It's funny I'm asking that question because, like, you know, we kind of have the announcement on you already. But, like, how do you think now that you hand eventually the reins ove r? How do you think about the growth algorithm for Five9 going forward? A great message for a new.
Perfect question. Look, I mean, we've been a growth story. Raim o, you and I go way back. To the early days of Five9. And look, it's a wonderful opportunity ahead of us. We are so excited about the future. It's really a two-pronged strategy in terms of, you know, how we're building products and how we're going to market. But it's also a two-pronged growth opportunity. There are two big growth factors ahead of us that remain. The AI for CX growth factor is significant. We all know that. Our AI business, our AI revenues growing 41% year-over-year. It's now 11% of our enterprise subscription revenue.
So it's sizable, a nd growing very, very rapidly. Our AI bookings in the last quarter grew 80% year-over-year. So wonderful first vector of growth, if you wanna call it that. They're the faster vector of growth. There's also a really solid, durable growth opportunity in our traditional CCaaS market. Gartner projects, again, remember that, there are 40% of the contact center agents in the cloud today and 60% are on-premises.
If you wanna think about it that way, and look, it's gonna be 40%'s gonna become 80% over the next several years. We all know that. Regardless of what impact AI has on the total global population of human agents, that growth in cloud migration or, I should say, the penetration of cloud going from 40%- 80% will more than offset any issues relative to cannibalization of human agents, and I think that's what people need to start to realize. Our non-AI business is growing significantly.
And it has been for a long, long time. And it will continue to grow at a very, very healthy, durable rate. And then we've got the AI revenue growth on top of that. So I think of this as a layered, layered revenue growth opportunity, meaning you've got the core traditional part of our market growing nicely, over the next several years, as we get to 80% in the cloud. And then we've got an AI opportunity that's growing much faster on top of that.
What do you see in terms of urgency? Because, like, that call centers being on-premises has been, as you said, you know, been around for a long, long time as a discussion point. You know. We've been talking about it for many, many years, and it never really happened at the speed, at scale that we kind of probably thought a few years ago. But now with AI, it's like, how do you wanna do AI if you're sitting on-premises in some old system? Like, so how are your discussions kind of evolving there?
Look, AI is a huge tailwind for the migration to the cloud, b ut there's also been periods where it may not be that evident. But I also will remind you, you say it didn't happen as fast. It happened very rapidly during COVID. Look at our growth rates were in the 40s. That was predominantly because of, you know, contact center agents, in that period of time scattering to their home offices. Cloud was, you know, the real only practical option f or those at-home agents.
So look, you know, there's just, AI is a wonderful catalyst. I think most of these brands are coming to the realization that in order to really get the benefits of AI, they've gotta move to the cloud, and so I do think it's going to be a nice tailwind for the growth in terms of cloud migration, but you know, there were also periods of time, like about a year ago, and we're coming out of that period where it was just decision-making around anything non-AI was just like. There was nothing else happening. Everybody was focused on just go figure out AI. Every CEO in the world was telling all their CIOs of every business unit, "Go figure out AI and don't do anything else," and those days are also, it's changing. I call it the AI fog has lifted. That's a good thing.
And then, how are the conversations going with your customers around the AI side? Like, how's adoption? The reason, and I'll give you more context. The reason I'm asking is, like, there's a lot of, like, there was a lot of POC. Now POCs are turning into kind of projects, but they're kind of very well-defined, smaller projects because everyone is still nervous that something is going wrong. Like, what are you seeing in your market?
No. It's exactly how it's playing out. I mean, look, this is all brand new to every brand out there. We're helping them come up the learning curve. There are a lot of point solutions that are available from an AI perspective out there. And what we're seeing is more and more brands coming to the realization that while a lot of the point solutions demo great, they may even do very well in a proof of concept.
But once it comes to rolling out in production across their entire enterprise and across their entire CX stack, it doesn't work unless it has connected to a platform like ours. And we've seen this in some of our customers. We gave one example on the last earnings parcel delivery service company that's been a customer of ours and is a sizable customer of ours was using a point AI solution. And you know, they realized in production that it wasn't delivering for them, and they've switched to our AI agent. And that was a $3.5 million ARR deal that we just did this last quarter.
Nice. Okay.
