Please welcome your host, Phil Winslow.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for coming this year. I know it's a busy time of year, and it's not just because the Knicks are in the finals, but obviously there are lots of things going on in the investment world this week, let alone just the volatility that's in the market. We're going to make best use of your time with a very packed agenda here. We're going to first start with a fireside chat with our CEO and co-founder, Matthew Prince. You'll then hear from Rita Kozlov and Sam Rhea on our AI strategies, both for our customers but also for Cloudflare. Stephanie Cohen is then going to take the stage to help everyone in this room better understand how Cloudflare is the only cloud built for the agentic internet. Mark Anderson will update everyone on our go-to-market strategies.
After that, Thomas Seifert, our CFO, will delve into our financials. Then, as usual, we'll end the day with open Q&A with Matthew, Michelle Zatlyn, Thomas, and Mark. With that said, I would like to invite our co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, to the stage for yet another edition of our fireside chat from last year. All right. We're back this year. There's some people that-
I think a lot more people showed up because the Knicks lost last night.
Knicks lost.
Otherwise, there'd be a lot of tired eyes in the audience.
Exactly. A little droop. I appreciate you all coming with it, though. This year, as a fireside chat, last year there was good Phil and evil Phil. This year I have a prop, so I brought receipts. This is actually the founder's letter-
Okay
from 2019.
Wow.
That was the year. It was the very first founder letter that you and Michelle wrote, and I thought it was actually really good to actually go back to that and start at a sort of a high level here, and I'm going to quote something here.
I tell Phil not to tell me what the questions are in advance, and so this is that. The look of surprise on my face.
Yeah. It is real. We're all going to experience.
You did tell me there was going to be a prop, but you didn't tell me what it was.
What the prop would be. I gave a little hint that it was some prop, but I thought this line was particularly interesting. It's still very relevant today. "Many great startups pivot over time. We have not. We had a plan and been very purposeful in executing against it since our very earliest days. We are helping to build a better internet. That was an audacious goal, and it shaped both our business model and our technical architecture in ways that we believe differentiate us and provide us with significant competitive advantages." I think that still holds today. My question to you is, let's start at a 30,000-foot view, and then we're going to zoom into questions after that. My question to you is, thinking back to that, what you wrote that in 2019, what makes Cloudflare different and how has that changed?
What makes us unique? How did the little pieces fit together, the small decisions that were made-
Yeah
along the way interconnect to make the whole greater than sum of the parts?
I think that there's some parts of that I think are still very true to us. I'll close with saying, though, there's a little bit of that I'm not sure totally holds true today. Let me talk about what is true and then what maybe we're actually starting to think about a little bit. The first is, I think from the beginning, Michelle and I were both students of Clayton Christensen, and we really did believe that whoever had the lowest cost to serve customers would win over time. We focused from the beginning on how we could just drive the cost of delivering our service down as much as possible. How could we buy equipment for as inexpensively as possible? How could we put it on the network as cheaply as possible?
How could we actually deliver bandwidth and actually drive the cost of bandwidth to as close to zero as possible and get those advantages of scale? I think that that's still so ingrained in the ethos of Cloudflare, and it's been super important for us over time. What's really interesting about it today is when humans make decisions on what service they're going to buy or build, a lot of times it's, "Oh, it's what I'm used to," or, "Oh, it's who has the best advertising," or, "What brand makes the most sense?" What we're seeing is that as agents make those decisions, they actually make those decisions on much more sort of foundational, rational facts. Just because you have fancy airport advertising doesn't necessarily influence the agent to choose. They choose based on actually what's the cheapest, what's the fastest, what's proven to be the best.
I think that that's been really interesting, where we're seeing OpenAI built their latest new platform, which they launched last week on top of us. We partnered with Anthropic on this. We're seeing more and more of the sort of agentic web choosing us because of the fact that we've actually built these fundamental cost advantages where we can serve requests just so much more efficiently than anyone else. The one thing I will say that was interesting, we had a board meeting about a month ago, John Graham-Cumming, who used to be our CTO and now is on our board, was sitting there, and we were presenting some of the stuff that actually Sam is going to show you later today. He sort of looked, and it was clearly he was thinking about something.
He said, "I wonder if our mission's too small." It was the first time I was like, huh, that's really interesting, where it always felt audacious to say we're helping build a better internet, it's increasingly more than that. That's actually something that, again, I think we're internally trying to figure out, that that's been so core to who we are, but is it actually something that's even bigger going forward?
Great. Let's continue from here because what you just described was sort of the beginnings, obviously, that started as call it connecting, protecting origins, the properties.
Yeah.
It became a developer platform where people are building these agents, building their applications, then sort of they call it the both sides of an internet interaction, then obviously connected with the most interconnected network in the world. Let's drill into those three, but let's work backwards.
Yeah.
Starting first with Act Three. I'm going to rewind back to 2017, because you put out a blog post about this new product called Workers.
Yep.
I was like, "This is the future. This is the archetype of the next thing." I remember I had a call with you, John Graham-Cumming, Dan Connock, and Thomas, because I was so excited about it. I remember at the end you said, "Phil, remember, developer platforms take 10 years.
Yep.
As usual, you're right, because we're now nine years into this, and what you said, something seems to be changing.
It is.
And-
You can look at, again, we share some stats publicly, but there's also things that you can see from NPM downloads and all these things, where it's just hit this hockey stick inflection. Where, again, I think because, I wish I could say that we were so prescient to see what the future was going to look like. We were always just building what made sense for us. That's always been the key to what Cloudflare does, is we were like, "Okay, if we could start with a blank slate of paper, how would developers want to build? How would our own team want to build these things?" I think that it turns out when we build things for ourselves, and then we show them to customers, that's really powerful. For example, Sam's going to show you what we've done with Cloudflare OS later today.
We didn't intend that to be a product. We keep showing it to people who are like, "What are you guys doing around AI?" We show it to customers, and they're like, "That's exactly what I want." Again, I think it's over and over again that we're building what are kind of scratching the itches that we have internally, and those turn out to be, because we sort of think about these things from first principle, those turn out to be the really powerful tools that everybody else is going to want for that.
Again, there's this flywheel which is happening now where as you make a platform which is cheaper, which is faster than anyone else's, you have a lower cost of serving everyone, that's causing more and more people to adopt it, which is getting more examples online, which then more things are training against, and that's just accelerating over time. Again, I wish I could say that it was because we were so smart. I think it's actually just because we have a team that's always saying, "If we could do it the right way from the beginning, what would we do?" Now more and more people are saying, "Huh, that's an opportunity where we can build on top of it.
Let's also talk about security, because obviously, if you think about how we began, the business plan was called Project Web Wall.
Yeah.
One of your friends said, "Actually, I think what you're trying to build is firewall in the cloud. You should call it Cloudflare.
Yeah.
Let's talk about security, because that's obviously been a huge topic this year with Mythos, ChatGPT, you know, Phi-3. It's almost equally as dominant as talking about AI and agents in the news flow. People are acting like, how do we protect when attackers have the ability to access these latest models? My question to you is, how do you think AI impacts the security industry, both near term and long term, but also what's Cloudflare's role in this new security paradigm?
I think for the next two years, every security company is going to be wildly busy. We're going to have a sort of Log4j-like vulnerability, which was probably one of the worst kind of vulnerabilities that was out there for the last 10 years. We're going to have about one of those at least a month, maybe one of those a week. That's going to keep the CrowdStrikes, the SentinelOnes, the Cloudflares, the ZScalers incredibly busy over that period of time. I think what's going to change is that going forward, software's going to get a lot more secure. I think there's going to be a flip probably about two years from now, where all of a sudden it's sort of like, huh, it's gotten much harder to find where those bugs are.
I think there's still going to be an incredible role for network security and how you're going to sort of partition data. There's always going to be a purpose for that. I think that security as a standalone category, if you're just a security company, it will be really exciting for two years, and then kind of maybe fades away after that. I think that that's Again, I think we're going to be incredibly busy around that time, but that's going to just become table stakes as part of the platform over time. What's been really rewarding has been working with the major model vendors to be able to share what they see, and we get early feeds on, hey, we found this new vulnerability.
What's powerful, and the reason that they partner with us in a very special way is because so much of the internet sits behind us, we can very quietly, effectively patch the vulnerabilities that they find and keep the internet safer. You see these model companies who I think genuinely do worry. Like Anthropic, we've had access to Mythos from the beginning, and Anthropic, just today, kind of released a version of it, which has a lot more guardrails than the version that was sort of in limited release. They really do want to make sure they're not making the world worse. We're an incredible partner to them because of the fact that we can say, if you do find something, we can have a very effective way of protecting as much of the internet as possible before everyone can go out and patch the software.
Again, I think that's one of the reasons why our customers trust us to stay in front of these threats. The folks that are finding these new vulnerabilities, including these new model companies, are such great partners to us.
Yep. That's great. Now, let's go back to the founder's letter here. One of the things you wrote is, "We never wanted to do anything to discourage any potential customer from routing any amount of traffic, large or small.
Yeah
through our network." This is a question I get a lot, so I'm going to ask you about this, too. Why is the free tier valuable to Cloudflare, and has this answer changed over the years? Because with the rise of AI and the opportunity to help build the new business model of the internet.
When Michelle and I started Cloudflare, it started as a school project out of HBS, and the business plan is on file at the library at Harvard. You can go out and actually read it and verify whether this is the case. What we thought from the beginning was that some part of the business was going to be something that looked ad-related. Where we were going to do something where we would present ads to either on error pages or if you had a 404, a page not found page, we would sort of give you a way of hints of getting around, or we'd do other things like that. Never quite worked because we never could figure out how we could do something that was significantly better than what Google was offering for it. That was always a piece of it.
The theory of it was always if you got enough of the internet passing through you, there must be some way to actually generate some value to the people who are using that and be actually less than free. Actually return capital, return money and revenue back to them in order to encourage that. What's interesting is it's starting to become true in a bunch of different ways. Some of the things that we're playing with are, no matter what, the business model of the internet is going to change over the course of the next five years. Like bots don't click on ads. Ads are going to change.
Imagine if you have the ability to say, I know a bot is coming to a page, and we're not going to show traditional human ads, but we'll take those spaces off the page, and we'll let people experiment with actually putting context on the page. We know what the bot is looking for, so we'll say, "Hey, by the way, I know that you're looking, shopping for this. Maybe there's some places out there." Imagine sort of a new version of a Google AdSense, but targeting bots. Again, I don't know if that's going to work, but we're in an incredibly unique position to be able to experiment with that and play with it. I mean, the other thing which I think some version of this has to happen in the future, which is as these agents are exploding in volume.
To give you some sense, I mean, from everything we saw, we thought that the end of 2027, bot traffic agents and everything else would exceed human traffic. We updated that about three months ago, bringing it in, saying in the first half of 2027 it was going to exceed it. It's been exploding at such a rate that just a few months ago we actually pulled the data again, and it turns out bots have already exceeded human traffic online, and it's growing exponentially. Someone has to pay for that infrastructure. The system that's paid for it in the past has been advertising based largely. That's going to change. It's going to go away. It's going to become something different. Someone has to pay for that.
I think that what we're thinking about is we see about half a billion transactions through our network on any given month. We think that somewhere between 1%-10% of those, you could have some sort of micro payment to actually transfer something to that. We're trying to figure out how can we build the rails to support that. What's interesting is all the AI companies are like, "Yeah, that makes sense." Like that's something that seems actually pretty fair, that when we access these pages, we'll pay a fraction of a penny in order to get that content. That's a way that there's still a way to encourage content that's out there. Again, I think we're in a very unique position to be able to deliver that.
If that's the case, if that's going to be the future, of course, we want every bit of content behind us. Of course, we want to support that as much as possible. The reason we can do that cost effectively is because from the beginning, we've always focused on how do we drive bandwidth cost to zero, how do we make it as efficient as possible to service, how do we build a routing engine where we can always, for a free customer, have excess capacity somewhere on the network in order to deliver that. All of that has allowed us to get into the position to be able to take advantage of whatever the next business model of the internet is going to be.
All right. Let's talk about how we're positioning ourselves in the next bet. Going back to the founder's letter, you said, "We will continue to invest in R&D so long as it demonstrates a significant return. Our investment philosophy is around making small and inexpensive bets, quickly terminating those that don't work, increasing investment in ones that do." Let's fast-forward to today now with AI. How has AI changed your view of the potential for the pace of innovation at Cloudflare?
I mean, it's just been amazing to see how much it's increased the pace of innovation. Our best engineers have gotten massively more productive. We're hiring as many people to build products, as many of the developers as we can because we see that their pace of innovation has just gotten so fast. What's powerful, though, is it's not only gotten faster, but it's gotten significantly better. We measure, again, every once in a while you have a big public incident. You all read about that. We have lots of little incidents all the time. We have 10 years of data on these. We trained a model on all of that information, on all of those incidents, and we put it in place to check not only every code release, but every time a configuration change goes out.
