Okay, good morning, everyone. My name is Mayank Tandon. I'd like to welcome everyone to the Needham conference. We're joined by PAR with Savneet, the CEO. Thank you for joining us, Savneet.
Thanks for having me.
I see Chris at the back there. Thank you, Chris. Savneet, let me kick it off with maybe some high-level thoughts around the state of the market. Maybe better to just back up a little bit and talk a bit about PAR's evolution, just for people who are newer to the story, then we can dive into some of the market dynamics as well.
Sure
What you're seeing in the restaurant space.
Today at PAR, we sell software and AI-related services to the enterprise restaurant community. You know, our heritage was sort of the, actually is the inventor of the point-of-sale terminal that we morphed into for many years as the largest provider of hardware and services to the category. In the last 10 years, we sort of reinvented ourselves as a software platform for that enterprise space. We sell loyalty, online ordering, point-of-sale and back office to that enterprise community. You know, we think it sets us up very uniquely to capitalize on the environment we're in today, in that we really are the only platform-like approach in the space.
Great snapshot there of PAR. Maybe Savneet, I was asking you earlier on the state of the restaurant space. I think we've seen a lot of sort of different trends shaping up.
Yeah.
One is traffic's been relatively slow, but same store sales have been actually pretty good. A lot of mixed data points coming out from the restaurant end market. Maybe you could give us a little bit of the backdrop of what are you seeing in the space?
I think categorically it is mixed, but I think within the specific categories, you can see certain trends. You can see, you know, QSR has now taken share back. For the last 18 months, two years, QSR was a share donor to, you know, table service and full-service dining. QSR seems to be taking that share back. At the same time, fast casual seems to be super challenged, maybe outside of, you know, CAVA, which continues to do fantastic. You know, that space is being hit very hard. It's in that price point that's sort of in between quick service and full service. It's sort of that kind of, you know, no man's or challenging price point.
I think that's really been suffering. You're seeing that community try to figure out how to combat the move to value. You know, the full service dining, which has been a share gainer over the last couple of years, you know, seems to be stalling out a little bit. You still see some customers, some brands do incredibly well. You know, so in whole it's mixed, but I'd say there's certain pockets that are doing very, very well.
Maybe just on that, you know, what at the end of the day, what is the value prop that PAR brings to the table? In other words, what is motivating restaurants to upgrade their tech stack, and what is driving the growth for PAR?
Sure
When it comes to the space?
I think, you know, if you're a restaurant, you adapt technology just like for any other reason, any other industry, which is, you know, growth and efficiency. What our software does is, you know, it's sort of two things. One, on our what we call engagement, you know, we are the largest loyalty solution in restaurants. And in that front end, our job is to increase revenue. It's to increase the LTV of a customer. It's to increase the number of loyal customers. And so we are a tool for our brands to accelerate their revenue growth, keep their customers happy and drive traffic. And then in the second part of our business, in the operator side, it's to create efficiency.
That is everything from the ability to run transactions faster, to service your, this new sort of type of customer better. Also to plug in all this infrastructure so that you can then plug in all this cool technology on top of that. A modern point-of-sale system allows you to put in some of these AI tools, put voice in the drive-through, also put in all the tools to lower costs. For us, what's driving the move into our category, I think, you know, if you go back five, six, seven years, it was really then this cloud migration, which still has quite a long way to go. That move was very much driven by the ability to have real-time data. Again, grow revenue, grow at lower cost.
Today, you know, we see some acceleration there because every restaurant brand in the world is trying to figure out what to do with AI and how to make people more efficient without losing their brand identity. What I think they're all learning is that it's really hard to put AI within your broader restaurant system unless you've got unified systems, unified data, and that's very hard unless you've got a more unified provider.
On that note, when you talk to your restaurant clients, you know, what do they point to as some of the benefits? Is it like the higher ROI on the investments? Is it better customer engagement, consumer loyalty? What is some of the key, tangible indicators that you're hearing from?