Just for the AI portion. So again, it is so important. The brands are seeing that it's important to have one end-to-end platform that can orchestrate interactions, whether they're digital or voice, across AI agents and human agents on the back end of those conversations. We're able to do all of that.
Can you just, like, for those of us, and I call myself, I include myself now because I didn't cover you for a while. If you think about your AI projects, like, offerings, how do they fit into that value chain that we have on a call center? Like, you know, what are the products in a way?
Oh, oh, sure. Sure. Sure. Let's back it up a little bit. Look, there are several categories of AI solutions that we offer. On the front end, you can think of this as self-service. Those are AI agents. They're both digital chat or other digital interactions handled by a bot, a chatbot, if you will, or a voice bot. IVA is what we used to call that. But we now call this set of digital or voice AI agents. So those are our AI agents. That's kind of at the front end of an interaction, sometimes fully contained within that self-service. Sometimes used as a front end, just like the old IVRs were used.
Where you start in an IVR and then eventually you escalate to another resource on the back end of that. But there are also Agent Assist or co-pilot products that we provide. And there are several different SKUs within that category of Agent Assist. It can be everything from, you know, interaction summarization Guidance Cards to. There are a couple other nuances in that, but I won't go into detail.
And then there are products that are really for the business, the overall customer experience, customer service operators. To understand their interactions, we have a AI Insights product. That we use it almost diagnostically. We'll come into accounts, whether they're our accounts or new accounts, and we can kind of turn it on, let it run, and it'll basically cluster interactions by use case and by sentiment and by a number of factors. It gives them the insight. To understand where to deploy AI first, second, and third as they go forward. We're now coming out even with additional AI products. So we've got a portfolio of AI SKUs that, you know, are contributing to that 11% of enterprise subscription revenue.
Okay. Perfect. That's really good, and how does it, like, in the olden world, you had not. It's not old, but you know, in a minute, you know what I mean. In the olden world, you were doing the plumbing, and then it was the Salesforce, the ServiceNow doing kind of maybe the UI kind of front end. They are kind of talking about AI, and you're talking AI. Like, has the overlap kind of changed or, like, how do we need to think about that?
I would think about it this way, Raimo. Look, CRM SaaS platforms, forget AI for a second. We'll get into AI in a second. But look, to run a customer service organization, we're all customers, we're all consumers , we interact with brands. That brand has a customer service department. In order to operate a customer service organization, you must have both a CCaaS solution or a contact center solution. Think of that as the routing engine to deliver interactions to the right resources with all the contextual data. To have a great interaction. And then you have to have a CRM system, which is a system of record for, you know, every customer of that.
What they do.
Brand. What products they've got, etc., so we're always joined at the hip. Integrated with a CRM solution, whether it's Salesforce, Dynamics, NetSuite, you know, y ou name it. Their homegrown CRM is still about 50% of the market.
Oh, wow.
There's a lot of different Epic and healthcare. We consider that a healthcare CRM. So we're always joined at the hip. But look, when it comes to the AI opportunity, every solution in this equation, including the CCaaS, CX platform, as well as the CRM platform, will have AI abilities, some of them infused in our core functionality, by the way. And others in these areas, like I just talked about with self-service and Agent Assist and all those things. And look, what we're seeing is more and more brands are coming to the realization that they want their AI from their CX platform vendor because we are the orchestration engine as opposed to the system of record for information. So and then we also, because we're the orchestration platform, you have to have ability to orchestrate between AI and humans, for example.
The second thing is data. We have the conversational data. All the data, the billions of conversations that have occurred with that brand and all of their consumers are in our system of record. Not in the CRM.
Okay. That makes it powerful.
Okay. And the only way AI can do its job is if it has access to that conversational data. And that's gold. And that's in our platform. And I think what that's part of the reason some of, I think, our customers and many customers are realizing that you want this end-to-end platform. It needs to be, you know, the CX platform. Now, if you have point solutions that happen to take certain use cases, they'll wanna integrate to our platform. And they, they do that, and we charge a toll.
Do you think that, because I think from an investor perspective, that understanding of data, those data and being gold, I think that's still evolving. Is that the same on the customer side? And I would assume they're a few steps further than.
I think they're a little further along in the learning curve. But I think you're right on. I think there's, you know, we have to do a better job of, helping investors understand that, f or sure.