You go to our dashboard as a customer and you push a button. There's actually an agent that checks that before it gets pushed out to the rest of the system. It was dramatic. Jeremy, who runs our production engineering team, it was running along and you could see here's the rate of incidents. It was all like this, and it sound like this. What that's doing is it's making us more comfortable to actually move faster and again, not break things as we do it, which is this incredibly powerful thing. I think this won't just be Cloudflare. I think at Cloudflare we're learning from We were always one of the fastest shipping companies that are out there. I think now we see what Anthropic's doing, what OpenAI is doing.
We're like, "Oh, we can be even better." That's encouraging us. At the same time, I think we, and across the entire industry, again, somewhat similar to what we talked about with security, you're going to see just a massive increase in the quality of software over the next period of time, that's going to just turn into just a better product and really, again, a flywheel which will continue to maintain our advantage over time.
Yeah. Speaking of products, you said earlier that some of our best products, if you think about developer platforms, Zero Trust actually started with us building solutions for ourselves, the problems that we face. If you think about the pain point that we're solving right now internally, what do you think that next thing is that we're solving internally that customers face as well?
Yeah. I think that you can't overstate how much that's been important to us.
Yeah.
We started with the idea of how do you put a firewall in the cloud? We had a problem that we knew that in only to make that a successful business, we needed to sell to big banks and governments and things like that, but they would never trust us unless we had really just robust data. We couldn't get data unless we had customers. There's this chicken and egg problem. Being plucky little business students, we were like, "Oh, let's create a free version of the service.
We'll get a bunch of data, and we'll use that." The problem was that all of a sudden, the people who signed up for the free version of the service were really a bunch of hacker kids who were always attacking each other like crazy, and then a bunch of civil society and humanitarian organizations around the world who were all getting attacked by nation-states all the time. All of a sudden, we started, and we were like, "Whoa, we never thought we had to be a DDoS mitigation service, but I guess we have to go build that," because Arbor and the folks at Prolexic at the time wouldn't take us on as a customer. The hacker kids almost stole our domains because the registrar that we were using wasn't good at security. We had to build our own registrar.
We started having distributed teams, and we looked at the Zscalers and others in the world, and we were just like, "This performance isn't up to what our standards were." We built Zero Trust. The developer platform was all because we built it ourselves. Core to what we are, for better and worse, and there are downsides to this too, is we're very kind of inward-looking at problems, solving them the way that makes sense. We're not driven by what Gartner tells us to build. We're really driven by how do we build what the right solution is. That, again, I think has done very well for us over time, but it accelerates even more in a world where you have these sort of emotionless agents that are making decisions on what's actually the right answer, because that's what we've built over and over again.
That's why we're seeing more wins in Zero Trust. It's why we're seeing more wins in developers, why we're seeing more wins in even our earliest products. I think to your question, though, customers are really trying to figure out, I have to implement AI, but I have two massive problems. One is, this is terrifying from a security perspective. How do I do this in a secure and safe way? The second is, I did it, I put this budget aside for it, and all of a sudden, I've blown through my entire budget overnight. The two questions that we get from every CTO, every CIO is how are you doing this securely, and how are you doing it cost-effectively? We had those exact same problems. The amazing thing, though, was we had all the tools to solve them.
Because we had Gateway, we could actually put in place very strict rules on what data individual users and their agents had access to. All of a sudden, and again, you'll see this later, all of a sudden, you were able to give these tools access to all of these different sort of systems of record, but do it in a way that you could contain and audit what was going on with them. On the other side, again, because we're partnered with all of these different model providers, we run things ourselves, we partner in other cases, we actually build very sophisticated routing systems that said, on this particular user's use case for this particular query, that's actually not that valuable. Steer it to one of our internal low-cost models that we can provide very inexpensively.
On the other hand, if there's something that's really high stakes, maybe we'll route it to something that's more expensive. As a result, we've been able to very much control what our AI costs are. As you can see, that's the number one thing that customers are asking for, and that's actually driving a huge amount of the adoption, especially in our Zero Trust portfolio, where it's turning out that AI is kind of the killer use case to drive Cloudflare's version of Zero Trust.
When I listen to some of the other security companies that are out there, I kind of scratch my head saying, like, "Why do they sound like they're kind of talking yesterday's game and not tomorrow's?" The team's like, "Because they don't have a developer platform, because they haven't actually experienced this pain in the way that customers experience it." I think that's giving us this just really unique perspective and advantage, which is going to drive a lot of business going forward.
Yeah. That's great. All right. Last question here. In Cloudflare, we have a tendency to say, "We live in the future.
Sometimes for better.
Exactly. We just celebrated, obviously, our 15th birthday last September, and Workers, as you said, turns 10 next year. When you think about Cloudflare's 20th birthday, let's say when Workers turns 20, what excites you most about our potential as a company when you stare into the future?
I can't emphasize enough how insane what's about to happen is across the internet. There's this giant system that's the internet. We're going to see traffic across it grow. In five years, it'll probably be 10 to 100 times the traffic volumes that we see today, just because that's the amount of additional load that these systems are putting on it. You're going to actually see, I think, a lot more application, a lot more content creation. For a really long time, the internet kind of plateaued. In the last 18 months, it started growing at sort of exponential rates again. We're growing at the same rates that it was growing kind of in the mid-2000s, which is extraordinary to see again, and it catching on. I think as that happens, no matter what, the business model of the internet's going to change.
What I think is so exciting is that we've got a front-row seat to figuring out what that new business model is. I think that as we do, I hope that we can do it in a way that catalyzes not just the people who are creating content and applications and all those things to be more successful. Some of the things that we learned over the last 20 years of the internet weren't all that healthy. I think the most interesting question of the next five years is going to be what's the future of the business model of the internet going to be? I think we're the company that everyone is looking to figure out what that is. I think that's a ton of responsibility, but it's something that our team takes incredibly seriously.
We've always said that our mission is to help build a better internet. We don't think we can do it alone. We're partnering with amazing companies, both the model manufacturers, a lot of the people in financial services, people who are supporting small businesses in order to really think about what that healthy future looks like. Again, I can't imagine any more interesting question than what is the future business model of the internet going to be? It's not going to be advertising, it's not going to be subscriptions.
That's great. Well, that's the end of our fireside chat. That 25 minutes went super fast. Matthew will be back up here for open Q&A at the end. Thank you, Matthew.
Thank you.
Appreciate it. All right. I have the honor of introducing our next speaker. This is her third year being here, talking about AI. To the stage, I would like to welcome Rita Kozlov, Vice President of Product for Cloudflare's Developer Platform.
Thank you, Phil. Hello, everyone. My name is Rita Kozlov. I lead product for Cloudflare's Developer Platform. I'll share a little fun fact with you. Just a couple of days ago, I got to celebrate my 10th anniversary at Cloudflare, and I'm being very sincere when I say that even though it's been an incredible 10 years, there hasn't been a time that's been more exciting to be at Cloudflare than right now. I'd like to start by talking about Cloudflare's mission for developers, because that's the reason that we're doing all of this. That's the reason that I get up out of bed in the morning, and it's to provide developers with a modern cloud platform that accelerates their velocity and enables them to build better end-user experiences.
In other words, we want to help developers bring their ideas to life, and we want to make it as easy as possible from the first million of users that they get, and the millions to come after that. The other thing that I like to start with is the big, bold, non-consensus bet that we made nine years ago when we started on this journey of building a developer platform. The reason this was such a big bet is because every single cloud that's been built before us has been built on the foundation of virtual machines or containers. We decided to take a different approach with a technology called Isolates. This came with a big trade-off. We knew that it meant that it would be harder to lift and shift applications onto Cloudflare.
It also meant that if you were building something new, if you were building a greenfield application, we could actually make that really easy for developers and remove the burden that we saw come with the clouds, where they still had to worry about infrastructure and regions and scaling and performance. When you're making a big decision like this, you always want to bet on the future, not on the past. It's a good thing we did, because the greenfield opportunity today is so much bigger than it's ever been. AI is making writing code incredibly cheap, and that means that there's a whole explosion happening of applications that are being built every single day. The whole calculus around lifting and shifting applications is changing too, because organizations are no longer stuck with these decisions that they made 10, 20, 30 years ago.
They can actually choose to rebuild something and not have it be this ambitious project that never completes. These are real conversations that we're having with our customers right now. Developers are feeling really inspired because there is this whole new use case for them to build around agents. This is my third time up here, and I feel like this is your opportunity to hold me accountable to the things that I promised, the predictions that I made a year ago. Let's see how some of them have played out. The first thing that we talked about was how AI workloads were going to shift from training and inference to end-to-end automation or agents. Guess what? That's exactly what we're seeing unfolding right now with tools like OpenClaw, which is an open source consumer agent growing so quickly in popularity that overnight it surpassed React.
React, which has been the biggest front-end framework for the past 10 years. That's how much demand there is for agents. The next thing that we talked about was how in the next five years, more code was going to be written than in the entire history of software that came before it. Again, we're well on track to surpass that goal. Every day this year, there are more websites, more new iOS apps being built than the year before. There is so much code being pushed up to GitHub every day that GitHub is barely able to keep up. We're seeing the exact same thing from our users with Wrangler downloads being up nearly 1,000% year-over-year.
Last but not least, and perhaps most importantly, we talked about how Cloudflare was going to become the go-to platform for developers to build and deploy these AI applications because Cloudflare could uniquely offer developers the best of cost and scalability, performance, and developer experience. Again, you don't have to take my word for it. You can take the word of 5.5 million developers that are building on Cloudflare today. That's not all. Just a week ago, we announced the acquisition of a company called VoidZero, the company behind Vite, which has been one of the fastest-growing developer tools that we've seen over the past couple of years. The reason it's so popular is because it powers the technology that underlies almost every framework out there, with the exception of Next.js.
What's been incredible to see is that as Vite has been growing in popularity, well, so has Cloudflare's plugin that's been growing with it, just recently representing as much as 10% of total Vite downloads. Okay, this was all a year ago. Now that hopefully I've earned a bit of your trust, let's talk about what's going to happen next. I'm going to start with making a small adjustment to something that I said a year ago. While, yes, automation and agents are going to be the next phase of AI, what we're actually seeing happen is that this is occurring in two distinct phases. First, the models have to get smart enough to be able to actually operate these agents end-to-end. What's going to happen next is all of these agents are going to need an execution environment to operate in.
Let's dive into that. I'd like to start with a recap of how agentic systems even work. Agentic systems are made up of three main components. The AI piece, this is the model or the brain of the operation that's going to come up with a plan, constantly reevaluate it to make sure that it's continuing to deliver on a goal. There's the workflow aspect of it that's going to make sure that the next steps are actually being taken every single time. Then there are the APIs. These are the tools that the agents have at their disposal so that they're not just making plans, they can actually action on them. Let's start with the first component, AI, which is where we've seen so much improvement happen over the past year and really even over the past six months alone.
Since November, December, we've seen a massive step function improvement in the productivity that models have been able to give to agents. With models like Opus 4.6, GPT-5.5 representing a massive unlock in agent productivity. What's been remarkable is that open source models have actually been very quick to follow here, with models like Kimi 2.6 and GLM-5.1 being just behind them. The good news here for Cloudflare customers is that they can always get access to the latest models. This is especially important when new models are coming out so quickly that you don't want to be locked into a single vendor. Through Cloudflare's AI Gateway, developers are able to access hundreds of models in a single place.
If you're choosing to run one of the open source models like Kimi, you can do so on Workers AI in a truly serverless way where you don't have to pay for pre-provisioned resources that might go unused. You can actually only pay for the inference that you end up using. Now that that's behind us, let's talk about the more interesting piece, which is the Workflows and APIs. This is where if you've used an agent recently and you found that while, yes, it is really incredible, you can't quite leave it alone entirely unattended. You can't fully delegate a task to it and trust that it will fully get done. Why is that? I'd wager that the main reason behind it is that the agents absolutely must have the ability to write code. That's a bold statement, so let me explain why.
This all starts with something called the context window. The context window, you can think of it as the memory of the model. It's everything that the model is able to hold in its head throughout the transaction of an agent. If you hear model labs announcing new models, often announcements start with this. "We've extended the context window." Here's the thing about the context window. The context window of the largest models today is about one million tokens. Into it, you need to be able to fit in all the tool definitions that tell the model what tools it has access to, the conversation, the system prompt, the tasks. By comparison, Cloudflare's API surface alone, to tell a model everything that Cloudflare can do, you need two and a half million tokens. Okay? More than double what today's biggest context windows are.
