Greetings, welcome to the UiPath Third Quarter Fiscal 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note that this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to our host, Kelsey Turcotte of Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.
Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today to review UiPath's Third Quarter Fiscal 2023 Financial Results, which we announced in our earnings press release issued after the close of the market today. On the call with me are Daniel Dines, UiPath's Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Rob Enslin, Co-Chief Executive Officer, and Ashim Gupta, Chief Financial Officer. Rob will start the discussion. Then turn the call over to Daniel. After that, Ashim will review our results and provide guidance. Then we will open the call for questions. Our earnings press release and financial supplemental material are posted on the UiPath Investor Relations website, ir.uipath.com. These materials include GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations. We will be discussing non-GAAP metrics on today's call. This afternoon's call includes forward-looking statements about our ability to drive growth and operational efficiency and our financial guidance for the fiscal fourth quarter 2023.
Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements due to many factors, and therefore, investors should not place undue reliance on these statements. For a discussion of the material risks and uncertainties could affect our actual results, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended January 31, 2022, and our other reports filed with the SEC, including our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the period ended October 31, 2022, to be filed with the SEC. Forward-looking statements made on this call reflect our views as of today. We undertake no obligation to update them. I would like to highlight that this webcast is being accompanied by slides. We will post the slides and a copy of our prepared comments to our investor relations website immediately following the conclusion of this call.
As a reminder, we price in local currencies and have experienced a significant foreign exchange headwind as we have progressed through the fiscal year. Now I'd like to hand the call over to Rob.
Thank you, Kelsey, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We are pleased with third quarter results, which delivered both top-line growth and margin expansion. ARR was $1.110 billion, driven by net new ARR of $67 million. Excluding the FX headwind of $22 million, total ARR grew 38% year-over-year. Revenue was $263 million. Excluding the FX headwind of $22 million, revenue grew 29% year-over-year. non-GAAP operating income was $18 million, a third quarter record, reflecting our focus on disciplined capital allocation and cost management. During the quarter, we added new logos like Petco, Nautilus, and Wisconsin Energy, and saw particular strength in our healthcare and telecommunications verticals. A great new logo in the quarter was Orica, one of the world's leading mining and infrastructure solution providers.
In a competitive win over 2 standalone vendors, one in enterprise automation and one in test automation, and working with Accenture as an advisor, Orica selected UiPath because of our ability to deliver both enterprise and test automation in one platform. With C-suite sponsorship, Orica is planning to migrate and scale the existing enterprise automation program with UiPath and utilize Test Suite to enable successful upgrades of their SAP S/4HANA. Third quarter is also the federal year-end, and under new leadership, we are very pleased to report that we delivered a strong quarter in that vertical, including expansions with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Customers appreciate both the quantifiable and intangible business outcomes that our automation platform can deliver, including business risk reduction, improved customer and employee experience, profitable growth, and the ability to more effectively allocate resources.
These are outcomes that resonate across lines of business and up to the C-suite. For example, one of North America's largest third-party logistics firms, Total Quality Logistics, is using Document Understanding, software robots, and Task Mining across the organization. In just two years, automation has delivered both strong ROI and helped them grow, including driving revenue in a new line of business without adding headcount. Going forward, Total Quality Logistics also plans to implement Process Mining to identify macro processes that can benefit from automation. It has been a busy few months for the team, and we're executing well across all the key strategic initiatives that we laid out at our Investor Day. These include extending our market leadership with our largest platform release, 2022.10, which Daniel will talk about in more detail.
Driving platform adoption with our market-leading capabilities in every stage of the automation lifecycle. Making significant progress up-leveling our go-to-market model, which I will talk about in more detail next. Announcing some great technical and go-to-market partnerships. Lastly, to build out our world-class team with the addition of Lee Hawksley, who will lead our APAC go-to-market team. Now, I would like to take a few minutes to update you on the progress we've made on our go-to-market initiatives. All of this work is designed to enable our teams to sell higher into organizations, define business outcomes that resonate with C-level executives, and accelerate customer time to value. To make sure we're on the right track, we tested many of these new approaches in our North American market, and we're very pleased to see they played an important role in several notable third quarter wins.
Next step is the formal rollout across the geos, much of which we started at the beginning of the fourth quarter when we launched new packaging and pricing designed to simplify our go-to-market motion. This approach brings together the solutions necessary to more quickly realize the advantages of broader platform adoption in one line item SKU. We also expect this pricing model to reduce friction in the purchasing process. We formally introduced Northstar, our new value-based selling tool. This prescriptive and predictive model helps our sales reps position the value of automation to customers through an engagement framework that defines economic value, the execution roadmap, and best practices. It is a great tool to clearly position the differentiated long-term benefits of automation delivered through our platform of capabilities.
We're also leveraging our extensive industry insights aligned sales teams around verticals like Financial Services, Healthcare, and TMT, where we've had good success to date and identified considerable white space to continue to grow in both new and existing customers. The focus helped us close a 3rd quarter expansion deal in the Financial Services vertical with Bank of New York Mellon, Pershing, a UiPath customer since 2020. Through their implementation of UiPath, the automation program scaled quickly, improving both efficiency and risk mitigation across the firm, as well as the client experience by leveraging UiPath's software robots to process transactions more consistently. As a result of these positive outcomes, Bank of New York Mellon is now rapidly expanding to the full platform across the organization.