Okay. And then, go moving on from the AI theme a little bit, like, you had some, you know, very large deployments over the last few quarters. Can you speak to that, where we are on that journey there? And, you know, the thing I was hoping is, like, they give you referenceable very large customers, which kind of usually then gets to the next one and the next one and the next one.
That's exactly what's happening, Raimo. I mean, look, we call them the mega deals or the whales that we've, Brought onto our platform over the last few years. And look, we've also said they're few and far between. They're not gonna happen every quarter, and they're not. But they're the pipeline for additional megas is excellent. We continue to march up market, as we call it. But we've got very referenceable, you know, situations with the ones we've been talking about, like the parcel delivery service and t he healthcare conglomerate and the, you know, the Fortune 50 financial services company that we brought on, from a booking standpoint in 2024. It started ramping in 2025. They're doing quite well in ramping and subscription revenue, you know, started in 2025, but that's a multi-year journey. But they're all doing extremely well and very referenceable, and you know, that is why we're able to continue to win large deals.
Okay. Makes sense. And then, related a little bit to the point you made before with the system of record guys, there was a little bit of a discussion, like, recently with, you know, how is your relationship with Salesforce, ServiceNow evolving? One is, like, who's doing what? The other thing is, like, you know, investments in certain other companies. Like, you know, what's your conversation with Salesforce like or ServiceNow like?
They're better than ever. I mean, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Google, we talked about on the last earnings call, all three of them, as partners. And look, we've got a lot of other partners as well. But look, the momentum with ServiceNow, our bookings, ACV bookings in the quarter, quadrupled. year-over-year. Quadrupled.
Wow.
Our bookings with Salesforce. We have, you know, thousands of over a thousand customers, I should say, with Salesforce. The ACV bookings with Salesforce grew 60%, six-zero over year-over-year. And with Google, who's a, you know, newer partner for us, but a wonderful partner and one that we believe is gonna be very strategic for us, as time goes on here. The pipeline of opportunities that we have with Google has tripled since Q1. So it's those partnerships are very, very healthy, doing really well in spite of, you know, I think there's a little bit of left-hand, right-hand in terms of corporate investments that happen. And that's just they're, you know, our relationships at both these all three of these companies are just very, very bullish on our partnership.
I mean, there must also be a nice market share move towards you because, like, if I look at the numbers from those vendors, they're not quadrupling or growing at the rate that,
Right.
The Salesforce is. So within the relationship must be getting stronger for you guys.
I mean, look, within their base, right? I mean, both those companies have huge installed bases.
Exactly.
Right? So that's where we're getting growth into their base, so to speak.
Okay. The other thing is, as we talked about AI and the AI product, how do we have to think about pricing there?
Look, we like everybody else in this AI market have a consumption-based pricing model. So again, all of our AI SKUs are priced on a consumption or capacity basis, and that's just the wave of the future. That's the way, you know, customers wanna purchase this software. The good news is that with AI revenue growing 41%, you know, you can rest assured that that's because our products are being used and consumed, if you will, by those brands, and that are driving that revenue growth. It's also an interesting opportunity for us as we do a lot of new contracts with customers, and they're trying to figure out this balance and equation between AI and humans. We're starting to do contracts that are revenue commits. That essentially think of us as a software provider for interaction management.
And those interactions can be handled by AI or handled by human agents. The more interactions there are, as interactions increase, regardless of the mix, we sell more software, and those minimum commits from our customers go up. We've done some very sizable contracts recently, and we'll continue to do revenue-based contracts as opposed to seat-based contracts.
Okay. Makes sense, and then, Bryan, I want to get you involved, and I apologize because it's gonna be the tough question straight away, like, if you think about it, like, when Mike and I talked in the past, the growth rates were different. Now the growth rates are kind of at a slightly different level. Like, can you speak to the factors that impacted that, and how do you see that evolving from here?
Absolutely. So I'm actually gonna focus on subscription revenue 'cause that makes up. A large majority, 81% of total revenue today. So I think the key one that I wanna focus on is if you look at subscription revenue year-over-year growth in Q2 was 16%. Then it was 10% in Q3. So five of those six percentage point differential was actually driven by known tough comparison that we've been talking about all year long. So in 2024, we had our largest customer who was finishing their multi-year ramp. So it was contributing significantly to revenue. And then we also had a seasonality that was much stronger in 2024 versus minimal seasonality in Q3, and we're expecting that to continue in Q4 as well. So those are known items.