This is where you start to see weird things happen, like the lack of accuracy that you see when agents are operating. For example, just this morning, I asked my agent to create an event for later tonight for dinner at 6:00 P.M. at Le Mercerie, great restaurant, by the way, if you haven't been. While upon first glance, it seems like it successfully created the event, when I looked closer, I realized that it actually created it for January 1st, 2024, which is not today's date. Why did it do that? Models have no conception of what today's date is. The way that they obtain that information is through doing tool calling, but we just talked about how you have to be very conservative with what tools you include in your agent because of how quickly it blows the context window.
Agents start to come up with all these inefficiencies and inaccuracies. What this really comes down to is that agents are not good at tool calling. Hold on. Here we are. LLMs are bad at tool calling because there's no such thing as tool calling in nature. Tool calling is actually an entirely artificial process. Tool calling gets injected into the model after the model has already been trained. It's not actually code, which is where models start to get easily confused. If you have two tools that have similar names, they can conflate them. They're very inefficient at using these tools, which ends up using a lot of tokens, which adds up to a lot of costs for our customers. This is not just me saying this about the model. The model labs know this about tool calling. This is coming directly from Anthropic.
Asking LLMs to do tool calling is a bit like asking Shakespeare to take a month-long course in Mandarin and then asking him to write a play in it. You know, it's Shakespeare, so it will be good, but it's not going to be his best work. What LLMs are really, really good at, what they're exceptional at, and have been trained on lots and lots and lots of, is code. LLMs can write code extremely efficiently and quickly. An LLM can write a few lines of code to figure out today's date in a matter of milliseconds. If LLMs are good at writing code, that means that they now need a place to be able to execute and scale all of that code.
If they need a place to scale and run all that code securely, why not just do that the same way that we've scaled and run applications all of these years, which is why not just run them on the hyperscalers? The reason for that actually sits behind the way that we scale applications today. Let's talk about that for a moment. Every application generally begins as a monolith. As a developer, you write that single application, and actually, after you write that code, it scales pretty well to the first 100, maybe even first 1,000 users, each of them coming in and running through that code that you wrote. Eventually, you get that 1,001st user, and that monolith no longer scales for that. What do you do? You create more copies, more instances of that exact app.
For the past 20 years, when we've been talking about scaling applications and we've been talking about microservices, this is exactly what we're talking about, running the same code over and over again, and when you need to make an adjustment, you write that code, you thoroughly review it, and you release it to your users. Agents don't work like this. Agents don't need more copies of the same code. Agents need a distinct new piece of code written not just for every user, but for every single task and sometimes even sub-task. What we've been doing simply doesn't work here. To use an analogy, the way that we've been scaling applications is actually very similar to the way that fast food restaurants work.
You have a chef, they come up with a menu, maybe they update it every couple of months, and you have this kitchen that's been designed to very efficiently execute on that exact same menu, producing hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes. When you have a lot of customers, how do you scale as a fast food business? You create more franchises, right? More copies of that kitchen designed to produce even more hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes. The really incredible thing about the year 2026 and the time that we live in is that we accomplished what we previously thought was impossible. Every person can have a personal chef in the form of an LLM that comes up with a menu fully tailored to that user and what they want on that given day.
We're still stuck with that exact same kitchen that's only optimized for executing on hamburgers, fries, and milkshakes. What you really want in this situation is something more akin to a pop-up kitchen, where you can quickly spin it up, have just the tools, just the ingredients that you need, and be able to produce that meal on demand, quickly spin down that kitchen and execute on the next one. It's not just conceptually that this doesn't scale. The math shows it too. Let's run through what it would take to power agents for the entire United States alone. There are about 100 million knowledge workers in the U.S. today. Being conservative, let's imagine that we run one agent per person, and you can fit about 10 agents per CPU if you're running containers. You need about 10 million CPUs to be able to power all of that.
For context, current global CPU server production is about 35 million to 45 million a year. To power the U.S. alone, that's about 20%-30% of global CPU production. We're not alone in this world, right? Let's run the math globally. In the world, there are a billion knowledge workers, and realistically, we're not running one agent per person. They can run very efficiently in parallel. We could run two of them. They can run when we're asleep, when we're at dinner. If you do the math, you need a billion server CPUs. That's 20 times current global production. If you think about the phases of AI adoption, each of them has been defined by different bottlenecks. The training era needed consistent GPU resources for training.
For inference, you needed flexible GPU resources to be able to adjust to unpredictable traffic. The first phase of agents, the bottleneck, was models getting smart enough, the next bottleneck is going to be on access to these CPU resources. The cloud that got us where we are today, it simply doesn't get us to where agents need to go. You know what does? Remember that big, bold bet that we made nine years ago on Isolates? This is exactly what Isolates were built for. Isolates are perfect for this moment because unlike VMs, Isolates don't need to bring in an entire operating system every time they need to run a line of code, or unlike containers, they don't need to spin up the entire language runtime every time they need to run a line of code.
They can actually just bring in the application code or the code that's been written by an agent and execute it on demand. This means that we can be 100 times more efficient than any type of compute out there, being able to import the code that the agent just generated and move on to the next one. It's not just about our efficiency. This results in meaningful cost savings for our customers, too. I'll start with a counter example, actually, where if you have a regular application that maybe only grows 10% year-over-year, and you've really invested in optimizing your one server, running on Cloudflare and spinning up a new Worker, renting it every time that you need to run something, might actually end up being about 15% more expensive.
When it comes to running agent-generated applications, if you need to run about 10,000 of them, that's going to be about 63% more effective on Cloudflare. If you need to run a million agents, that's going to be nearly 75% more cost effective on Cloudflare. At the scale that our customers run at, this adds up to really significant cost savings for them. It's not that the cloud got everything wrong. In fact, Andy Jassy was absolutely right about one thing, it's that it is all about primitives. It's just that the primitives that got us here are not the primitives that we need for the agentic era. If the last era was defined by primitives like S3, EC2, SQS, the next generation of application is going to need primitives that look a lot more like Durable Objects, Artifacts, Workers, and Workflows.
This is not just me saying this. Our customers are starting to think about this already, too. Just recently, I was talking to Mark Smith, who is the head of infrastructure at Discord, one of our customers, and he was telling me that, he said, "I know what hyperscalers are going to look like in 10 years. They're going to look exactly the same as they do now." I'm looking to Cloudflare to define what the next generation cloud is going to look like, because like us, our customers want to bet on the future, not on the past. We're about to live through a major generational shift on the web. The last one of these that we saw was mobile. While the cloud preceded mobile, it was actually mobile that made the cloud take off. Right?
Before mobile, we could only access the web when we were tethered to our computers. Smartphones made it possible for us to access the web anywhere we went. These new devices were so much cheaper that they became accessible to a larger portion of the population, making internet traffic explode. We're about to see the exact same thing with agents. We're already on track to surpass human traffic with bot traffic, as Matthew was just saying before, earlier than we even expected. Stephanie is going to talk about how, unlike humans, agents never tire. We get bored after clicking on five links. Agents can look at thousands of links before they reach a conclusion. Traffic on the internet is about to take off, and it's going to need a different type of cloud to be able to power it.
If the iconic companies that were born out of the mobile native era are Airbnb and Uber and Netflix, and they were all built on clouds like AWS, well, the next generation of iconic applications, these agent native businesses, are going to be built on Cloudflare. This is not a prediction. This is happening right now. Look at the past month of announcements alone. Figma, Lovable, Anthropic, OpenAI, the world's fastest-growing agent native companies are already betting on Cloudflare. We're building the fastest, most secure, most cost-effective place to build, deploy, and scale agents and the code that they write. I'll leave you with this one final thought. There are 8 billion people on this planet, and we're starting to rely on agents not just for our jobs, but for our day-to-day lives.
We're going to need multiple agents running per person, and these agents are going to generate infinite lines of code, and we can't just build more servers to scale our way out of this. We need a cloud with a fundamentally different approach, Cloudflare is the only cloud that's going to be prepared for this next agentic era. Thank you. All right. With that, I'm excited to invite Sam Rhea to talk about how we do AI at Cloudflare.
Thank you, Rita. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sam Rhea. I'm Cloudflare's CIO, and today I get to share with you how we equip and enable everyone at Cloudflare to use AI. Rita just told you about how their team has been creating the world's best platform to build and deploy AI agents. We have the privilege of getting to use that platform first, becoming the first users of these technologies. We are our own most demanding customer, and we're also a very active customer, because recently we needed a way to give our entire team a turnkey solution for managing agents, for automating work, for getting their jobs done in the AI era. We started building one. We started using all of those components that you heard about to create something that could really supercharge our workforce.
The result has become something that we call Cloudflare OS. It is this intuitive platform that gives every single member of the Cloudflare team the ability to automate work, to build and manage agents, to create apps and documents, all running on the infrastructure that you just heard about. Cloudflare OS, it starts with a cloud-based agent running in our infrastructure that users get to with a single click. No more forcing your entire team to fumble around with command-line tools. In fact, no requirement for local tools at all, which means your agents and your workflows keep running when you close your laptop. It is all happening inside of an environment where we have total control and total visibility. Team members, they are not constrained by the number of hours in the day that they are on a keyboard.
They can build and schedule agents that get jobs done autonomously. It comes batteries included with our organization's brain. We have invested the time to make sure it has the right context about how we work, about what our priorities are, and safe and secure access to our company's data, all while making sure, like you heard Matthew mention earlier, that everyone on the team can use the right model for the right job by running all AI inference through our AI gateway. Here is the architecture at a high level. It starts up there at the top. An employee starts their day by opening their laptop, and within seconds, inside of their browser, they have a full, comprehensive agent workspace, all without needing to take time configuring local software. For IT, that means we get everyone productive immediately.
For our security team, that means we move away from what I think is really an anti-pattern, this idea of putting all the data back on the device. Instead, it is all taking place in an environment where we have total control and total visibility. That employee, they start going about their day by accessing our context library. This is a collection of workflows, runbooks, material that give them the ability to solve problems and accomplish jobs with a single click inside of the system. Then on the bottom right here, like I mentioned earlier, they also have the safe and secure access to our systems of record, all of them. Because for a lot of teams, giving everyone access to all of your systems of record is both a security challenge and it is a context window challenge.
Because like you heard Rita mention earlier, when you access these kinds of systems, it can explode your context window. It makes the AI agent or the AI workspace overwhelmed, but not with Cloudflare OS, because we get to use something that we call Code Mode, where our agent workspace does not interact directly with the systems of record. It interacts with an isolate running in our network that executes code to then go interact with those systems of record so that we can make sure every employee has access to the hundreds of various tools inside of these systems without overwhelming those context windows. Again, for our security team, all happening in a way where we have total visibility into every tool call. Then when those workflows, those agents, those user sessions, when they need to use AI, we send everything through our AI gateway, no exceptions.
that gives us the ability to dynamically route inference to the right model for the job. For the IT team, this is fantastic because not everyone needs to spend $20 with the world's most powerful model just to summarize an email. For our security team, they love it because they have total visibility into all AI usage at Cloudflare. Finally, our team members can build applications inside of Cloudflare OS that also run as isolates, and they can schedule automated agents and workflows to get work done when they are not at their laptop. Cloudflare OS, it's our open-ended internal platform, but it's not the only way that we deploy AI at Cloudflare. It's part of a larger funnel.
Sometimes users, they build great applications in Cloudflare OS, that gives them an incredible opportunity to then just immediately share those with their teammates, all safe and secure behind our Zero Trust layer. Sometimes those applications are really great. We see experts across the organization in various functions building the applications they always wanted, the tools they always dreamed of to get their jobs done. In those cases, we're happy to partner a little bit more closely with them so they can kind of run these through an AI car wash, and they can become more formally supported tools in our organizations. It's really incredible to see the creativity that gets unlocked when everyone becomes a builder on top of Cloudflare's compute and storage platform.
Thanks to our AI Gateway, we can treat these models more like a choice, like a commodity, picking between the right model for the job while controlling token usage. We can route to external models to power workflows, but we can also steer jobs to the models that are running on our own GPUs, where we run inference with incredible efficiency. This also means that the latest models are available to every team member without any additional configuration. We're not handing out tokens or sign-in keys. They open this workspace, they have access to the latest, greatest models, and they have access to models that map to the work they need to do. We have all these incredible technology primitives that power Cloudflare OS. Like everybody else, you still get faced with this blinking cursor problem.
You give people an AI workspace and you say, "Go," and they say, "Well, what do I do here?" That's why we've really spent a lot of time investing in a central context layer, our organization's brain, because we have thousands of employees in various functions, and we want to take those manual jobs to be done and map them to skill files, to workflows, to instructions that team members can schedule or on-demand invoke with a single click, all from a visible, transparent place inside of the ecosystem. Time for the fun part. Let's walk through how team members use Cloudflare OS, starting with that context layer. Inside of Cloudflare OS, there is this centrally managed skill file collection. These are all jobs to be done in our organization.