Restaurants are a tough business. You know, they are businesses that are very, very sensitive to shifts in traffic, shifts in margin, and so everything we sell is ROI based. There, there's no such thing as like a nice to have when you're buying, selling a product to a restaurant. They are very focused on the bottom line, and that is magnified in the fact that most large restaurant chains in the United States are franchised. It's a small business owner making that investment.
If you go to a small business owner and say, "Hey, spend $20,000 on a fancy new TV screen that will, you know, do X, Y, and Z," the chances are they're going to say no until you can prove to them that there's an ROI back to that, and that ROI's got to be fast. Everything we do has to be ROI driven. On the back of house, as an example, we literally say, "Hey, if you install our product, you can expect to save this much on food, this much on labor units. That will lead to an ROI of this." On the loyalty side, it's literally saying, "Hey, let's look at your old loyalty program, and then let's move you to our program.
If we take the data based off of all the information we have on your peers, here's what we can drive as far as LTV spending. The other part of it is less ROI based, but at the corporate level is also about being a more modern platform. I think what's kind of unique is that because we are in a category that has not been the most tech innovative, very innovative in branding, very innovative in food, but not in tech. There's also an understanding that, gosh, the technology just keeps changing so fast, and the longer and longer we wait to move, the harder it will be and the more painful it will be for us down the road.
We have been a benefit that the brands that have made the investments technology have clearly outperformed the ones that have not. There are very few exceptions to that. I think that is also a nice tailwind for us, which is if you've made the investment, it seems to have worked for you.
When I think of the enterprise market, you only have a handful of players. I would think it's mostly a replacement market where they have something, whether it's proprietary or something from a third-party solution. At the end of the day, what drives the wins for PAR? Do you win on the technology? Do you win on the better, you know, customer service support?
It's always product. In enterprise software, I think it's very hard to win if you've got great sales or great events or whatever. Like product has to win. You know, these are year-long sales cycles. You can't hide anything in those experiences. It's customer referenceability, it's the product. You know, those are the two things I think matter the most, is the product can fit the needs that that customer has, and you have great referenceability, i.e., have you been able to do what you say you're gonna do at other brands. That is a huge, you know, tailwind for us that I think we've got a very strong reputation always doing what we say.
The new kind of I think arrow in our quiver is that, you know, for a long time we had this thesis that restaurants needed to be, and retail stores needed to have a more consolidated platform. This idea of let me pick ten different vendors to do ten different things, and magically it's gonna stitch together and help me run my restaurant. I think that is now like, almost like been beaten in a sense that the idea of having a more consolidated approach seems to have won. That is a nice tailwind for us because there's not a competitor we see that can do that in the enterprise like we can.
Got it. Savneet, on the market as a whole, you know, maybe we'll build up to AI very soon, but when you think about the enterprise market, you know, how would you identify the TAM? What are the realistic penetration that you can achieve over time? How should we think about in terms of whether it's customers, locations? You know, how do you look at that from a TAM perspective?
We've always looked at it, you know, simplistically as locations times ARPU, and ARPU being the products that we have today and, potentially products we could build in the future. You know, in North America, there's something like 1 million restaurants. You know, estimates say roughly half of them are enterprise. And that's a very, very generous way of looking at our TAM. We tend to be a little more specific. We take out all sorts of pieces and think the TAM is sort of, you know, probably 350,000-400,000 total restaurants. But that TAM is expanding.
You know, as an example, we just grew into the pizza category in the last six months, not even the last six months, and so that opens up another, you know, call it 50,000 enterprise restaurants, in pizza, and probably more when we go to the mid-market. That's generally how we look at it. From a price point perspective, today we sell four products and payments. If a customer bought all of our stuff, they're probably spending $10,000-$12,000 a year. And I expect that number will continue to grow over time as we continue to add new modules to what we offer. Call it a $4 billion-$5 billion market.
Got it.
We've got a small but growing international business, which is, you know, international numbers are so large, it's just gonna make it look.
The TAM numbers that you shared, does that capture the C-store space as well?