To give customers in these verticals even more tools for success, we are piloting our first solution accelerator to provide them a starting point for their automation journey. We are excited about solution accelerators and believe they will provide our customers with the technical know-how to help them complete the implementation significantly faster. With customer success always in mind, we continue to deepen our relationships with global GSIs and automation experts. At Forward IV, we announced our expanded partnership with EY, also one of the largest UiPath customers, that puts the partnership on par and at scale with their largest ecosystem partners. The strengthening of this global alliance is a testament to the trust we've developed and a belief in the massive growth potential that UiPath Automation Platform presents for global organizations. We also continue to expand our technical ecosystem.
During the quarter, we announced several strategic partnerships with major technology providers, including Microsoft, which named UiPath as their preferred enterprise automation partner. While we announced Microsoft Azure as a preferred cloud platform for UiPath. We plan to continue to collaborate and innovate together to bring automation solutions powered by Microsoft Azure to market. OutSystems to combine the power of the UiPath Business Automation Platform with OutSystems high-performance low code. Together, we expect to enable customers to securely and intelligently automate core processes and applications. One of the best proof points of our execution is the growth of our larger customer cohorts. This quarter, we are very pleased that our cohort of customers over $100,000 in ARR increased to 1,711, including customers over $1 million of 201.
For these customers, automation isn't just a tool they can use to reduce or eliminate tedious work. It is part of their strategy, growth plans and operating model. I feel good about where we are in our journey to take this company beyond $1 billion. We have the market leading automation technology and platform, the right leaders putting the right go-to market structure in place, and we are making the disciplined decisions that allow us to drive growth, increase productivity, and expand operating margin. We are already seeing the positive impact of our work as we head into the fourth quarter, and the team is focused on a strong close. I'll turn the call over to Daniel to talk about 2022.10 platform release and our newest innovation. Daniel?
Thank you, Rob. Good afternoon, everyone. Before I get started, I'd like to thank the UiPath team for their hard work and commitment to our customers and partners who recognize and appreciate your dedication to their success. In fact, one of the things I enjoy most about my role at UiPath is spending time with customers to understand where they are in their digital transformation journey and talk to them about the role automation can play in that evolution. Given today's unpredictable operating environment and tightening budgets, automation is a powerful engine that directly addresses these challenges and changes the way organizations of all sizes operate and innovate. We had great platform expansions in the quarter, such as ManpowerGroup, a UiPath customer for four years, and successfully deploying automations in their finance department.
They expanded to use our full platform in the quarter as they look to scale their automation program internally and deliver workforce solutions to their clients. Ultimately, platforms win because integrated technology is easier to manage and drive faster time to value. With market-leading capabilities in every stage of the automation life cycle, our platform outcomes resonate with the C-suite, another huge competitive advantage for us. A great example of platform adoption is the deal we closed with HCA Healthcare, one of the nation's leading healthcare providers. HCA has been a UiPath customer for two years with numerous software automations in production. In the quarter, they expanded our partnership by adopting the entire UiPath platform in a multi-year agreement. Coming out of our Forward IV user conference and our most important platform release this fall, 2022.10. Momentum is building across the business.
This release allows customers to automate more, faster, and with less friction, expand user, and build their bases, and operate it all more efficiently and effectively. This recent platform release includes a preview of Studio Web, the latest member of our Studio family, which completes our cloud offering, further reduces the friction in ramping citizen developers, and provides a cross-platform developer experience. 2022.10 also delivers the ability to build public-facing applications with UiPath's apps, enhance capabilities in Process Mining and Task Mining, and platform intelligence to help our software robots understand both structured data with Document Understanding and unstructured data with the acquisition of Re:infer. There is a massive amount of value to be captured by automating processes involving unstructured data. During the quarter, several customers added Re:infer, which we recently acquired and have renamed Communications Mining to their automation program.
This includes a leading U.K. fund administrator, an UiPath customer since 2019 that is planning to leverage Re:infer to drive efficiencies and improve customer experiences by automating tickets in their case management system for their HR, payroll, accounting, and tax departments. 2022.10 also delivered enhanced capabilities for both Automation Suite and Automation Cloud, both of which help drive triple-digit year-over-year growth in cloud ARR. One of our core tenets, its flexibility of deployment to meet the customer wherever they are on their automation journey. This constant focus on innovation has won us recognition by thought leaders and industry analysts. We are proud of the recent reports from Everest Group and ISG.
According to Everest Group's Robotic Process Automation Products PEAK Matrix Assessment 2022, we were named an RPA leader for the sixth consecutive year and star performer in the technology provider landscape. ISG named UiPath a leader in their latest application development research focused on low-code, no-code software companies. This recognition reflects our commitment to category leadership and innovation across the platform. I am proud of what we accomplished in the third quarter and excited about the massive opportunity ahead.
