extremely important. And if you think about the long-term model and how we expect to deliver that growth, you'd expect that roughly 50% will be coming from pricing improvements and 50%, you know, give or take, coming from seat growth, which is roughly the ratio that we've seen historically up until the last 18 months or so.
Great, that's really helpful. Thanks for the clarity there. I just had one follow-up quickly here on workflow and Relay more broadly. Historically, it's been a complex, longer sale for Box. I'm wondering how the announcements you've made in terms of your go-to-market, the acquisition of Crooze, can you kind of maybe help us zero in on some of the pain points that you'll be able to address now that had been part of that sales process? I guess at a high level, why will velocity pick up? Why will this get better? Because it's always been very strategic, but just kind of a longer duration sale for Box. Thanks so much.
Sure, yeah. Maybe I'll, I'll kick off and then maybe Mark or Olivia, if you wanna build on this, from a go-to-market standpoint. So, so there, there's a few kinda quick things. So there's the workflow engine itself, which will continue to just get more and more advanced over time, being able to power much more just substantial business processes within a within a customer base, within the customer base. So that, that's the workflow engine, and that will, again, continue to get invested in more and more. And then there's the how does an end user often experience that workflow? And how do I, as a marketing professional, participate in a digital asset management workflow, or I, as a individual on the legal team, participate in a contract intelligence or contract lifecycle management workflow?
In the past, we haven't quite had the full interface components for that. So a lot of our customers have built custom applications on Box or had to embed us into other software, which can be a pretty complicated cycle from either a development standpoint, 'cause you have to have engineers at the ready to go build that functionality, or you have to have another system to integrate Box into. The reason why the Crooze acquisition was incredibly exciting was they found a gap in between sort of the simplicity of the Box end-user interface and having to go build full custom applications, which is this ability to kinda quickly configure end-user-oriented, metadata-driven workflows within Box.
And so, literally within, you know, an hour-long process, you could build a digital asset management experience or a contract lifecycle management experience or an invoice kind of processing experience. Now, that doesn't represent the full change management that you might need to go embed Box into that organization or migrate data, and that's what a huge opportunity is for system integrators. But the ability to stand up the core experience is now, you know, near instantaneous, and that's a very important technology to now have on board. So we think we'll be able to show the value of the Box platform far faster for customers.
Still opens up, you know, 10x the opportunity for SIs, because now that we can show the value of it, there's a lot more work that can be done, you know, to actually bring it to life for that customer. But we do think this will make the sales cycle much more efficient for kinda getting after business processes and more content management experiences, for our customers. So, Mark, I don't know if you wanna build on that?
Yeah, I mean, I think you said it well. I mean, essentially, it's taking on more of the steps of the full content life cycle, that we're putting more of the pieces together from, you know, doc generation, applying metadata tags. Obviously, we've had the security capabilities for quite some time. I don't know that I would say that our workflow capabilities historically have extended the sales cycle. I think if anything, they may have shortened it because we're taking over workflow and the way that content moves through the organization and through different business processes in the enterprise. And now we're just adding more and more functionality to that in an environment where every single department at the enterprise is looking at how these new generative AI powerful platforms can help their business.
And as I said in my presentation, and I've never seen anything like this in my career, every department is either evaluating AI tools, they're investigating them, or they're in a POC, or they're in production. Every single department in every enterprise we're meeting with is having that experience, and they're all sitting on 90% of their data is unstructured. So it just means that the more of those workloads we can take over in a more end-to-end experience, I think it's actually gonna make the selling much easier.
Thank you. Our next question is from Erik Suppiger with JMP Securities, with an email question: How large of a price increase will your new price tier have over E Plus pricing?
Yeah, so, we haven't announced the specifics on that, but maybe, Olivia, if you wanna share any philosophy on, on this as an upgrade cycle, or Dylan, feel free to, to kinda jump in, without... Obviously, we're not kinda sharing the specific numbers.
Sure. So we think about this as a really exciting opportunity for us because we are not only just taking it to, to the next level, but we're really providing access to a whole another set of capabilities, and we think we're creating a ton of value for our customers in that regard. And we already see our customers moving in that direction, but they're doing it with the help of you know consultancies and SIs. And so this will be something that we see the need for, and we see the use of legacy tools, but we also know that they're looking for this new solution, and so we'll be capturing that value, but we're not announcing price today.
Thanks, Olivia. We actually have a question related to this topic from Brian Peterson with Raymond James. How much of a benefit should we assume from this new higher-priced tier in fiscal 2025 guidance? And is it fair to assume that the transition to this plan would be faster than the prior suite offering, or E Plus, given the enhanced functionality?
Maybe, Dylan, if you wanna take that?