It does not. Great catch.
Incremental?
The C-store space in the United States. is, you know, we think about 150,000-200,000 enterprise stores. We're in about 25,000 or so. To your question I skipped, which is, you know, what can we get to? The way that I've always thought about it is, you know, our two largest peers both got to well over 100,000 restaurants. I see no reason why we couldn't do the same thing. You know, they obviously did it 10, 15, 20 years ago, but, you know, I think that there's no reason we couldn't do the same thing.
There's no reason we couldn't do more given that we're gonna be more global and expand more. On the C-store side, you know, I suspect we could have even greater market share because there isn't a, you know, an aggressive peer there that we're competing against. It is more of a greenfield opportunity, where most C-stores don't have a loyalty program, don't have online ordering, and so we are the first product they're ever buying.
Maybe we should get to it, the AI topic. Recently, you launched PAR Intelligence, your AI platform, if that's the right way to phrase it. Could you talk a little bit about the product?
Yeah.
From a timing standpoint, when do you see that adoption phase, and how are you gonna be able to monetize it over time?
You know, what's great about AI in restaurants and retail stores is you can actually understand it. It's very practical because, you know, my job and our team's job is to go to a restaurant CEO, CIO or CFO or CMO and say, "Hey, here's what this can do for you," and not just kind of tell them, you know, a bunch of words they can't understand. Our products are very practical and I think add, you know, pretty immediate ROI. We have two products in market today. One is in our digital side called the marketing and loyalty side, where we will allow our people that buy our loyalty products to have a ChatGPT-like interface.
Give me the report on X, Y, and Z, which historically was a lot of work for somebody else to do. What it can also do now is say, "Hey, I want to run a campaign to attract all my fallen angels," meaning people who used to be loyal, they're no longer loyal. Can you figure out how to target them? What to segment them? What to offer them? Should I do SMS, mobile text? Just imagine how much work that is for someone to figure out how to do that. Now your AI can do that for you. Right? That's sort of the second phase.
One phase is reporting, second phase is segmentation, building the campaign, and then the third part, which we call actions, is actually this ability to say, "Hey, Mayank, do you know that you have all these fallen angels? Do you know that you could do this, and this? Do you want us to go do this for you?" You just press a button and it does it all, right? That's sort of the third phase. We think that third phase is very monetizable, and we're building towards that. You know, I think we're in a freemium mode today where we're getting it in the hands of our customers, getting a ton of data, making sure we remove hallucinations and pushing that forward.
In our retail business, as an example, we've got 1,700 customers already using it across three brands, and we are getting incredible amounts of data there. It's really unlocking tremendous insights. I put a quote in from one of our customers already saying, you know, the outcomes we can drive already are impactful. You know, as an example, our AI can go say, "Hey, do you know you still have these marketing dollars left over from Altria, like, that are gonna expire?" That is immediate ROI because that would've just gone out the door. That's sort of our first product is like how to pick on the digital side.
On the operations side, we've launched a product called Coach AI, which is giving you again that sort of chat interface about your reporting. It's telling me, "Tell me what store is most profitable, tell me where I should spend my time, tell me how this is going." It's a back and forth kind of exchange. We've now moved into version two that just is coming out, I think the next two weeks here, that is again predictive, saying, "Hey, there's a snowstorm next week. You know, do you wanna change up the labor schedule? You know, do you wanna add more hot chocolate to the inventory?" Or say, "Hey, for the last six weeks, we've ordered tomatoes like this much.
Maybe we should cut down that order because of X, Y, and Z. Then in the third step, I call it like autopilot, but it's really about press this button for us to constantly just optimize the inventory, the labor, so on and so forth. We think, again, that's the part we can monetize. We have an aggressive target of getting our products into 50,000 stores this year, and that will create a nice roadmap for us to monetize in 2027 and 2028. We'll start monetizing this year. We're absolutely gonna charge. We've made an acquisition of some assets called Bridg. That is a core part of our ability to charge. We will have revenue this year from these products.