These map to various roles, to various functions, each can be invoked with a single click or scheduled with a trigger. It can take action while people aren't at their laptop. People can also come bring their own context, their own skill files, so they can make this environment tailored to the way that they do work. Within those people who are doing that work, let's zoom in on two personas, builders and sellers. How do we equip and enable them with Cloudflare OS to do incredible work? Up first, when developers use Cloudflare OS to write code, how do we make sure it meets our quality bar? AI allows us to write more code faster than ever before, but that's only useful if it's not introducing more problems.
You heard Matthew mention this earlier, every submission to the codebases at Cloudflare runs against an AI review. It's not just a generic AI review. It is powered by this context layer we debate and argue over because we want to make sure that everything that gets introduced into every codebase at Cloudflare maintains or improves our quality bar. When it doesn't, it gives the developer the instructions that they need to go make the fixes, and they can hand those over to an AI agent to go solve that problem for them. Cloudflare OS lets our builders focus on higher order challenges, they can just give Cloudflare OS a ticket or a problem, and it will go about fixing it. It will provision a sandbox in our environment to test it.
It will go create monitors to make sure that the builds are passing, that the test suites are passing. If they aren't, it will come back and fix it for them as well. That means our developers can focus on higher order challenges, or quite frankly, they can go get a coffee. Again, this doesn't rely on them walking around the office with their laptop cracked open. It keeps running in our infrastructure so that they can focus on other things. What about everyone outside of R&D? How do we make it so that everybody at Cloudflare can own more of their workflow? They don't have to wait on five different specialized inputs to every stage in their workflow. How do we equip them? We built Cloudflare OS to solve that as well.
Here's an example of somebody doing research ahead of a conversation with a prospect customer. Before Cloudflare OS, they would have to go manually conduct this research, spend hours finding this material, referencing our blog, and other material that we have internally. We want them to be able to spend that time with more customers. With Cloudflare OS, with a single click, they can get a tailored research report for one or dozens or hundreds of customers ahead of the conversations they go have with them. This, we don't need containers to go do this. What you're seeing on the screen is all running with our Agents SDK orchestrating this so that it scales to meet our entire go-to-market function and more.
We let sellers hit the ground running with Cloudflare OS so that they can, for example, start their morning without needing to go into a dozen different vertical applications to figure out what they're supposed to be doing that day. They can schedule Workflows to run before their day starts. It will go look in our Salesforce, our Jira, their calendar, their email, and say, "This is where you ought to focus today," all before they sit down. This works for various functions inside the organization. Actually, right about now, I have an agent that's reviewing some updates to our MCP servers using my own personal context file so it can provide feedback while I'm here with you.
As that workday gets started for the rest of our team, for example, our sellers who used to need to request things from competitive intelligence or our brand marketing team to put together a deck before they go meet with that customer for whom they've done some research, they can create, in a matter of minutes, a tailored, prescriptive deck using that organization's brain to think about how we talk about our product, how we position ourselves, what are the case studies we want to reference. Gone are the days of our single corporate deck. Our sellers can own more of this workflow. Like I mentioned earlier, some Cloudflare OS projects, they really deserve to be packaged up as formally supported tools in our organization. That's increasingly from people outside of the R&D team, which is really exciting.
This is an example from members of our events marketing team, who they plan hundreds of events like this one and small events all around the world, using dozens of different spreadsheets and various tools, which inflicts an extremely high coordination cost. That's really painful. In fact, one of them sitting in our Lisbon office got so sick of this that she said, "I'm going to build something better," and used Cloudflare OS to prototype an idea that removes all of that coordination cost, building the tool that they always wanted. We've now partnered with them to make it something that's more formally supported in the organization. I think you're going to see this happen in every part of our team. In addition to reducing the coordination cost of our organization, we also want to shorten the time spent waiting in various parts of our team.
Imagine that seller, they did that research for that customer. They had this prescriptive deck created for that customer. They met with them. They felt confident about the meeting because Cloudflare OS helped them out, the conversation went really well. Customer said, "Great, I want to get started." In the old days, the seller might think, "Oh, gosh, I need to go schedule time with a solution architect or a bunch of other people, get some expert opinions, come back, put a document together, get it reviewed." Not with Cloudflare OS. Because it can pull from our organization's brain that investment we've made in that context layer, they can come in and just tell Cloudflare OS, "Hey, conversation went well today. Customer really wants to talk about our developer platform and our Zero Trust products," and it will create this prescriptive solution architecture for them.
Of course, our teams are also global. I'm visiting here from our Lisbon, Portugal office, and we have teams around the world meeting customers in every industry and every geography. Previously, that slowed us down because we would need to wait on teams to do specialized case study, go find different advocacy stories, go find different localization tools, make sure that the materials that we've been talking about today were custom to a given region, a given industry, given segment. We don't need to do that anymore. We can make everyone all around the world at Cloudflare more productive by giving them the tools to adapt everything that we generate to the customer, the region, the industry that they're meeting with, all in a matter of clicks.
I feel like I'm the luckiest CIO in the world because I get to build on top of everything that Rita and team are creating. Being the luckiest CIO in the world, that's only partially true. The reality is everyone, every CIO, every team in the world, can use these same components to equip and enable their organizations to use AI. I'm so excited for us to keep building and more importantly, sharing and learning from our customers, because at this exact moment, every organization on the planet has this exact same problem. I appreciate your time today. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Stephanie Cohen, our Chief Strategy Officer, who's going to talk about the future of the agentic internet. Thank you.
Thanks, Sam. It is so great to be here. My goal for today is to build on what you heard from Matthew, from Rita, and Sam, and demonstrate to you why Cloudflare was built for this moment. The internet itself is changing. We all see it in our daily lives. Cloudflare is the only cloud designed for this new agentic internet. Not because we decided it was the cool thing to do, it's because we repeatedly made the right architectural choices over the last 15 years. The new agentic internet, it's turbocharging our existing businesses, and it's opening up new opportunities. Because on the agentic internet, every single interaction is a chance for commerce. Yes, I don't think it's an exaggeration that orange is the new cloud.
That's coming from someone who lived right here in New York City for a really long time, and I prefer to wear black. While we, along with everyone else, eagerly await for what this new agentic internet holds, we are already seeing the benefits in our financial results. In the sectors that are most affected by the agentic internet, we're experiencing revenue growth north of 37%, and that's driven by new customers like Reddit and PeopleLink, and existing customers such as LinkedIn. Our retention and our expansion are higher because many of our products are now strategic imperatives. Those bots on your site, they're no longer just a nuisance or a security threat. They can either be a chance for new monetization or an existential threat, depending on the decisions you make and the tools that you choose.
When we go to meetings on application performance and security, they're now with the CEO in addition to the CTO and CISO. Cloudflare has never been more important to the C-suite. Before we go deeper into these results, let's start with how we got here. You heard this from Matthew. A new internet really is emerging. You're all here, you're here in the context of your job, but I want you to take a minute and think about how your own daily interaction with the internet is changing. We're going through a platform shift at the fastest rate we have ever seen. The numbers on this page are staggering. It took 14 years for the internet to reach a billion users. Social media, it was almost nine years, smartphones, six, generative AI in less than three years. Generative AI just keeps growing.
It's now at more than 2.5 billion active users. That's over 30% of humanity in just 3.5 years. The curve isn't just getting steeper, it's going vertical. Never before have we seen such a dramatic change in how we interact with information and how we perform our jobs. This platform shift, it's not just faster, it's actually more extreme. In the AI era, the way all of us use the internet and actually spend our time is changing. The other platform shifts mainly fed the internet, but this one is taking our attention away from it. The previous platform shifts taught us that if you just put your content out there and you allow bots to scrape it, you're going to get rewarded with traffic, and you can monetize that traffic with ads, subscriptions, and affiliate revenue.
Traffic from humans on the internet, it's disappearing. For every hour that we all spend today searching online for information, only 15 minutes of that is actually spent on the open web. When was the last time you actually clicked on a link before you just read the answer? Why? Because for most things, you just want the answer. You don't want a treasure map of blue links. These numbers don't lie. Traffic from humans from many news and content sites is quickly heading to zero. The Faustian bargain between search and content is no longer just a bad deal. It doesn't even exist. Many of our customers are preparing for what they call Google Zero, a moment where none of their traffic comes from search.
The answer is not to go back to the way the world was before, we do need a new ecosystem because high-quality, original content is valuable. It's valuable to all of us, and it's also necessary for AI to flourish. While media is the canary in the coal mine, they're not the only ones. Retail, software, IT, and finance are all seeing meaningful declines in human traffic on their sites to the tune of almost 40% in less than one year. This matters. It matters not just to those sectors and companies, but it matters to all of us. The internet is a critical part of the economy, and it's also a really important conduit of information. It's why we at Cloudflare come to work every day. It's the North Star for how and why we deliver value to our employees, our customers, and our shareholders.
For that reason, we are uniquely suited to help build and power the business model for this agentic internet. Providing the control plane for the agentic internet requires a unique combination. You need supply and you need demand, but you also need technical capabilities that support both sides, and they bring them together so that everyone can benefit. Let's start with the supply side. I think you may have heard the internet runs on Cloudflare. Because of that free network that Matthew talked about earlier, more than 20% of the internet runs on us. We also have depth. 36% of the most visited sites sit behind us, and more than 40% of the Fortune 500. We also have a large amount of hard-to-find, unique user-generated information that comes from communities that really matter, both to humans but also to AI.
We said this before, this is not just about news and content. Every site is being impacted by the change in how the internet functions. Every site needs to understand what it means to be agent-enabled. You heard Rita talk about all those agents. Those agents are going to all of our customer sites, and they all depend on Cloudflare to help them, whether it's media or software or retail or finance or healthcare. The largest sectors in the economy are all experiencing historic changes in traffic to their sites, and they depend on us. They depend on us to help them understand what in the world is going on, to give them insight, but also give them the tools to adapt. What about the demand side? That part of the agentic ecosystem that wants access to the information, they all depend on Cloudflare too.
From OpenAI to Anthropic, almost 80% of leading AI companies use Cloudflare. It's not just the big companies. We also support the long tail, and the long tail really matters here if we want a sustainable ecosystem to emerge. We can't just have a small handful of large LLMs deciding what information matters to the world. Because of the Cloudflare, this long tail is actually able to exist, and they can compete with those really, really large companies, and they do that by leveraging our network, our scale, and the innovative products that you've heard a lot about today. We are uniquely really easy to use. We're efficient. We're global out of the box. As you heard from Rita, our TCO for agent-generated applications and agents is 60%-70% less expensive.
I think we need to pause on the 60%-70% less expensive, because that's how we get an ecosystem to emerge. It is our unique, innovative capabilities that bring everything together and makes Cloudflare an N of one when it comes to being a platform for this new agentic internet. Our position of sitting uniquely at the intersection of the internet and AI, that's been built over the last 15 years. It's not an accident. The world chooses Cloudflare because they are at their best when they build on us. While there's a course dependent on products, it starts with a set of beliefs that are anchored in our mission to help build a better internet that helps us keep making the right architectural choices over and over again. You heard from Rita on the Isolates. This is something that's embedded into who Cloudflare is.
We're simply the best partner for every player that is building for the agentic internet now and in the future. We sit in between the supply and demand and have world-class primitives that work together seamlessly and will allow this nascent agentic internet to flourish. Well-functioning markets like the one whose building we're sitting in today, they don't just appear. They have to be built on the right platform with the right capabilities. For us, these capabilities include Act One products like Bot Management and the full suite of developer products from Act Three. Let's start with Bot Management. My guess is I don't have to tell this crowd, there is no sustainable market without reliable scarcity. No one pays for things they can get for free, and of course, that's true for AI companies.
The world's largest companies with the most sensitive data, including the AI companies themselves, depend on Cloudflare because no other Bot Management provider has the breadth and depth of data that we have. We see every IP address on average 7 times per day and sit 15 milliseconds from 95% of the world's population. Our win rates show that we're just better and faster every time. For most of our customers blocking, that's just the starting point. What they really want is they want to optimize and monetize their content and information for AI. In order to do that, they need analytics. The dashboard that we originally built for the security teams is now for the C-suite, business, and marketing teams. This idea not only expands our customer base, it actually makes us stickier.
Once you help someone drive revenue rather than just reducing cost or risk, a product that could have become a commodity is now priced inelastic. What about those AI companies who are spending hundreds of billions of dollars crawling an internet that was meant for humans, not machines? They need our help too. Those same signals that make our Bot Management product best in class, they help AI companies decide what content is scraped and how often. Consider for a moment how easy it is for us to tell if a site behind us has been outdated or whether the domain behind it is trusted. AI companies value that information on top of the value for the content. Our Agents SDK makes it easy to build an agent that obeys site owners' requests, and therefore has better and also faster access to what it needs on the internet.