Yeah. So I'd say wouldn't assume, and we haven't assumed hardly any impact in terms of top-line growth for this year. Because, as a reminder, we are expecting to introduce that plan later in the year, and then you have the sales cycle, you know, it then takes a little bit of time for that to really flow through to revenue. So we wouldn't expect it to have an impact on our growth rates really until next year in FY 2026. And then in terms of the pace, you know, we were really pleased with the way that Enterprise Plus was adopted by the market.
Wouldn't necessarily expect a faster adoption curve, you know, but we will see it's a very, very compelling plan, even above and beyond the enhanced functionality that we've recently introduced and will be building into Enterprise Plus. So we're very excited about the impact on, you know, customer use cases, stickiness, the deal economics, and top-line growth overall, especially next year and beyond. But hard to say at this stage, you know, the relative rate of adoption that we'll see. But we'll certainly, you know, share more once we know more on that front.
Thank you, Dylan. Another question for you. Can you address the upcoming maturity of the Box convertible senior note and when we might see you?
... act on that?
Sure. So for a bit of context, about three years ago now, we raised $345 million in convertible debt, or issued that amount in convertible debt. And that'll now be maturing in about two years. So because we don't want to wait till the last minute, you would expect to hear from us and for us to address that sometime in the next year. What I would also say is there's a lot of flexibility that we have. We're fortunate that because of our strong balance sheet, the fact we're generating about $300 million in free cash flow this year gives us a lot of, you know, flexibility in terms of what we do with that.
But I would say also that we believe that there's an enormous amount of long-term shareholder value that we'll be delivering, so we are committed to our share repurchase program, as I've talked about. So I think we'd want to keep some debt on the balance sheet, but what that looks like, you know, and the future state of that capital allocation strategy, you know, we'll announce in the not-too-distant future, is what I'd say for now.
Thanks, Dylan. We have Steven Enders with Citi on the line.
Okay, perfect. Thanks for taking the questions and appreciate the all the content here today. Super helpful. I guess maybe to start, just on some of the new use cases you're going after, I think you called out, you know, IDP and archiving and a few others in there, but how do you think about capturing those adjacencies? And maybe how is the buyer or user different than what Box has historically gone after in the marketplace?
Yeah, maybe I'll share just again, the philosophy and then maybe Diego, if you want to talk about some of the, the, these adjacencies. You know, in general, I think one of the biggest problems with the content management market historically is that you had to buy a different product and a different technology for really each step of the life cycle that content went through. So the vendor where you shared files and collaborated on files with customers or partners was different than where you governed those files at the end of the process, or where you got an e-signature, or where you had a view of the workflow that that process was going through.
So I think one of the kind of key insights that we've had over the years, and we sort of developed this a few years into, you know, kind of frankly, launching the company, was that you needed to aggregate more of that functionality into a single platform, fully integrated to power the full life cycle of content. We've been methodically building on that vision, you know, over the past, you know, essentially 15 years since we pivoted to the enterprise market. So that's been the strategy overall. What that allows us to do is certainly bring more dollars into the Box platform, allows customers to get more efficiency. It allows you to improve the security because you don't have files leaving the lots of different applications, all with different permission levels and different security settings.
And ultimately now in an era of AI, it means you can have AI work across all of your data in a much more efficient manner. So this strategy is just compounding over time, and we laid out a bit of a market map of the additional spaces that we'll enter. Maybe Diego, if you want to share a bit about kinda how we think about those additional spaces and, you know, any kind of future vision on that.
Yeah. So the consolidation of the tech stack and adding some of this new functionality is opening up new business, but in particular, extracting metadata, extracting templates that then can be used to be filled up with the metadata of this unstructured data that Mark mentioned earlier. And the ability to also apply AI to curated sets and use RAG as an opportunity to pass specific documents for AI to be acting upon curated content, create a whole new set of opportunities. And if you compound that with having the content already in Box in a secure and compliant way, we are uniquely positioned to solve all of those. And this is the time where we can actually take those big, complex use cases and accelerate them with a size that also Mark mentioned earlier as well.
So the combination of these use cases and the opportunity to do it in one single platform is a true differentiator for this year.
Okay. No, that's, that's great. Super, super helpful there. And then maybe for, for, for Dylan, just on, on, you know, when we think about the, the longer term margin framework that you're, you're laying out here, is there like a, a framework to be thinking about, you know, either how, how many points a year per margin that we should be expecting to or, or, or maybe, you know, a certain scale that that 34%-37% margin, begins to, begins to come into frame?
Yeah. So I would say, just from a, you know, high-level standpoint, that, that target, model that we laid out, the time frame for that is kinda three-five years, is what we had said. And then from an overall operating margin expansion point of view, you would expect that to be fairly consistent, not, you know, exact same, but, but pretty consistent at, you know, the 200, you know, plus, type basis points, level in terms of annual operating margin expansion. And for most years, we'd also expect that to be, you know, kind of, driven by, efficiencies and leverage across all areas of the business.