I think it'll prove, one, that our core base is not, yet, you know, I don't think we'll be disrupted by AI, but in fact we'll be actual enhanced, incremental revenue from these new products. I should mention that, you know, when I say we're gonna get our product in the hands of 50,000 customers, that is a super hard target because if we're selling SMB software and you were just a random coffee restaurant, you could wake up tomorrow and say, "Oh, there's PAR AI in my dashboard. I didn't have to" You know. When you're selling to like a gigantic chain, they have to approve it, they gotta test it, they gotta okay it. It is an aggressive goal, but we think we can, we can get there.
Very helpful. I mean, on that note, you know, in terms of the impact of PAR Intelligence, does it in any way cannibalize your existing business? If so, how do you account for that?
It doesn't. It's all incremental. We get excited about that aspect. You know, the way that I sort of think about software as a category is that, you know, I think there are gonna be, you know, three large buckets of what happens. There are companies that are truly disrupted, companies that AI truly replaces the need for that product anymore. Those are the companies that should be trading at very low multiples because it just doesn't make sense. They were built in a world where, you know, you needed someone to build a website for you, but now we all can do that ourselves. I think there's a second bucket of software that is using AI to fortify an existing business. What does that mean?
It means you're the payroll software that probably can be vibe coded, but at the same time, AI's probably not a revenue accelerator for you, but you can use it to make it stickier. Those businesses, I think, used to trade at, call it a SaaS median number, will probably trade below that because AI may not be a growth factor, but over time you have less seats as, you know, you're selling a per seat license. There's less seats in like our workforce, you're probably just trying to fortify what you have. I think there's this third bucket that's actually the winners, which are the ones that have a core workflow product that you can't get rid of through AI, but also can add a new revenue stream or multiple revenue streams of AI.
That's the bucket I think we're in right now. We do this interesting analysis where we look at all of our product and say, "What is actually at risk for AI?" Today we see a very small portion of that, and that's the portion that we're gonna bundle into our core product so that it's not disrupted. The majority of what we see is stuff that's actually getting stickier, not less sticky. I think we'll actually be able to create multiple incremental revenue streams, which hopefully will create a rerating for the stock. For us, the bet on PAR is that we are in that third bucket, and we feel, you know, at the moment the customer feedback would suggest we're definitely in that bucket, but we have to execute and prove we can sell the stuff.
Very helpful again. Maybe turning to the numbers. When I think about the ARR expectations, I think you've talked about mid-teens growth for fiscal 2026 with some acceleration in the back half, and we'll get into some of the pieces of that. Have you accounted for any impact from the PAR Intelligence adoption and,
Very little.
monetization?
For us, it's upside. You know, our guidance is generally conservative in the sense that we don't assume we need to win some gigantic deals to get there. We're not assuming we need, you know, to commercialize these products in some aggressive way. We feel that provides some incremental upside for us.
One more question on the AI, on the growth side. Are the clients coming to you? Are customers actually coming to PAR and saying, "Okay, we need to be able to embrace AI"? Or is it more the push coming from your side where you said, "Okay, this is how we enhance our product and make our moat even wider over time"?
I'd say it's a bit of both. You know, there are definitely customers that are saying, "Listen, my CEO or Board is telling me I gotta do AI. Like, how?" You know, there's a lot of that, those conversations and those are actually the worst conversations because those are somebody trying to whitewash something to a board or to a CEO and those are the ones you've gotta like actually convince there's ROI. The better ones are where you can go in there and say, "Let me just show you a demo." I know I've done this myself now on numerous customers where I'm like, "Hey, just give me 10 minutes, Mr. CEO or Mrs. CFO or whatever.
Let me just pull up this thing real fast and show you in a call. You know, it's almost a 100% rate, which is like, "Wow, I didn't even know that was possible. You know, let's go see that person. Again, because we're doing this more freemium model, well, let's just put it in your stores and we'll see what happens. You know, I said in the call, like the retail one is a great experience, you know, very similar to what we do in restaurants, but, you know, when you can, when you can show ROI like on the phone with real data, it's very hard for them to say no. That's kind of been more of our pitch.