We've said this before, the vast majority of AI companies and agents want to do the right thing. I want to pause here because there's a lot of people who believe that AI and agents would just prefer to ignore site owners' preferences. The data on our network tells us that's just not true. The reality is it's just not that easy. First, the internet. Just like we want to abstract away infrastructure for builders, we want to do the same for helping build agents. We uniquely can help builders to build while helping site owners maintain control. It's not just about the tools, it's about the ecosystem itself. We, as a society, I think we can all agree, we need a level playing field. This chart on the right, this is just not good for the world.
It shows that one large LLM has access to almost two times more information than the next LLM. Look at how quickly those bars get smaller. How can new model companies ever compete? We want to create an ecosystem where small model providers have this opportunity to actually compete with the world's largest companies by being able to access the same information. Right now, large existing companies are leveraging their advantages in one market to help them win in this new market. Cloudflare uniquely knows where the asymmetries exist and can help AI and agents access this harder-to-reach information and price what it's worth. With the finance crowd, every functioning market, what do we need? We need a payment system to support it. Today, there is no payment system that can match the throughput of the internet and the Cloudflare network.
We process more than 500 million transactions per second. The largest payment company, they can process less than 100,000 transactions per second. I assume we can all do the math. It takes us less than two seconds to process the number of transactions that they process in a day. It's not surprising that these large payment networks have decided that Cloudflare is a really important partner to them. All of them have embedded the ability for us to cryptographically verify bots at scale into their payment protocols. That's how it works today, but there's a much larger opportunity. We spoke earlier about how the internet is changing, and Rita alluded to this, but we didn't cover what that means for traffic. When a human goes to research a bot, they may go to five to 20 sites. Your agent's going to thousands.
While traffic has always been a positive, growth in traffic has always been a positive for Cloudflare, growing agentic traffic is even more interesting. Today, we monetize requests by providing security and developer products. Tomorrow, we can monetize requests by simply being in the flow, the way a payment company does. To start, with Coinbase and Stripe, we created the X402 protocol so that machines can pay other machines at scale. Already today on the Cloudflare network, there are more than two billion 402 responses a day. A 402 response means payment required. It's not just a block, it's a, "Please pay me." Today, the vast majority of these 402s, they don't actually result in a transaction. The scaffolding's there. It's built into the internet with the capacity for a higher number of machine-to-machine transactions than the largest payment networks in the world.
X402 is payment rail agnostic, but it is perfectly designed for stablecoins. For the dream of agentic commerce to be a reality, a lot of things need to work together. No other company has all the pieces to enable this agentic internet, building the agent, verifying the agent, and allowing for the payment. It's not just about agentic commerce. It's about changing the surface area of the economic opportunity. On the human internet, I think we can all agree, payments can be a bit of a nuisance. On the agentic internet, they are the oil that allows new ecosystems to emerge. Micro payments for access to content and systems of record, those just weren't viable before. Cloudflare sits in between all of it. We go from protecting websites and applications to monetizing trusted, automated demand.
Yes, the agentic internet is nascent, but we already have proof that it's working. The largest media companies in the world are moving to Cloudflare to ensure that they're agent-enabled. PeopleLink, Condé Nast, Financial Times, just to name a few. These companies are using Cloudflare to negotiate large deals with the LLMs. The best example is PeopleLink. In July of last year, they implemented Bot Management, by September, they had seen a significant shift in their negotiating leverage. What did they do? They created scarcity, and they used that dashboard that we showed you earlier. Yes, the splashy deals between the big publishers and the LLMs, those make the headlines. It's not just about them.
Clay, a startup that provides AI-powered sales and marketing tools to automate lead generation, prospect research, and data enrichment, they're using Cloudflare for signals so they can quickly and efficiently access updated information on the internet. Before they started using Cloudflare, they were constantly scraping the same sites over and over again. That creates unnecessary load for them and for the sites. It's very expensive. Now they're using our network and our storage capabilities, so we can just serve them the updated information. This capability is where we expect to start with most AI companies. We make it faster and cheaper for them to obtain access to information that they already can get to. The next step is us getting them information from hard-to-reach places. Remember that chart? The difference between the LLM that had the most information and the one that had the least?
This is the ecosystem you see emerging. To that end, we have large AI companies working with us to get access to this niche, hard-to-reach content. Only Cloudflare would know that a top LLM was unsuccessfully attempting to crawl a specific healthcare site almost 800 million times in a 30-day period. We can see where the demand is and price it not just once, but programmatically. The promise of the agentic internet, it's already here. It's helping us to win new customers, grow existing customers, and increase stickiness and decrease price sensitivity. We're executing content deals and building stable coin payments into our products. We are building an ecosystem where both sides can benefit. Act 4, it's not separate from the rest of Cloudflare. It's only possible because of the foundations we built from act one and act three.
We're the only platform that can build, secure, and enable this future. There is nothing more consistent with our mission and nothing that will deliver more value over the next few years. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mark. He's going to talk to you about how he's helping, and all of us are helping our customers adopt our platform at scale.
Thanks, Steph. All right. Hey there, folks. Excited to be here with you today. I'm looking forward to sharing what we're seeing and hearing from customers around the world and how I think about the go-to-market team evolving during these really extraordinary times. Throughout my career in tech, I've tried to spend more than half my time communicating directly with customers. Cloudflare, given the sizable transformation I've helped orchestrate, I think it's the best way for me to learn. Learn what customers know about us and why we should matter to them. Also learn how well-equipped my team is to articulate the compelling value that we can deliver. Let me start about what I'm hearing today. I've been in this role now for a little over 30 months.
When I first joined Cloudflare, a large portion of my time was spent introducing the company to enterprise and government customers. Conversations kind of started with the basics. "Who's Cloudflare? What do you guys actually do? Why should me and my big bank care?" At the same time, I was sharing a consistent message that AI is going to change everything. That organizations are going to need to modernize their infrastructure, their security architectures, and their application environments to be able to take advantage of AI. I challenge customers to think differently about the future. Who are you going to pick for your infrastructure partners for the next five years? Guess what? It's not going to be a lot of the infrastructure partners that you've had for the last five years. Fast-forward to today, the contrast, it's remarkable.
I spend far less time explaining who we are. Instead, customers are coming to us because the challenges that they're facing increasingly align with what Cloudflare was built to solve. This market is moving towards modern cloud-native, globally distributed architectures, and Cloudflare is already there. That shift is showing up in our brand awareness, our enterprise engagement, and ultimately in our business mix. The conversations haven't just become easier. They've become far more strategic. I've lived through some pretty big platform shifts as an operating executive over the last 25 years. Since the end of 2022, when OpenAI announced ChatGPT, the pace of change has just been astonishing. In these last two years, I kept hearing from customers, chatbots, copilots, they're interesting, novel, not really moving the needle with regards to delivering real enterprise value.
Since the beginning of this year, 2026, wow, agentic AI is all anyone wants to talk about in every single industry, everywhere I travel in the world. AI and agents are changing everything, and earlier this year, the market began to understand just how quickly this transformation is occurring. Companies like Anthropic have demonstrated the enormous value that AI can create inside large enterprise. What's even more important is what AI enables. They're beginning to rethink how work gets done, how applications are built, and how employees operate, and ultimately, how businesses create value. I think we're entering a world where software doesn't simply support work, software increasingly performs work, and that requires organizations to rethink the technology architectures, application infrastructure stacks that currently support their business.
One of the most significant shifts I've seen since the beginning of the year has been the speed at which AI adoption has evolved. If you go back roughly nine months, most conversations centered on enablement. Organizations wanted to experiment with AI, but they were equally focused on governance and controls and guardrails. The question was, how do we safely allow employees and developers to start using these technologies? Again, fast-forward to today, the conversation has changed dramatically. The urgency level has gone from 0 to 100. Organizations are no longer asking whether AI will impact their business. They're asking how quickly they can operationalize it. I'm seeing customers move from pilots and experimentation into production every single day. Increasingly, those deployments involve AI agents interacting with applications, infrastructure, data, and their business processes.
Looking ahead, we believe that autonomous agents will become embedded across nearly every enterprise workflow, that is where the opportunity for Cloudflare becomes increasingly compelling. I think AI is changing how work is done, that trend only accelerated with the rise of agents. Just in the last year, agentic traffic on our network, as you saw, grew 1,700%. When you move more than 20% of the world's web every single day, the insights that only Cloudflare can glean from those traffic patterns is a superpower for all of us here at Cloudflare. Also, in the past month alone, we've commercialized major relationships with AI native companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Lovable that understand that our Workers developer platform is the very best place to build and scale AI agents and the code that they write.
This is just the beginning of the beginning of the agentic age. It's not just changing how businesses operate it, of course, it's changing how attackers operate. What you're seeing here is the dramatic compression in time between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation. Historically, organizations might have had months or even years to be able to identify, prioritize, and remediate those vulnerabilities. Today, that window is shrinking rapidly. Today, it's seconds. I think AI is going to continue to accelerate that trend. What I'm hearing today and seeing from CISOs is fear. They've realized that this year, legacy security approaches are just not effective. Organizations need architectures that can detect, adapt, and respond in real time, that's exactly why we're seeing so much urgency around security modernization. As we talk with customers around the world, we're seeing two powerful forces emerge simultaneously.
On one side, every organization is exploring how AI agents can improve productivity, automate workflows, transform operations. As discussed, those same advances in AI are changing the threat landscape. Frontier AI models are making attackers more capable, more automated, much more sophisticated. Individually, each trend is significant. Together, they're creating urgency inside virtually every enterprise, I've never seen an environment like this before. Customers are being asked to move faster while simultaneously reducing risk. They're modernizing infrastructure, they're rethinking security architectures, they're looking for platforms that simplify complexity rather than add to it. I believe Cloudflare sits at the intersection of those needs, that's why we see the demand going through the roof like they are. What's particularly interesting to me is that all of this is happening against a backdrop of relatively flat budgets. IT spending is growing modestly.
Headcount growth has kind of slowed significantly in IT and InfoSec. Technology leaders aren't being handed dramatically bigger budgets. They're being asked to accomplish substantially more with roughly the same resources, which means every single decision matters. Despite those constraints, AI spending is accelerating. Gartner's research shows that nearly 90% of technology leaders expect to increase their AI investments this year. Security remains a major investment area. Application modernization remains a major investment area, and cloud platforms remain a major investment area. What's important is that these aren't separate initiatives. They're increasingly connected. AI adoption requires modern infrastructure. Modern infrastructure requires security. Modern security increasingly requires a platform-based approach. I hear different perspectives from executives every single day. For the CISO and governance teams, the primary concern is managing this new wave of risks, including employees using unsanctioned shadow AI tools.
For the CIO or infrastructure team, it's about unlocking productivity. You want to empower your teams with the best AI tools, but you need to do this in a way that's both safe and agile. For the CTO or technology teams, the goal is to innovate quickly, empowering your developers to build the next generation of AI architectures with security embedded from the get-go, not sold separately, not as an afterthought. No matter their role, all IT leaders are almost exclusively focused on how to best accelerate AI adoption to drive their businesses forward. Ultimately, it's about speed and security. No trade-offs. Customers don't need entirely new architectures, infrastructure stacks to be able to adopt AI.
They need infrastructure that was already designed for this reality, infrastructure that can support users and agents, infrastructure that can connect, protect, and help build, and infrastructure that can adapt as technology evolves, and boy, is it ever evolving. That's where Cloudflare is differentiated. Our network is the Earth. If you step back and look at everything we've discussed so far, a pattern emerges. Organizations are moving faster than ever. They need to embrace AI. They need to defend against a rapidly evolving threat landscape, and they need to do all of that without dramatically increasing cost or complexity. That's exactly the type of challenge that Cloudflare was built to solve. I had a unique vantage point before joining the company as an operator because I spent nearly five years on our board of directors. What attracted me back then was this architecture.
One global network, one platform, security, networking, and developer services working together. Today, it feels increasingly obvious to me the market is moving towards the architecture that Cloudflare has been building for years. We're seeing these demand signals translate into larger opportunities, deeper platform adoption, and accelerating enterprise engagement. When you take a look at the market, most vendors participate in only one part of this AI journey. Some focus on security, some on infrastructure, some on development. Customers increasingly need all three, and they need them to work seamlessly together. I think that we're unique because we help customers connect, protect, and build these AI applications on a single platform, on a single cloud-native modern network. That breadth becomes increasingly valuable as organizations move from experimentation into production. Customers don't want more complexity. They want fewer, larger platform partners that can do more for them.