This year in FY 2025, as we've mentioned, it's really gross margin expansion driving the bulk of that operating margin expansion. But after this year... And that's because of the completion of our public cloud migration just a couple quarters ago. But then, beyond that, expect that to be across all areas of the P&L. And so delivering that 34%-37% operating margin in a three- to five-year timeframe from now.
Okay, perfect. Thanks for taking the question.
Mm-hmm.
... Thanks, Rich. Our next question is from an investor over email. Can you, Aaron, can you address the competitive environment with AI now, and if it's changed for Box at all?
Yeah. So, the competitive environment is one that is very favorable to us. You see tens of billions of dollars going into AI model development and model training, and there's a massive race between Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, IBM, Anthropic, Amazon, many others, all producing, you know, incredible groundbreaking technology that brings, you know, full, you know, AI to any type of data. So for us, as an open, neutral platform, we get to leverage all of the competition that's happening in the AI space and bring that all to our customers due to the abstraction layer that we've built. And then, for any of the more applied AI use cases above the model layer, we generally will integrate with the various providers and players in the space.
So Copilot from Microsoft is a great example. We've announced an integration. We have deepening functionality with Copilot. You can imagine a future state where an employee will interact with a variety of AI, either chatbots or assistants. Maybe one is in Salesforce, maybe one is in ChatGPT, maybe one is in Microsoft. We would wanna make it so content can show up in all of those experiences through those AI interactions. So long-term, the best way to think about us is we will sit between the places where you go access data from an AI standpoint, and the AI models that ultimately power a lot of this, this AI revolution. So we believe we're in a very strategic position in this ecosystem. So Diego, I don't know, anything to build?
No, you described it, you know, in detail. The curve, the pricing curve is decreasing, which is to our benefit and to our customers' benefit.
Yes.
The acceleration of computing, you know, the announcements across the industry also are to our benefit because we want to see faster and better solutions. But we're not building LLMs, we're leveraging now, all of them and picking with Box AI, which is the best solution for the given problem, and that's really beneficial to us and to our customer base.
Thank you. We have another question from the RBC team. Is there anything you can quantify around the low-cost workforce location strategy, such as what the cost per R&D employee is in those regions versus historical R&D costs? And in addition to R&D, where is the low-cost workforce location strategy most impactful, i.e., G&A, S&M?
Yeah. So we don't, we don't break out the costs from a labor standpoint on that front, but there is, you know, meaningful efficiency gains on that front. And from an overall headcount standpoint, you know, I think a lot of the Poland efforts in particular and other locations is really to get more leverage and scale from engineering and some G&A functions.
Yeah, to build what I would say at a high level is the cost per employee, as we've said, is a little bit less than half. So we get a little more than a 2-for-1 ratio, at least in Poland. But of course, every role, every geography is a little bit different. But do feel confident that the strategy, to Aaron's point, is primarily gonna allow us to really accelerate the pace of innovation as we've been doing without seeing a commensurate increase in cost. And as Aaron mentioned, do have several dozen folks in my organization in G&A already in lower-cost locations, and been and expecting to scale that, you know, at a pretty healthy clip in the coming years.
Thanks, Dylan. We have a question from Olivia over email. Of all the go-to-market initiatives that you discussed in the presentation, which will be impactful the earliest?
Well, part of go-to-market strategy is that it all has to come together to create one engine to drive an outcome. So it truly has to be all of those in tandem. So as I mentioned, we're going into these new capabilities. We're super excited about that. We already see customers using Box AI in the beta and now in the GA, and then we're excited about what they'll do with in new. Then our platform, as I spoke about, will be enabling a lot of that, and as was referenced, that will also provide tools for SIs to come in and really engage with us and help us scale. And then, as Mark mentioned, we are leaning into SI relationships we already had, but now we have more to offer.
There are more services dollars to be had, and so by leaning into that set of relationships, we believe that we'll be scaling. And then as the final piece of that puzzle is awareness and consideration, right? So we now need to let the world know of all these new capabilities and this ability to partner even more at scale. And so we really expect that all to come together. I wouldn't say any one of those is gonna hit earlier, but we're excited about what the combination will look like.
Thanks, Olivia. We have another question from Pinjalim Bora with JP Morgan. Can you talk about the significance of Box working with NVIDIA on the NVIDIA Inference Microservices released yesterday? Does that help Box in its infrastructure side, or does it help customers to adopt the Box AI services?
Yeah, so that partnership was us using one of their core technology services that they've made available to make it more efficient to do embeddings of content on your own GPU. So when we use open-source embedding models in one of our public cloud providers, we're using NVIDIA's technology to run that kind of in the background. So we have a great relationship with NVIDIA, as we do with every other major you know either AI provider or cloud infrastructure provider, for the most part. And so our relationship with NVIDIA is you know continued to be invested in, where when they have breakthrough technologies, we want to bring them in-house. Our teams are very quickly you know looking at new ways to leverage the services.