There's been more of a push from us, I think. There's no doubt that will flip this year because as these case studies get out of the ROI we're generating, you can't sit still. If your peer is doing it, you can't. Well, I'll give you an example. Last year we had a retail forum, which is our, you know, when we sell loyalty software to convenience retailers. You have like, you know, Chevron and Marathon, all the big oil companies like kind of there. You know, that's not a community that's had to like adapt to innovation, you know, because they've got, you know, products that we all need in some, you know, dominant fashion.
You know, I remember my the pitch that I used that worked on them was pretty simple, which was like, "Listen, I get it. You got the gas station there. They got the gas station there. If the gas station on the, like across the street from you leverages AI, where they can remove an employee, manage their inventory better, manage their labor schedules better, understand how to price better, leveraging AI, they can actually lower the cost of the goods they're selling. They're by taking share from you." You're gonna be forced to do it whether you like it or not, because you just need one competitor to do it. I think that's the same for restaurants. It will drive a lot more adoption this year or drive a pull this year.
Super helpful. Thank you for all that color. I asked you this question on the call, I'll just ask you again just so that everyone can hear your response. When you think about the ARR growth expectations, could you just unpack that in terms of how much of that comes from existing rollouts? How much do you have to go out and actually win-
Yeah.
ARPU versus location growth, all the underlying factors driving the ARR potential acceleration.
You know, we guided to the teens, and, you know, I think for us, you know, we think we've probably got 70%-75% of that, you know, book, meaning we have to just install what we've signed. For us to, you know, get to our guidance, we're in a really comfortable position because we have the rest of the year to go book and take live. What I think is important is, you know, as you've seen over time, usually our bookings are most heavy in the second half of the year. We've been able to front-load a lot of that this year, which gives us a lot of visibility into what we've had to do.
The driver of that is predominantly new stores and new logos, that is because, almost, you know, 80%- 90% of our deals the last three quarters have been multi-product deals, meaning the ARPU per deal has gone way up. That is kind of, you know, allowing the new revenue to come on to be a big portion of the growth. While we are gonna sell more and more back into the base and upsell the base, it's these new deals that have come on that has just had much higher ARPU that are driving the growth.
On that note, could you just update us on how the BK rollout is going? Also your expectations on the potential rollout of Papa John's, which was the other big win?
Yeah.
This year.
Burger King's gone fantastic. I mentioned on the call, you know, we think, you know, from, at the end of Q1 going forward, we think there's another 3,000 +, we have a pathway of 3,000+ sites, so we'll be, you know, pretty much done by the end of this year if things continue as the way we're going. It's gone incredibly well. I think the, the organization at BK is really, really happy with our performance, really supportive, continues to be our best reference customer. I think they are, you know, I think every that organization from the CEO down would say we're probably one of the best partners they've ever had. We kinda show up when things are tough, we show up when things are great.
You know, I'm incredibly happy with the way we're pushing there and, you know, fingers crossed that that continues, and we've got really good visibility. Papa John's, we are, you know, contracted to start at the, you know, very end of this year. We'll start the rollout with the rollout finishing all in 2027. That gives us a nice visibility into a big chunk of revenue in new revenue in 27 as well.
Got it. I think you've also mentioned on the call or in recent comments that you have, potentially three, tier 1 RFPs that you're in the mix on, and then I think there's maybe more as well.
Yeah.
Any updates on, like, where you stand with those RFPs and, you know, what does the pipeline look like?
Sure.
Potential to convertible?
I can't comment on anyone specifically, but, you know, I would say, you know, we hope to hear for a couple of them second half of this year. You know, there's one very, very large one that, you know, we'll hear when we hear, but we continue to see that the signs continue to look more positive than negative for us, and so that's kind of exciting. We look at, you know, some of the, you know, you looked at things like who are they hiring, what are the stuff they're saying publicly, and that all kind of aligns to what we're hoping for. You know, in every large tier 1 deal, it's 50/50 until the end, and we will always feel that way.