The build portion of this story is becoming increasingly important. Enterprises aren't just consuming AI anymore. They're building AI-powered applications. They're deploying agents, orchestrating workflows, and creating entirely new customer experiences. You heard what we're doing with Sam. Everyone's going to be doing this. They need infrastructure that helps developers move quickly without sacrificing security, governance, or performance. That's where our developer platform becomes a critical part of the story. The same global network that secures applications can now accelerate applications. The same platform that protects AI workloads can help customers build AI workloads. The same architecture that simplifies operations also improves performance and resilience. Programmability, automation. That is a very powerful combination. So far I've talked about what's happening in the market. The obvious next question is, are we prepared to capture this opportunity? Because opportunity alone doesn't create outcomes. Execution does.
Over the last two years, we've been transforming our go-to-market organization to position Cloudflare for the next phase of growth. Everything we've done falls into six areas. Recruit and develop stage-appropriate talent, stage-appropriate leadership, improve segmentation, drive customer adoption, selling the platform, leveraging value-added partners, and increasing sales productivity quarter in, quarter out. None of these initiatives were designed to operate independently. Each element reinforces the others. Together, they form the foundation of a world-class go-to-market organization capable of meeting the moment that we're in today, and especially the moment that we'll enjoy in the coming months and years. The first step was bringing in stage-appropriate leadership. We brought in experienced operators who scaled businesses at every stage of growth. Just as importantly, we strengthened frontline management throughout the field.
Pretty sizable change in team dynamics that you see here, because great sales organizations are built manager by manager, team by team. That investment created the foundation for everything else that you'll see in the following slides. We've refined our sales strategy to be much more targeted and more structured, enabling an improved go-to-market approach to best address the unique needs of our diverse customer set. We've clearly defined market segments ranging from digital native startups, to large enterprise, to public sector, and this allows us to apply specific sales models with the right resources to solve the specific challenges for each opportunity. We have had and continue to have incredible success with SMB and mid-market companies from our freemium origins. We're stacking larger and larger customers on top of that.
In this graph, you're going to see the inflection in the slope of our million-dollar-plus customers from the second half of 2024, with the momentum building through 2025 and through Q1 of this year. I believe we are still in the early innings with regards to large enterprise adoption. Although we count 42% of the Fortune 500 as customers, I'm not going to be satisfied until they're all Cloudflare customers. Our innovation engine has always been the very heart of who we are here at Cloudflare. Our incredible R&D teams continue to build more and more amazing new products and features for our customers. As an organization, we've become far better at listening to these large customers and building products and features that they need for their AI revolution. To me, this is a massive competitive differentiator for our field team.
Our platform, as you've heard, built from the ground up with a full understanding that the entire infrastructure stack is going to have to shift to the multi-tenant cloud, compute, storage, security, and networking. Cloud native, massive scale, single user interface. We didn't glue together a bunch of acquisitions. A true platform where every service runs on every server and every rack and every data center all around the world. Our field team understands that customer value, this kind of solution. Simply put, platforms win, and that's where we continue to lean in. Another important shift has been our partner first approach. The largest opportunities increasingly involve complex transformations. Customers want strategic guidance, they want implementation support, and they want long-term operational expertise that partners bring. They have to move fast. Partners help us extend our approach.
They give us feet on the street to start telling the Cloudflare story, and they help us accelerate adoption, drive consumption. As a result, partner contribution has steadily grown as a percentage of our business. Partners around the world are creating demand, fulfilling that demand, and providing value-added services that amplify what we do every day for our customers. We view this as an indicator of both scale and maturity in our go-to-market motion. Welcome back to my business to business go-to-market university. From the last two years, you'll remember my equation for momentum. It's the product of mass times velocity. In sales, momentum and ACV is the product of sales capacity times productivity. Ultimately, all of these investments need to show up in productivity, and that's exactly what we're seeing. Sales productivity has continued to improve and recently reached new heights.
That's important because productivity is one of the clearest indicators to me that a go-to-market system is working. I consistently believe that when you have a differentiated suite of products at a time when customers are just realizing that they need this differentiation, you can continue to build and ramp high-performing teams to articulate a compelling value proposition, you can roll up market share in a very meaningful way. My team certainly thrived with these dynamics at F5 and especially at Palo Alto Networks over the last couple of decades. For us at Cloudflare, the opportunity is much larger. Given our massive total addressable market, my plan is to continue to invest in sales capacity, I expect that sales productivity will continue to grow for a very long time.
As a reminder, when I first joined in 2024, many of these CIOs, CTOs, CISOs had little or no contact with Cloudflare. Most didn't know who we are, why we should matter. Again, we brought in stage appropriate talent to build these relationships and earn the trust with the largest companies and governments around the world. Our momentum to bring the right AEs and sales pod members to customer teams globally is going full steam ahead. Where do we go from here? I believe that AI will transform not only what we sell, but how we operate. The next phase of our journey is applying AI to our very own go-to-market organization, not as a science experiment or side project, but as a practical way to increase capacity, improve customer experiences, and help our teams operate at greater scales. We spent the last several years helping customers modernize their infrastructure.
We're applying those same principles to ourselves. We intend to be one of the best examples of how AI can transform a modern enterprise, because the future of go-to-market isn't humans or AI, it's humans and AI working together to create better outcomes for our customers and for our partners. One principle guides our approach. As Sam mentioned, we're our own most demanding AI customer. Before we ask customers to trust these technologies, we want to use them ourselves. We want to understand how they create value. We want to understand where they fall short, and we want to understand how humans and AI can work together most effectively. That experience helps us become a better operator and a far better partner to our customer base. Today's sales professionals, they probably spend less than half of their time actually selling.
AI gives us an opportunity to change this big time. Across the customer life cycle, we're seeing repetitive activities that can be automated, accelerated, or augmented. The goal isn't about replacing people. The goal is about allowing our teams to spend more time with customers and less time on administered trivia. The next phase of our AI journey isn't just about how we sell, it's about how we serve customers throughout their life cycle with Cloudflare. We're applying automation and AI across onboarding, adoption, and renewal. For example, during onboarding, we're helping customers reach value faster through automated planning, deployment preparation, and follow-up. During adoption, we're using usage signals, business reviews, and customer engagement data to identify growth opportunities and proactively address risk. As customers approach renewal, we're automating insight generation, forecasting, and expansion planning.
This will allow our teams to spend more time delivering value and less time managing process. AI is fundamentally improving the customer experience while also increasing the scale and efficiency of our customer-facing teams. Folks, the opportunity in front of us at Cloudflare has never been larger. The market is moving towards the architecture that we've been building for years. Our platform continues to expand and grow. Our enterprise momentum continues to strengthen. Our go-to-market organization is operating at a higher level than ever before. We're just beginning to unlock what AI can do for our customers as well as for ourselves. I am mega excited about the road ahead. Some of that excitement comes from the confidence that I have in the team that I've assembled and the executives that you see here in the room. I think we have an incredible opportunity ahead of us.
Folks, I've been at this for a long time, and it's with mixed emotions that I'll share with you, at the end of this year, I'm going to retire. I'm psyched about it. My family's psyched about it. You know, stepping off of our board back in 2024, I had this incredible conviction that we could complement our product-led growth motion with the right people, strategy, and infrastructure to dominate where half of our total addressable market exists, large enterprise and large government. That's half the spending on what Cloudflare does. I'll continue to cheerlead from the sidelines in 2027 and beyond. We're launching a public search right away, I know we'll find the very best person to take the baton and guide this go-to-market team and their efforts into the future.
In the meantime, I'll be squarely focused on our FY 2026 plan and wrapping up the most successful fiscal year in Cloudflare's history. I want to thank you for your time. Some friendly faces here in the room that I'm going to miss, but I really appreciate the support you've provided over the years. With that, I'm going to pass it off to our amazing CFO, Thomas Seifert.
This is off script. I give you a hug.
Thank you.
It is quite a while until the end of the year. This is the Investor Day. It falls on wherever it falls. I want to acknowledge that it has been a true pleasure working alongside you, Mark, for the last seven years. You and I have been both long enough in this business that we both know how important it is that our two roles have a really trusted relationship. I truly want to thank you for that. I know it's a long time until the end of the year. In front of our investors and shareholders, I want to acknowledge that. Thank you. I'm Thomas, the CFO of Cloudflare. I was standing up here yesterday. One of you guys last year reminded me, said, "Thomas, keep in mind, we count CFO smiles." That is a really important KPI for us.
I said, "Finally, I get my moment where the CFO can smile." I should have saved this comment for this year. This year is a way more appropriate place for smiles. Especially now after Mark and Theresa acknowledged that I work at a wonderful, magical company. Here we go. Off we go. This is a slide you've seen two times already today. I think it's one of the reasons, as Michelle said, this change that are behind the significant increase in traffic on our network is probably shaping up to be the biggest tailwind for Cloudflare moving forward. How does this impact our financials? When does it show up in revenue? How does it show up in revenue? Is what I would try to take you through over the course of the next 20 minutes.
In order to get started off correctly, I take you back a moment and try to familiarize you again with how revenue at Cloudflare works. Today, as you can see, we have four primary models of how we generate revenue. They're the easy ones. The flat rate, this is where we came from, where the world was easy. We're near IPO'd and almost 100% of our revenue was subscription-based. There is a larger share of pure usage-based revenue today, still under 10%, where customers pay us in the rear. The complexity comes from the two other components of how we interact with our customers, cap models and pool of funds. You'll find out has a lot to do with T-shirt sizes and Nike swooshes. Why is that? The majority of our contracts are based today on what we call a cap model.
Requests in these contracts are the most significant measure for revenue. What does this mean? Think of a T-shirt. A customer buys a T-shirt, he commits to a ceiling of utilization of a product, a WAF, for example. Say buys a medium-sized T-shirt, 10 million requests per month. It gives us predictable and smooth revenue as long as the customer is using under this umbrella of what he has committed to. What happens if a customer outgrows that medium-sized T-shirt and has to go out and buy a larger one? Let's say from medium to large, to 20 million requests per month. The traffic is increasing more than the customer has planned. He needs to buy up. However, remember, the customers are going to buy what he consumes in the moment. He's trying to estimate what his future consumption is going to be.
This transition is letting our revenue grow, but it will lag to the inflection point of usage and makes, a little bit of sympathy from all of you, our job of guiding and forecasting a little bit more tricky. I brought you a good example. It's a very large leading technology company in retail space coding. The company had already to increase their caps twice in the past year. The customer is working where Agents are. It's highly likely that they will be up soon for another bigger T-shirt size. Keep in mind, the lag to revenue will come with this model because the usage is lagging behind the revenue recognition. That is all still manageable. It gets a little bit more complicated when we go to pool of funds.
Pool of funds has become a meaningful instrument for us and extremely beneficial to the platform adoption to get to larger customers, a frictionless expansion. In the fourth quarter of last year, 20% of our new ACV was coming in in pool of funds. Pool of funds has a very significant impact in how they shape our financial model. You see here two cohorts of pool of funds for 2004 and 2005. You see what would have happened if we had recognized this revenue in a more radical model. The smooth line from the cap model disappears. It becomes much more a ramped model. You can see that revenue lags compared to a radical revenue recognition in the early parts of the contract before it catches up and exceeds it. That delta becomes bigger, the bigger the pool of funds contracts are.
You can see that in 2005, we were even more successful signing larger deals, the gap becomes more pronounced. What happens now when the customer is really burning through that commitment really fast? This is an example of one of our largest customers, in the AI space, increasing the pool of funds commitment already twice. In the fourth quarter, there was a significant step up in commitment, north of 215% of ACV commitment. The customer, of course, is negotiating better rates. In the first and second quarter, and you get a little glimpse in the current quarter, it takes a while until revenue catches up and overtakes what revenue run rate with that specific customer was before. You can also already see what momentum is building up behind that dip in the first and second quarter.
You can also imagine what happens to us when we stack a couple of these extensions in a quarter on top of each other. The headwinds are a little bit more pronounced, make our job a little bit more difficult. You also have to keep in mind that becomes very important when we talk about gross margin later. While the revenue dips, consumption or usage on the network is not going down. Not only is there a headwind from a revenue recognition perspective, until the runway catches up, there's also a slight headwind to gross margin for that transition. With this out of the way, moving forward, I want to focus on frame the discussion around the two primary drivers of value creation for us, growth and profitability. Starting with growth. I want to walk you really fast through the six or seven most important growth drivers.
The Cloudflare business model always excelled itself because we have these multiple independent growth vectors that have been carrying us forward. How do we think about the components at this point in time? First of all, there's TAM. Today, we have about 75 revenue-generating products on the network, including Act four, a massive opportunity. I remember when I joined, I think we were at five. Our total addressable market is forecasted to be around $238 billion for this year. That is more than seven times up from eight years ago. It's almost $40 million up just from the numbers we looked at last year, just by adding developers this year for the first time. $100 million up for 2028. Act 4, all the good stuff that Stephanie was talking about is not yet included in this number.