Now, there was one unexpected item in Q3, which was our commercial business, which by design is not a growth factor for us. But typically, it declines in the single digits, but in Q3, it was in the teens, right? So that was a little bit higher than what we anticipated, mainly because we had underallocated demand gen spend toward commercial, as well as we had a temporary gap in sales capacity as we promoted more commercial sales reps to enterprise.
Both of those have been remediated. Now, in terms of the revenue impact, we'll start to see the year-over-year trends go back to its historical levels in the next quarter or two, but these factors will continue into Q4 as we transition out of this, throughout 2025, but we lapped those tough comparisons at the end of this year, and going into 2026, what gives us comfort is, first of all, the tough comparisons are no longer there, and it's really the backlog, and typically, when we start the new year, the backlog is comprised of new logo bookings that we already won. This time, we have new logo bookings and installed-base bookings that we've won.
And there's a new dynamic here in the sense that historically, our installed-base bookings would be comprised of existing customers having deployed their platform already and just adding additional business on top of that so you could turn that into revenue right away. The new dynamic here is that we've been very successful in upselling and cross-selling new software. So brand new software that they don't have, like AI, for instance, or brand new business units within the existing customer that we discovered and brought on. So it's essentially like a new logo ramp.
And so those are starting to convert. Both the new logo and the installed-base booking side are starting to convert into revenue in Q4 and more so in 2026, which is what's underlying the shape of the curve that we gave, where we have an outlook of double-digit growth in the second half of the year, and what gives us comfort for the annual number of $1.254 billion for consensus.
Okay. Makes sense, and then, if you think about it, like, talk a little bit about that commercial versus up, or higher segment. How do you define that again? Because, like, that's, you know, every vendor has, like, a different dynamic there.
I'll start, Bryan. Feel free to chime in. So commercial, think of it as SMB. It's our smallest customers, right?
That's 50 seats.
It's our 50.
50 seats or below. And it's, again, it's not a growth factor for obvious reasons, right? And look, if you think about our enterprise business, it's 91% of our subscription mix.
Commercial being 9% and it's, again, it's not a growth opportunity for us, so it, again, it's just a different market. You've got small businesses that come and go, go out of business, etc. You've also got more competition down market. They don't necessarily need the full feature functionality of an enterprise-grade solution like Five9, and we don't sell a separate product. Down, down market.
Okay.
There are other options from some of the UC players that, you know, have lightweight contact center solutions. That are just fine for some of those. So again, it's just a different market, and the enterprise and up-market is much, much more attractive to us.
Then the other thing that, you know, I'm trying to kind of get an answer on confidence for next year. Like, there's obviously easier comps, you know, which kind of makes sense. What do you see also, like, in terms of, like, pipeline build, etc., around, you know, like, it's early-stage pipeline probably. Like, you know, about pipeline build as you go into next year, like, how do you feel about that space ?
Our pipeline coverage is great. It's continuing to, I would say, perform very well. And again, part of this is RFP flow, right? Just that this kind of leading indicator of. Of top-of-funnel activity, that continues to be at a high watermark ever since about eight quarters ago, so we're very bullish on kind of, you know, the demand side of this business and the pipeline. We've gone through some really great changes in terms of our sales segmentation as we've talked about. In the past few quarters. Those are, you know, kind of fully in place, and I feel really good about our sales execution against that demand that we're seeing.
Okay. And then, Bryan. More for you, like, the upside is on, well, there's growth, and then there's margins on the margin side, significantly better profitability in the quarters. Like, can you talk a little bit about, like, what's driving it and how sustainable is that?
Absolutely. So, as you know, we went through our operational review at the beginning of the year, and there are many different cost savings initiatives that we're working on, whether it's related to offshoring or, you know, delayering and expense control automation. The list goes on, right? And so that's why if you look at our annual adjusted EBITDA margin, it was 19% in 2024. We have guided to 23% this year. And then we're guiding to at least 24%, which is a good step function into the beginning part of the range for our midterm target in 2027, which is 25%-30%. So we continue to be very disciplined in our cost management. But one thing I do wanna point out is that we also continue to make sure that we reinvest in key strategic areas like AI and go-to-market.