Although, you know, again, I think we're greater than 50 on our largest one. You know, these are large organizations that are complex, but we feel really good where we are. The pipeline today is probably the most interesting thing that I've seen. In this market of the last 18 months of restaurants having kind of call it choppy waters, you know, the pipeline continues to get better and better and better and better and better. I think that speaks to your first question of, you know, the buying demand environment. You know, our pipeline today is bigger than it was at when we reported last, and, you know, it's sort of been literally linear, which is fun to see. We feel very good about where the pipeline is today.
It is a really diverse pipeline. You know, it's balanced between both sides of the house and obviously, we have these larger deals that would, you know, dramatically change that. We generally don't keep the large deals in pipeline just 'cause they're such outliers.
On these large RFPs, are you basically competing with the homegrown proprietary systems, or is it other third-party solutions that, you know, could potentially also maybe come up with a new product that would compete directly with you? How does that landscape look?
You know, 99 out of 100 times, it's you're competing against a third-party product. There are, you know, a handful of chains that are homegrown. You know, in our instance of, you know, the three or hopefully four brands we're going after, one will be homegrown, two, the other ones will be third-party systems. You know, the third-party platforms, the true only advantage that they have is price. You know, I think that's a losing card to play because in a world of AI, it's hard to go back to your CEO or board and say, "I picked the old crappy product 'cause it was 25% off.
You know, the question is really about, you know, were you able to innovate and adapt? I think that's really what they hold on to. I think that the legacy guys, their bases are strong, but they're, they are hard to protect because, you know, you know, it's like, I always joke like, you know, if we, if we dated for 10 years and took like a six months break, like we start dating again, I'm probably still the same guy I was, even though my Instagram makes me look cooler. That's kinda how it is in software too.
Like, you know, when you go to the RFP process for six months, the other side seems a lot cooler, but then you're like, "Wait, I literally worked with you for 10 years and kinda know what it's gonna be like." I think that, you know So in many ways, I don't think they can compete over time. Now, will it slow us down? Maybe. Historically, and not historically, what we're seeing is this continual movement of more tier 1s entering the pipeline, like, every single year, I think that is just the ROI that's being seen by others. On the homegrown solutions, you know, that's really exciting because those are, you know, so there's only a handful of them across the entire country. They are, you know, large, large organizations.
We are in a really strong position to be a partner for them to make that big leap of faith because it's a tough thing for them to do. They don't have the infrastructure to do it historically. They haven't done it. You're also probably, you know, they're probably having to offer a bunch of people's jobs because of that. I think that the narrative out of all those firms that do that is that the cost structure, the cost doesn't make sense. Even in a world of AI, it's hard for them to imagine why would you build point-of-sale software. It just doesn't make sense. Now you should be building all sorts of other software, stuff that touches your customers, stuff that touches your employees. Point-of-sale doesn't seem like something you wanna recreate the wheel.
Fair enough. From a competitive standpoint, obviously you mentioned Toast, or we talked about it earlier, and then there's other players. How are they faring when it comes to the enterprise space? Are you seeing them in RFPs, or are they still mainly focused on the SMB side of the market?
I mean, I think the world of Toast, I think in the enterprise space, you know, they'll probably win a deal or two a year kind of thing, I think it's still not their core competency. I think that seems very impressive. You know, where they have an advantage, I think, over the industry is on that full-service dining part of the world where that's where their product developed, it came from, and obviously. Now we're, you know, we're aggressively growing in that. Obviously, our win at Papa John's, our win at Pizza Factory, you know, we're starting to in many ways encroach upon their territory, I'd say, on the full-service dining side.