A massive opportunity moving forward, and we have been excelling and turning and disrupting this TAM significantly. Pipeline momentum, you heard that from Mark, is really, really good. We have increased our opportunity in the market exiting the first quarter of 2026. Our carry forward pipeline is already up 40% year-over-year. And as Mark mentioned, we have made significant progress in our sales organization over the last three years. Productivity, you saw that from Mark, is reaching all-time high, and we are not finished yet. This is where all the good stuff that Sam showed you. If you look carefully at the skill files that went down the menus, a lot of them were go-to-market related. We think we can significantly optimize our cost to book revenue moving forward, and you'll see this on a later slide.
Productivity is reaching new all-time highs, and this gives us the confidence really to continue to invest in quota carrying capacity. Not only has it been increasing throughout 2025 and in the first and second quarter for this year, we forecast based on the confidence we have in pipeline creation and the momentum behind the business, that sales capacity is going to continue to increase for the remainder of this year. You've also seen with Mark that the upward market on the enterprise side has been really successful. We have 42% of Fortune 500 companies behind our network, and the fastest growing cohorts are our biggest customers. And I think this is probably the reflection of the combination of the products that are enterprise ready and the account structures that Mark and team has put in place are the right structures. We are seeing success in driving platform adoption.
One of the reasons why you see DBNR coming back up again is platform adoption. The multitudes of products, the cohorts of products that customers have now, 10 and more products per customer is the largest cohort. And at the same time, across the 75 products we have and sell, there's hardly any revenue concentration. So it's a widely diversified revenue footprint across the product portfolio that we have. Finally, there is accelerating traction in the key product areas, including developers and SASE. In 2025, ARR for Cloudflare One, our SASE product suite, is up 43%, and developer grew 137% last year-over-year in ARR. That's an important number. It shows the acceleration. It is also an important number to keep in mind when I try to give you context around what gross margin does and how gross margin will develop moving forward.
Significant acceleration in the key product areas. Well, growth was easy. How do we think about profitability moving forward? As you heard us now say many times, we are focused on maximizing long-term shareholder value by investing in growth while we remain committed to the underlying economics of our business. Exiting 2025, we increased our unit economic margin to about 44%, despite the declines in gross margins. We'll come to that in a minute. We have also started to realize that the business has become complex. The dynamics that drive the business are very different. So we have to be way more granular in how we manage the business, how we allocate resources across the various products.
In order to give you some transparency how we think about this, I want to drill down more than a line item in terms of what the impact is on our P&L. Let's start with gross margins. There have been two primary headwinds starting in the first quarter of 2024. The first one is, and we've talked about this, the free to paid mix. Free traffic moves to paid, and over the last two years it has accelerated. This is simply an allocation topic. Cost move from sales and marketing to cost of goods sold, and this is a wash on the P&L, but it's a headwind to gross margin. That is what you see in the blue colors. I think moving forward, we've gotten that it's flattening out. We have also made some adjustment also useful life of equipment, that is also flattening out.
The other mix shift is specifically coming from product mix. There's some little impacts in there, like how contracts work, how the caps transition, how the pool of funds transition. It's also a recognition that today, the developer product has a slightly, has a lower gross margin than the rest of the portfolio. We'll talk about this in more detail, what that means, whether that is important, where we make it up. Because how can it be that gross margin came down and the unit economic margin still went up? While the gross margin might continue to hover at this level for a while, we expect the unit economic margin across the four Acts to increase, and to increase significantly.
Let's talk about the unit economics for each one of the four Acts and understand how it impacts our KPIs, what differs between the Acts, and how we manage the business, taking into account that these products, these Acts are now very different in how they influence our revenue mix and different line items on the P&L. You might recognize this graph. All the credit goes to our esteemed Chair of the Audit Committee, Mark Hawkins. This is inspired by him. The unit economics define literally the growth and margin frontier. The lower the cost to book are, the higher the line is on the Y-axis, and the lower the cost to serve and the lower the attrition is, the further to the right the line will cut the X-axis.
Where the line crosses the X-axis is exactly where the unit economic margin sits today at 44%. Now let's talk about the four Acts and how they differ. Let's start with Act One. You're not surprised. You would expect that. Act One is our original and largest business, so it most closely resembles our overall unit economics. It's the foundation for all of the Acts that follow, as you heard from Rita, from Matthew, and from Stephanie. It cost to book our average, cost to serve our average, and because we have a higher mix of small and medium-sized businesses, the attrition rate is slightly higher. This frame pretty much where most of the business from a volume perspective sits today. How does Act Two compare to that? Very different. You heard this before.
Act Two significantly benefits from the infrastructure we have put in place with Act One. It's like taking the infrastructure for free. We compare it to planes that are flying so the eyeballs are empty, and we fill them up with data on the way back for literally zero to very low marginal cost. Very low cost to serve, very low attrition, very sticky product, significantly higher cost to book. Longer sales cycles. This is where Mark's graph on increased partnership comes into play. We have to share revenue and margin with customers. Significantly higher cost to book. Act Three, as discussed earlier, our developer products currently carry a lower gross margin. That said, lower gross margin doesn't necessarily mean that the unit economics of the product are significantly lower. The combining impact of getting a platform business to scale is getting us to superior unit economic margins.
There are good examples for it. You all know them, right? If you look at how the Google Cloud business developed, how AWS developed, how Microsoft Azure developed. The reason for that is that platform businesses have this unique capacity that they can structurally shift their frontier. We've seen this now already happening in individual products in our developer platform portfolio. Rita showed you good examples for it. The lower costs to run agents on our infrastructure are a result of the progress we have been making, taking costs down fast. The curve is shifting. Scale is shifting this. One of the biggest levers is still in front of us. You heard from Rita that unpredictable CPU workloads for agents are the next bottleneck for AI deployment.
Well, if there's one thing that we are really good at, better than anybody else, then it's making the most of our CPU capacity. That's a significant lever that we are going to pull. The curve is shifting up and to the right. At scale, we think that Act Three could surpass Act One and Act Two from a unit economic perspective. That is a good basis to start. Finally, there comes Act Four. You keep in mind how Stephanie defined it. She said Act Four for us is a combination of Act One plus Act Three. Of all the Acts we have, of all the products we have. It will have by far the lowest cost to serve. It will have by far the lowest cost to book because the traffic is already on the network, and it will have significantly lower attrition costs.
This unit economic curve for Act Four could literally shift us off the chart from a performance and from a potential perspective. Let's put all of this together and talk about what it means for our financial targets moving forward. Just for housekeeping, we are clearly on pace to surpass the $5 billion annual run revenue target before 2028. With the expanding TAM you saw, the momentum you saw on traffic and pipeline, this simply will be the next revenue milestone. As we execute on this massive opportunity of us, we have been talking about what guided us through all the years since the IPO. The North Star for us was what we call the Rule of 40. It was a very serious KPI for us. Since fourth quarter of 2020 on a rolling average forecast, we have achieved 40 or above for 22 consecutive quarters.
That's quite an achievement. This is a very serious KPI for us. How the year is shaping up, the momentum we are seeing from a pipeline, from a traffic, from a customer engagement perspective, allows us to see enough momentum that we exit the year as clear line of sight to a Rule of 50. I think this is why we think it's time to raise the bar for us for 2027. We will move our North Star up to a Rule of 50. More importantly, we've already enough signals in the data we see that it will not take us another nine years for that Rule of 50 to shift. We think we will exit 2027 with enough visibility to push the rule beyond a rule of +50 exiting next year. That is good news, but it takes into account everything that you heard today.
A very important milestone that we have reached today. We cannot talk about the Rule of 50, the impact and all the good news on the revenue side and keep our long-term operating model the same. We are also now at a point where we're adjusting our long-term operating model. The first step we take is we make the range of our gross margin wider, not to signal that we will fluctuate between 70% and 77% all the time. It is more a reflection of the journey we will go through over the next quarters, recovering from where we are, improving further from where we are, and getting back to where we came from, primarily by a lot of good engineering work that is happening, but also by a shift in revenue mix. With that said, where do OpEx fall in this play?
Sales and marketing will come down a bit compared to where we were before. This is a reflection of two things. It's a reflection of an increase in revenue share in Act 3 and Act 4 products that have significantly lower cost to book. It's also the results of what Sam Rhea and Mark Anderson have been talking about. In the past, we've been building go-to-market organizations where we scaled the support of quota-carrying employees by ratios. These roles, these ratios are literally contracting and falling away. We think we're moving forward already with the work that has started. We can significantly reduce the support infrastructure across support roles for years. We will not let those dollars fall to the bottom line.
We will use it, deploy it for more quota-carrying capacity, which automatically means for every dollar that we continue to invest in sales and marketing compared to where we were before, we will see higher sales capacity, higher quota-carrying capacity. R&D will pretty much stay in the zones where we are today. However, with some of the best engineers in the world, now we give them the tools to be super productive. These are just three recent examples how supercharged the engineering organization has become in terms of deploying new code, rebuilding new products. We think even if we keep the runway at where it is today, the productivity we get out of our best engineers will jump, and the flywheel that is driving the cloud-first innovation wheel will just continue to accelerate.
Where we will see the most significant changes from a productivity perspective is in the G&A line. Oops, how do I get back? Sorry. Here, literally, AI is transforming the G&A workflows that we have been operating with. This is where currently Sam's team is most busiest across the organization. I see this in my own finance organization now every day, how roles are collapsing, how functions are moving from manual and monolithic ERPs to agent-driven execution, whether that is accounts receivables, revenue recognition, even IR, how we draft our Qs and Ks is impacted. We think the frontier of where G&A costs and benchmarks are going to be moving forward will significantly fall, and we will be leading that charge.
That means our operating margin targets will go up from +20% to +30%, and with that, our free cash flow margins will significantly increase moving forward to about 30%-35%. Quite a dramatic impact, I would say. Last but not least, having all this in sight, some of you are looking for the day, I've been looking for it myself, we will achieve GAAP profitability latest by 2028. In summary, I've been with the company for a while. It's the most exciting time to be with Cloudflare, to have a front row seat to what is happening in the world. The momentum and the opportunity in front of us is enormous. I'm proud to work with this team to make it all happen. With that, we move to our Q&A. Thank you.
All right. Well, good afternoon, everyone. We have some time for open Q&A now. Please wait for the mic before you do ask a question for the webcast, please. Gabrielle? Gabrielle.
Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for all of the new details throughout the presentations. I would actually love to talk to you all about some of the infrastructure you've built internally with Cloudflare OS. I would love to hear what are some of the technical challenges that you have to solve to get there? What do you think some of your peers are doing? Are there alternative approaches? Really the question is, do you think that's something you can actually commercialize and monetize over the long term?
I'll start. Sam is here, you should corner him to ask more specific questions. I think what I hear talking to customers is that everyone is facing the same set of challenges, everyone is trying to figure out how to build it. What I think was unique to us is that we had the primitives to be able to go very quickly and build out what has turned out to be really a transformational tool. We were using AI on our developer teams, I think a lot of organizations are doing that, but expanding it to use it across the rest of the organization has been something that Cloudflare OS has really enabled that I don't see our peers actually building. Whether that's Fortune 500 companies, whether that's new startups, every time we show this to people, they're like, "That's what I want.
I need that." Which again, has us questioning, we didn't think we were going to turn this into a product, again, over and over again, that's been sort of the story of Cloudflare. If any of your organizations are interested in something like this, we'd love to show you how it works. Right now we're kind of just letting people play with it and use it. It's been really powerful. I think the really amazing core thing that enabled us more than anything else was actually and the sort of secret hidden benefit where I think everybody struggles is the fact that we started as a security company. That allowed us to have hooks that were auditable and controllable into a bunch of different systems.
When I talk to peers, where the second question in every presentation is, what's the security model of this? Because we had that infrastructure built in from the beginning, because that was sort of core to every primitive that we built, I think that's allowed us to develop the tooling a lot faster than anyone else.
I would say the biggest part to get momentum, Sam can follow up with you afterwards, is how do you get enough momentum on the skill files? How do you get the organization to document the jobs that need to get done? This is where the effectiveness of the output and the multiplication starts. Sam had this great idea with an email alias where employees literally could say, "This is what I want. This is the skill I want to build. This is the skill file I want to have." Literally in the beginning, we had humans building skill files just to get momentum going.
We lied to them. We told them that it was an AI system behind the scenes.
They were sad.
People would ask more honest questions if they thought they were talking to a machine, not wasting their colleague's time, but really it was a team that was answering that, recording everything.
We started what we call build sessions at every site, where what Sam demonstrated literally got put on every laptop of every employee, and we helped them think about how that tool can help them become more productive, how to schedule tasks, how to build their own agents, what are the most burning workflows that need to get automated.