So that we support double-digit revenue growth, which is what's in our midterm target in 2027, as we target to exceed the Rule of 40 on an adjusted EBITDA basis and approach it on a free cash flow basis.
Okay. And then is there, because the cash flow is the other question that comes up a lot between EBITDA, like, how do you think about that EBITDA to cash flow conversion?
Yeah, so, I mean, typically historically speaking, it's been right around that 11% range. If you look at EBITDA margin and look at free cash flow margin.
That's absolutely.
Take a difference of the two.
Right. And if you do the math, we actually gave our outlook of $175 million for 2026, and if you take that against the $1.254 billion revenue that we said we're comfortable with, that's actually a 14% margin against the 24% EBITDA margin that we had provided as an outlook, so that's a 10 percentage point differential, so we expect to continue to get more efficient from a working capital perspective and CapEx perspective and have the conversion improve over time.
Is it, like, is it really working capital and CapEx that's the kind of the delta that explains the delta?
So the delta is mainly, you know, in the working capital area, which we expect to get better and better, especially around deferred revenue because we have typically our business has been much more monthly invoicing, which now that we're moving upmarket is transitioning to a lot of annual prepayments. We're making that standard across the board for a lot of other customers as well so that we're gonna get some efficiency there. CapEx, you know, there was a period when we were doing a lot more investments, but now we're getting much more efficient. We're gonna be below 3% in 2025, and we'll continue to improve on that front as well.
Okay. Perfect. Last couple of minutes, I wanna talk about, like, you know, capital allocation a little bit. Like, if you think where the shares are, like, how do you think about buyback, share buyback, share?
Absolutely. I mean, this is something share buybacks is something that we've been evaluating very closely for the last couple of quarters, and we're excited to announce an inaugural program during our last earnings call. $150 million share purchase program over two years. With $50 million of it being accelerated through the first quarter of 2026, and we felt like it was the right time to do this given the valuation where it's been, as well as if you look at our balance sheet, our cash balance is over $675 million. We're generating a lot more free cash flow, and we expect to continue to improve that going forward. So, you know, we're gonna have a very balanced capital allocation strategy where we continue to invest organically and inorganically in the business, but also buyback shares to maximize shareholder value.
Okay. Yeah, and then, the other part of the capital allocation is obviously M&A as well. Like, you know, how are you guys thinking about that?
I think the best way to think about that, Raimo, is look at our track record over the last five, six years, seven years. We've made a lot of tech tuck-in acquisitions. Not a lot, but you know a handful. And they've been very successful, including our AI acquisition about five years ago that we've obviously you know modernized and built on top of. But I would not be surprised, you shouldn't be surprised if we do additional tech tuck-ins at this point. But again, we're not gonna go overpay for an asset that you know that doesn't really move the needle for us.
It's gonna be difficult at the moment.
Well, but it, you know, exactly. It's difficult with our market value where it is. But I also think there are lots of opportunities out there. There are gonna be more and more opportunities out there for, I call them, downstream opportunities that are valued properly.
Okay. Perfect. And then maybe a last thing is, like, if you think about the organization, like, how do you think about, like, your success? Like, what, what's the, what's the requirement? What's on the list?
We've said this publicly, and again, the board and I are conducting this search where we announced it back in August. Look, we're looking for, you know, someone that has a very successful track record of product innovation. This is a new world that is very, it's evolving rapidly, and we wanna make sure we've got someone that can lead that charge, someone that has operational excellence at scale, someone with a growth mindset, and someone that, frankly, can carry on the culture of Five9.
I just talked with another investor a few minutes ago about this. Look, we're pretty unique, and we have a great reputation in the market with customers and partners, in that we care so much about our customers and our partners, all of our stakeholders. It shows through our customers. It's easy to say that, but when you go to, you know, an event like our CX Summit we had a couple weeks ago in Nashville, you really feel it back. I mean, they know that we care so much about their success on our platform. There's a reason our NPS scores are plus 85 on.
Wow.
Implementations because we truly care about their success. And I wanna make sure that whoever leads this company going forward maintains that culture of just caring about our customers and putting our customers at the heart of everything we do.
Okay. Perfect. That's also a very good closing statement. Mike, good to see you again.
Great to see you, Raimo.
Bryan, thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.