You know, the enterprise market is just so incredibly different and, you know, I would say this to the Toast, I just don't know if the ROI is there for them. You know, look at our little business after all these years of selling the enterprise and our enterprise revenues and point of sale, and, you know, we definitely have the highest win rate of anybody in the enterprise space. Like, what would that add to their market cap relative to the expense and the distraction of the core machine that's working? At some point, I think he's kinda like, you know, either they buy us or they get out of it 'cause just I don't see the ROI. Conversely, like, it's a great place for us to be 'cause it's all we do and I think our customers know that too.
In other words, the best advice to them is stay in your lane and let you guys.
No, I mean, I think the competition makes everybody better, but, in many ways, I think it also highlights the advantages that, you know, that we have and how it makes us more valuable, I think, over time.
Right. Fair. Savneet, what about international? You bought TASK about two years ago, how has the progress been? What is sort of the adoption curve internationally for enterprise, you know, restaurant tech?
We bought TASK, you know, we After the first six months, we built this awesome pipeline, then we got into this super large RFP with TASK in the United States for a very large global deal, which changed everything overnight because it's a very small team, we've, you know, reorganized efforts to be very focused on that one large opportunity. It's probably premature to answer the question. I think if we decided to put our hearts behind it, we would grow even way faster. The return to PAR of winning this potential large deal is so enormous, that that's the bet we've taken so far.
I know we have only a little bit of time left, let's turn to margins. You know, on the prior call, you had talked about AI efficiencies going back to the AI team. I think $15 million was the number that you'd shared in terms of cost benefits, you gave obviously very upbeat guidance on EBITDA and cash flow in the recent quarter. Maybe just talk about the, besides AI, the various levers that you have to drive the EBITDA margin expansion and how sustainable that is over time.
Sure. Let me first say that AI, I mean, AI is definitely the biggest one we have. It's, you know, we've, we're very careful of, you know, putting cost-cutting in buckets, meaning what are we getting out of core restructuring? What are we actually just putting two things together and removing redundancies? What are we cutting out and saying, "Oh, there's probably AI there," versus what are we actually removing and putting an agent in place of a human? You know, today it's probably, you know, 50/50 in the sense of we've done consolidation of certain teams that has allowed us to rip out costs. You know, a good half of those savings have come from actually, AI replacing true cost. I think we will hopefully see more and more of that.
I think we are finally at a point truly where, you know, we just promoted someone to President of our growth in AI, and I think that person would tell you know, even with all the cost cuts we've made, we think there's a lot more and it's literally replacing bodies with agents. You know, I'll give you a couple examples I think are interesting.
You know, our audit function, you know, we had a team, you know, we have a team there, but, you know, we literally realized that, you know, an AI agent can be that first level of internal audit because they're actually better than a human could ever be at audit, and you still have a human reviewing at the end, so you still have to go through, you know, you have to double check some documents. Like, wow, that was like, that was a pretty meaningful six-figure savings in just that one agent. You know, and so we've, you know, found a bunch of examples like that where we can, you know, project management, man, AI is a lot more efficient. Obviously support is where everybody else is getting it.
Where we're getting the most savings is out of our G&A costs. That's been kind of helpful. You'll see the biggest cost cuts with us in G&A.
Going back to the EBITDA growth, or expansion that you talked about this year in terms of margins, you know, how sustainable that is as you look ahead. Maybe that begs the question, like, what does the long-term model look like for PAR? Is it, you know, is it a double-digit ARR grower long term with higher profitability, like where would you sort of put the long-term model at if you could, you know, I don't know if you could share that.
I think we're also, I think this is just the beginning of a rapid, you know, expansion of margin. You know, we guided for $44 million-$47 million EBITDA for this year. I think we'll, you know, there's lots of opportunities for us to go well beyond that. I think in 2027, you know, we'll continue a really rapid march upward in EBITDA. I think, you know, and that's all just through operating margin. It's not, you know, anything funky like that. It's just through operating margin. We've kind of proven for, you know, two and a half years, we barely changed our OpEx, and now we're actually lowering our OpEx base quarter after quarter after quarter.