Yeah, I'll just add that when Matthew mentioned Cloudflare OS on the earnings call, we had a number of inbounds from customers and some of the trusted relationships we have with long-term customers. I've stopped taking count of how many of them want us to do this for them.
Second.
Getting your steps in, Heather.
Thanks so much for hosting Saket Kalia at Barclays. I'd love to dig into Act 4 a little bit. There was a chart, I forget which presentation, that showed some websites where traffic is down precipitously. One of them was PC Magazine. I remember not too far ago, thinking, "Oh, which laptop am I going to buy?" Going to PC Magazine and looking at that. Now, when was the last time we ever did that, right? We just look for the answer. We just kind of get it like that. Right? We just all want the answer immediately. I'm curious, maybe Matthew, Mark, anyone on the panel that wants to chime in, how are your conversations with those content creators going now? Because it feels like such a pivotal moment. When does that start to unlock the value that you could provide with Act 4?
It feels like that should inflect at some point. When does that happen?
Yeah. First of all, the charts show that what human traffic is down. You look at the overall traffic to those sites, it's up massively. That additional traffic is agentic traffic. I think the key question is to figure out what's the fair value exchange for agents and the people who are feeding information into those agents. That's what we're figuring out. We're seeing early success where once they create, as Stephanie talked about, scarcity in the market. You can't get to my content unless you make a deal with me. Instantly, you're seeing the largest publishers that are out there striking much bigger deals. They're all then talking to each other, which means that it's become this virtuous cycle where they say, "Wow, we've been able to strike much better deals with the AI companies because we're using Cloudflare," and they're doing that.
I think the next stage, though, is how do we make that more automated and systematic across the infrastructure? I think over time, there's going to be a lot of different ways of doing that. Yeah, there are going to be content deals. There are also going to be things that just literally say, every time you access one of my pages, you have to pay me a fraction of a penny. At first, that's going to start out as a relatively small amount, but if you just see the growth in agentic traffic and you forecast that out, that turns into significant models. What I think is going to change is what content is the most valuable.
If you look at the media industry historically, for the last 20-plus years, that the way that you built a media company was you told basically the same story that everyone else told, but you defined a very specific audience for it. I remember sitting with an executive of a kind of fast-moving media brand that you've all heard of, this person was bragging about how they created articles as inexpensively as possible and then wrote the most incendiary headlines to kind of piss off their audience as possible, so they would click on them, and that was a way that they drove that traffic. I think that business model for media is in real trouble. I don't think that's going to exist. On the other hand, my wife and I own the local newspaper in our hometown.
I think we'll make more money off AI licensing deals this year than we do off online display advertising. Why? Because we own the newspaper in Park City, Utah. If you guys are going on vacation in Park City, Utah, you want to know what's the best new restaurant, what's the best hotel to stay at, what concerts are going on. We're the exclusive information for that. Interestingly, I think what's going to change is that the media companies of old may get very much disrupted. They may be something different. Some of the media that has disappeared over the last 20-plus years, local media, very specific things, unique content, that actually might be much more valuable in what the information age of the future is.
Exactly, I think there's going to be a lot of change, but I think what I'm optimistic about is that if we figure this out, traffic's always been a terrible proxy for value. For the first time, we can actually reward content creators for creating content that has actual real value that accelerates human knowledge. Fatima. Fatima.
Thank you. Fatima Boolani from Citi. I appreciate you hosting this. I wanted to ask you about Claude Managed Agents. I think all of us have lived through seven lifetimes of announcements from some of the frontier labs, and what was striking to me is almost all of them seem like and probably are your customers. Matthew, this is probably best suited for you, and then please feel free to chime in because there's a commercial implication for my question as well. Claude Managed Agents versus what you're purpose-building at the edge for agents to be persistent, agents to be ephemeral. Where is kind of the line in the sand as it relates to cooperation, co-optation, and competition? Ultimately, where will Cloudflare shine? Is it going to be the orchestration brain?
How do you get paid for that when you talk to customers who are thinking about building autonomous workflows to run their businesses from here on out?
Yeah. I think that we are incredibly closely partnered with all the major frontier AI labs. If you look at the latest, say, OpenAI models, they've all been trained on what we call our Code Mode assistance, where we work very closely with Anthropic in terms of thinking about what their future of managed agents looks like. What we believe is that if you are the place that has the highest performance, the lowest cost to serve. That you're going to be the place where that code naturally runs. Very much what you're seeing right now with OpenAI's recent announcement in terms of where their code is shipping, Cloudflare is the default where it goes to. I think that's going to become more and more the case across these different things.
Again, the AI companies are really good at actually building AI systems, but we're really good at then running the output of the code from those systems extremely effectively. What I think people don't understand, and Michelle's talk is actually worth going back and re-watching, is it's not just code the way you think of developers writing code. If you ask an AI agent to plan your next vacation, it needs to write code. If you ask it to pick what restaurant you should go to or who you should invite to your next birthday party, the way that AI works best is if it's actually generating code.
Every single request that AI creates in the future is going to have to spin up some code in order to do its work, and the most effective way to do that is with isolate technology, and we are the only ones that have it.
Adam.
Adam Borg with Stifel. Thanks so much for the time. Appreciate the discussion today. Matthew, I thought your comment with your fireside chat with Phil earlier was interesting around how AI is really driving a demand for your Zero Trust platform. Maybe a two-part question. First for Mark, maybe give us a state of the union of just SASE Cloudflare One in the field. Obviously, the ARR growth you talked about, Thomas, was really impressive. Two, maybe for Matthew, talk a little bit more about how AI is really driving demand and how that should play out in the coming quarters in your space.
From a security standpoint, I think we made the point earlier that as you start to build and proliferate these agents, you need a security framework that's very differentiated from legacy point product technologies. I think the opportunity for us to have a conversation that traverses agents into security, into global network performance is super easy for us. It's a lot harder for other people. We've seen a lot more mindfulness of the acceleration towards the Zero Trust model. It's funny, we're going to have our customer advisory council here tomorrow. I started, I think, the week we had one, two and a half years ago in New York, and we survey customers at the end of every CAC and say, "What's your big strategic opportunity this year for your company?" 75% of them said Zero Trust.
One year later, same survey, 65% of the people said Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a journey. It's not a point in time in which you buy some stuff. It's a journey to aspire towards, and I think AI and agentic deployments really accelerate that.
Yeah, if we're really honest with ourselves, when we were selling Zero Trust to people who were looking to buy Zero Trust, the challenge was we were late to the game. There were a whole bunch of people that had dominated the category. So we were good if we could get in the conversation, but we weren't always in the conversation. I think what's changed is really two things. The first is the conversation starts at a different place. The conversation today starts with you're trying to build an AI system to do effectively what Cloudflare OS does, and whether you're adopting that or you're adopting your own version of it, now you have to have a security plan that actually makes that happen. Oh, it just so happens that's what our Zero Trust platform does, and it's built very much for that.
Instead of the conversation starting with, "Let's go sell you Zero Trust," and you're starting with the CISO, instead, you're starting with the CIO, the CTO, or even the CEO who's saying, "I need to be able to do this, but I need to be able to do it in a secure way." We've got the complete package to do that. That's how I think the Fortune 500 are coming to us, and where we're winning those deals much more. We're in so many more of the conversations because they don't start as Zero Trust conversations. They actually started AI conversations where Zero Trust is the killer app to make it and enable it to work. I think the other piece is we're really the only Zero Trust platform that has a self-service option.
When things like OpenClaw came out everyone said, "Oh my gosh, how powerful is this if we give it access to everything," then everyone said, "Oh my gosh, how scary it is if we give it access to everything," everyone then quickly searched for what's a solution, they figured out that we were this really powerful and compelling solution. For a long time, the average consumer didn't care about Zero Trust. Things like OpenClaw have made them care about it, as a result, you're getting much more adoption, then those people are bringing themselves to work. That's a very natural Cloudflare-like sales pattern that we had not usually been able to tap into, but now we're more able to tap into it today.
Ryan.
Hey, Ryan Williams, Wells Fargo. 10 to 100 times internet traffic over the next five years with AI agents, it seems more and more realistic each day. Is there anything you would need to change or reorient or invest in as the internet moves towards that level of activity in the future?
By the way, if you challenge me to take an over-under bet on that, I'd probably pick the over. It's growing so fast. We usually feel like we're pretty good at predicting the future. This is growing much faster than we ever anticipated. Obviously, it's going to require investment into what is there. Then the question is, how do we pay for the investment? That's very much what Stephanie was talking about with, we have to figure out as that traffic happens, who's paying for the infrastructure in order to support it. The answer can't be, it all goes back to the content creators who all of a sudden aren't generating any revenue anymore.
Again, I think there's this natural cycle where everyone is like, "We have to create some new version of this." As I talk to the leaders at all of the different AI labs, they're like, "Listen, we're happy to pay as long as you treat us fairly, as long as everybody else pays as well." I think that we're getting to a point where we're going to be able to do that, you're even seeing folks like Google who are very much moving away from a traditional search model.
In that process, they're much more saying, "Okay, there's got to be a different way of having a value exchange with the people that are creating the content." I think, again, we might be on the cusp of a golden age of content creation because if we figure out this way to actually reward real knowledge creation, as opposed to just what generates traffic. I think that's actually a really optimistic view of what the future can look like.
Matt.
Hey, guys. Matt over here from RBC. Thanks for doing this. By the way, Mark, great run. You've really turbocharged Phil. He's really the best.
Thanks, Matt.
Thomas, a lot of good information there. We'll give one to you. I thought the way that you described the different acts from a cost to book, cost to service was great. We think about that gross margin range that you presented, I think it's helpful context that you provided. I wanted to double-click on that. In other words, we should expect maybe a little bit of pressure on that in the near term, then an upward trajectory towards that? How should we progress in that range?
Today, I would describe it best as a journey, where we are. We will improve from where we are. Will it be a straight line, we might have a dip again? Could happen, it would come with a benefit, right? A dip in gross margin would mean that something else accelerates significantly, either growth rate or operating margin, because a significant step up for us to dip even more, it would need to be a significant amount of additional revenue on top of the acceleration of the growth line we already have projected, right? That additional revenue with maybe pressure on the gross margin would come with other benefits. Our path to on the rule of whatever, north of 50, would accelerate. Our operating margin would increase, as we have already seen.
Apart from that, I think it's a journey that takes us from where we are to back to where we come from. We're public, so I can say that you will see already a stabilization in the second quarter results.
I think that usually the fear with gross margin pressure is that you're seeing more competition. We are not seeing more competition. In fact, we are seeing a place where we are oftentimes selected as a category of one, and that's the case. Where the gross margin pressure is really coming from is the fact that we've just seen so much growth in our developer platform. Again, as you see, that's actually a really healthy thing, even though it is at the lower gross margin.
Saiju.
Thank you for taking the questions. I think one of my favorite parts of the presentation today was Rita's presentation around we're not going to be able to CPU and VM our way out of this. When do you think that reality sort of hits the enterprise? Maybe it already is with developer growth being 137%. In terms of breaking that inertia, breaking that modality that most people have when it comes to building net new applications, when do you think we hit that breaking point?
I think that we're seeing that realization with companies that are really adopting AI. The big hyperscale or the big AI labs, the reason that they're adopting our platform, the reason they're using the things that they're doing is because they see that it doesn't work to do it the old way. I think you're still going to see a lot of the reason why AI adoption at large companies is still more of an experiment than a really embedded system is because they don't see how to do it. The security model seems too hard. It seems too costly based on the token spend. It seems too costly based on all these VMs that you have to stand up.
You hear even digital native companies like Uber coming out and saying, "Oh, I don't see what the return is here." There's a better way to do it. We can show them the better way to do it. That part of the reason why we may just give Cloudflare OS away for free just to show people, here's a way you can do what you want in a cost-effective way, where we've been able to significantly lower the cost of using AI while enabling more of our team to do it. I think what's really going to drive it is when you see more and more of those companies say, "Okay, I really have to get on board." Is that going to happen in the next quarter, in the next year, in the next five years?
I think faster than that because you're going to see this adoption expand. I think that's going to be the real thing where people say, "I can't do it the old way. I have to shift to a new model," and we're the natural place to provide that new model.
All right. Well, we're out of time, everyone. We actually have to get down to the closing bell.
The market will wait for us.
Yes. You want to say one more?
No, no. I said the market will wait.
Oh, I thought you said will wait. I was like, "Really." We have 15 of our longest-tenured Cloudflarians who are going to be joining us too, many of whom who are actually in this room, to ring the closing bell. We also have a bunch of members from Cloudflare New York office joining us as well. Thank you for your time today. I certainly learned a lot. I hope you did too. We'll be around afterwards to chat. You know where to find me. Thank you everyone today up here for joining us.
Cocktails. All right.