... Thank you. Another question over email from an investor: In which ways is Box going to leverage the trend of RAG for AI to accelerate its business?
Yeah, go for it.
I mean, it's related to what we mentioned earlier. RAG allows to optimize the way AI is accelerated through specific documents that could be shared. So our development and upcoming Hubs implementation that allows to curate content for publishing, is also pretty much able to be leveraged for RAG purposes to basically get AI to a specific type of question and answer created already by the user. So you can imagine customers that are working on a specific problem or a specific industry or for a specific use case, to use Hubs for that purpose, combined with AI. So we are very well positioned to really leverage the trend on RAG.
Yeah, and maybe I'll just build on this from some customer interactions. So we'll, we'll often have. And Ben, you know, our CTO, would represent this. But we will have a conversation with a customer who says, you know, "Hey, I have 1,000 documents on a bunch of equity research content or sales materials or contracts, and I want to be able to ask questions of all this data. So, you know, I'm going to go and do vector embeddings on these documents. I'm going to put it into a vector database. I'm going to build an interface that lets you ask that question." And very quickly, you realize that they're going to be putting together maybe five or 10 different technology services together, that they're going to run and manage themselves.
Ultimately, they're going to have a service that doesn't offer any end user permissions or access controls because the, you know, that's a whole other set of technology they have to go build. So what Hubs does is, Hubs does literally all of that without a single line of code for the customer. So you take any amount of content, as Diego mentioned, it could be on any topic you want. You, you collect that content by sort of telling our system that you want that inside of a hub. Once that content is inside of a hub, you can ask the hub any question, and that is going to our vector store, where we've done the vector embeddings on the content through our AI abstraction layer, and the end user instantly can ask questions of any of their data.
So we solve the entire RAG problem for any content stored in Box, but the key is, it's for curated content that the customer then brings together, so we know that, that it can answer questions properly, reduce hallucinations, and ultimately kind of go after critical business problems across the enterprise.
Thanks, Aaron. Our last question is, when you talk about the cost of AI and serving AI, can you talk a little bit about your gross margin and operating margin philosophy?
Sure. So the overall gross margin and operating margin philosophy is we want to make sure that we're delivering high-value AI services to our customers. So ultimately, we want to get paid in some fashion for that. The first sort of approach is make sure that customers are upgrading into Enterprise Plus to have access to Box AI, where they get a certain amount of kind of adoption that they can have, that we've sort of priced into the plan. And then for high-value use cases where you have a lot of volume of data, maybe you have 1 million contracts you want processed with Box AI, you then get charged a consumption rate for that. So that gives us additional monetization and revenue opportunities.
In all of these cases, we anticipate our AI offering to be neutral or not dilutive to gross margin, and then obviously operating margin accretive in everything that we're delivering.
Yep. I mean, just to build briefly on that, I think, you know, that's, that's spot on. And would also just add that, overall, our philosophy from a pricing, you know, packaging and as related to margins point of view, is that we want customers to be able to use the platform without having to think about, you know, different limitations as often as possible. Certainly, for some customers, just as we've done with, like, our sign, monetization, that are extremely heavy, we'll monetize those separately. But for the most part, we want to set the pricing so that customers, can get as much value as they can out of the platform. That's all baked into the pricing that we lay out, as well as the gross margin targets that we've laid out.
And then, you know, we also are fortunate that, just we've seen with a lot of the other underlying costs that have allowed us to bring our gross margin over the past few years from the low 70s, up to about 80% this year, and then beyond in future years. A lot of these things that are the core cost components are continuing to come down year after year. Which is also why we want to kind of disaggregate the way that customers think about Box, which I think we've done a really nice job of, between here's the cost of the underlying components of what I'm using, versus, as Olivia and Mark have been talking about, here's the full value of the platform that we're providing.
So I think that combination of how we price, you know, how we want customers to be thinking about and using Box, and then ultimately how it translates into margins, are actually really, really nicely connected.
Thank you, Dylan. Now we'll turn it back to Aaron for closing remarks.
Cool. Thanks, Cynthia. So thank you, everyone, for joining us today. As you can tell from today's presentations and conversations, we're insanely excited about the future of Box. We are very clearly entering a new chapter, where we're building on the foundation of what we've already laid to power an era of workflow automation and intelligence around enterprise content. I think we have the most exciting product roadmap in the history of the company. We have an incredible go-to-market engine that we're going to be doubling down on, and a long-term financial plan to both improve the growth rate and operating margins. So we're super excited to have spent this time with you. Obviously, stay in touch, and we'll see all of you soon. Thank you.