I think that we're just the beginning of what the margins could be. You know, what that means for the long run, you know, I used to always say, you know, enterprise software companies that get to scale with our ACV average are usually, you know, mid-20s to low 30s of operating margin. I see no reason why we can't be there or more over time. As a company, we are obsessively focused on being Rule of 40. We also, you know, still believe that, you know, you get way more credit for being a growth business than-
Right
than a cash flow engine. We're gonna continue to make those growth investments. I think, you know, by the end of this year, you'll know, you know, are we gonna be a 10% grower and 30% margin, or are we gonna be 15% and 25% or 20% and 20%? I feel super excited because I think, like I said, we feel very convicted that all the information we get from our customers today, they're gonna be buying more products from us in this AI world than less. If that's the case, then it makes sense for us to continue to make those investments.
Savneet, just to close out, we have a little bit of time left on the recent convertible. Could you just talk about the rationale for doing the convertible?
Yes. Yes. Thank you for asking that.
The valuations that you did, and just from a capital allocation standpoint, like where do you stand?
Yeah, it's a great question, one we should have, you know, touched on in our, on our call, actually. I think, we ran into a, you know, candidly a challenging situation in that, we had converts, we had converts that were due in 2027 that become current in 2026. You know, I think our plan had been, you know, let's go deal with them before they come current, because once they become current, you have to add going concern language to your financials, which makes refinancing more challenging, and you kind of got a little bit of a gun to your head from your, from your large convertible holders.
The challenge we ran into is that our stock, you know, candidly with no news, started to, you know, really come downward, putting a lot of pressure on all of our debt ratios. We kind of got to this tough situation, which is we could have done the refinancing that we did, or we could have rolled the dice and waited, well, see what the stock would've done after Q1, and then done it after Q1. You know, that's a pretty, you know, tough thing to decide, you know, one or the other. We took the path that we thought was the most responsible for shareholders, which is let's remove the financing risk of the company.
Let's not have that overhang because, you know, I could envision a scenario where even, you know, even though we had obviously we had an awesome Q1 and we had better guidance than people expected, but I also see the overhang being, well, you know, how are you gonna deal with these converts coming up?
Right.
I think we did the smart thing and we pushed out our converts, you know, where there's no liquidity risk of the company. We are now a really strong, we're gonna be a very strong cash flow engine. As I said to our shareholders, a convertible is only diluted if you let it convert or you refinance to a convertible. If we, you know, hit the EBITDA numbers I expect, I think there are lots of ways for us not to take on that dilution. We'll come back and look at this as a really good tool for us to have removed the overhang of liquidity challenges or potential fears, I don't think we ever had challenges, and take advantage of the hopefully low stock price.
Sort of during this time, you've talked about doing buybacks, and also do you still have some of the maybe flexibility to do M&A if you have opportunities?
I don't think we'll do any M&A with our stock price where it is. I think it's, you know, I've never said this before, I just think it doesn't even in a world of AI and someone who's it just doesn't make any sense to me. I just hate giving a share to anybody, you know, unless it's dramatic value. The one thing we did was this [assets as company] Bridg, which, you know, we truly believe is going to be the foundation of our AI platform on the digital side. We're gonna It'll be I think, wildly accretive. I always said wildly accretive in 2027, I think there's a decent chance it's super accretive even in 2026.
That fast, I think we'll see the change. It's going to be very hard for us to like pry any shares out of us for an acquisition right now unless we saw something, you know, super small but had super high upside, but I just don't think that's going to happen. I don't think so.
You still have the authorization to do buybacks.
Yes, we still have I think.
'26
$65 million of authorization left for another year and a half or so, or 20 months or so. I think, as, you know, Bryan, our CFO, mentioned the call, you know, we expect to generate cash flow, significant cash flow the next three quarters. That's the tool for us to create value for shareholders.
Perfect. I think we have a few minutes left. Any questions from the audience before we wrap up? Excellent. I'm out of questions. Savneet, thank you so much.
Any time.
A pleasure hosting you. Yeah. Appreciate everyone.