The need for automation is greater than ever before. I believe UiPath will continue to play a leading role in helping organizations not only thrive, but increase their competitive advantage. With that, I will turn it over to Ashim.
Thank you, Daniel. Good afternoon, everyone. Unless otherwise indicated, I will be discussing results on a non-GAAP basis, and all growth rates are year-over-year. I also wanna note that FX was a significant headwind to our results again this quarter. I'll start by running through our third quarter and then provide fourth quarter guidance. Third quarter ARR totaled $1.110 billion, driven by net new ARR of $67 million. Because we sell in local currency, foreign currency fluctuations do not impact demand for our product but do impact the translation of our results. On a year-over-year basis, FX was an approximately $10 million headwind to net new ARR. For total ARR, FX was an approximately $22 million headwind. Excluding FX, total ARR grew 38%. We now serve approximately 10,650 customers.
As we shared at Investor Day, we are positioning the company to land and grow customers with a high propensity to invest in automation, while distributors will serve the lower end of the market. Moving on. Our dollar-based net retention rate was 126%. Normalizing for FX and excluding the impact of Russian sanctions, our dollar-based net retention rate was 130%. Americas continues to show strength as our dollar-based net retention rate outperformed relative to the rest of the world. Dollar-based gross retention of 98% continues to be best in class, underscoring the transformational business outcomes that customers achieve with our platform. Revenue grew to $263 million. Normalizing for the year-over-year FX headwind of approximately $22 million, revenue grew 29% year-over-year. Remaining performance obligations increased to $759 million.
Normalizing for the year-over-year FX headwind of approximately $50 million, RPO grew 40% year-over-year. Current RPO increased to $441 million. Total gross margin was 86%, reflecting ongoing investments in support and cloud infrastructure as we scale that business. Software gross margin was 92%. Third quarter operating expenses were $209 million. We continue to focus on operational efficiency, including our restructuring actions, hiring freeze, and tighter control of discretionary spend. GAAP operating loss of $67 million included $81 million of stock-based compensation expense. Non-GAAP operating income was $18 million, our strongest third quarter non-GAAP operating margin to date. Third quarter non-GAAP adjusted free cash flow was negative $24 million, reflecting timing of collections and prepaid vendor contracts that allow us to lock in favorable terms for UiPath in an inflationary environment.
We have a very strong balance sheet, which is an important asset in the current operating environment, with $1.7 billion in cash equivalents, and marketable securities, and no debt. Let me turn to guidance. We guide what we see in the pipeline and assume that the current choppy macro environment and pressure from foreign exchange continue. Turning to the numbers. First, for fiscal fourth quarter 2023, we expect ARR in the range of $1.174 billion-$1.176 billion. This is an increase from prior guidance of $1.153 billion-$1.158 billion. We expect revenue in the range of $277 million-$279 million. We expect non-GAAP operating income to be approximately $35 million.
We expect fourth quarter basic share count to be approximately 554 million shares outstanding. Finally, we will guide to first quarter and full year fiscal 2024 when we announce our fourth quarter results. I wanna highlight that we expect typical enterprise seasonality from the fourth quarter to first quarter in both net new ARR and revenue results. We delivered a solid third quarter as our durable financial model and strong balance sheet gives us the resources to invest in long-term growth and drive sustainable profitability, both of which are core to our go-forward strategy. The team is focused on delivering meaningful outcomes for our customers, and we look forward to a strong close to fiscal year 2023.
Finally, I would like to wish our employees and all of you a healthy and happy holiday season, and we look forward to speaking with many of you in the coming weeks. With that, I will turn the call over to the operator. Operator, please poll for questions.
Thank you. At this time, we will conduct a question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. To ask a question, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from Phil Winslow with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question, and I appreciate the color, particularly on the go-to-market changes, which is really where I wanna focus my question. You know, Rob, you know, obviously you made some changes when you joined, and wondering if you could walk us through just sort of your thoughts on, call it, you know, productivity versus just capacity in the sales force. How do you kinda think with these changes you're making sort of productivity should start to inflect? Similarly, how do you feel about just sort of the capacity of the go-to-market push right now? Just one follow-up.
Thanks, Phil. We feel good about the capacity we got. It aligns with the strategy we outlined at Investor Day, and we're starting to see real proof points around our strategy and how we're delivering that. The team is actually focused on really good delivery. If you look at, like, what I would say is one of the best proof points of our execution is the growth of our customer cohorts. When you look at $100,000 in ARR, we've increased that to 1,711. When you look at customers over 1 million now, it's up to 201. We feel good about the go-to-market, the segmentation, and our execution and how far we've come in a relatively short period of time.
Great. Daniel, you highlighted, you know, just efficiency and the need to drive productivity as a catalyst for automation for companies. Obviously, you know, the dollar-based net retention, you know, continues to remain strong, and it feels like that's resonating with existing customers that already have proof points of success. When you go to new customers that are maybe are just starting their automation journey, you know, what makes sort of the light bulb go off of sort of why automation, why RPA into your full hyper-automation suite is something they should lean into from a productivity standpoint?
I think, this is, this is kind of the same motivation as for existing customers. They drive, you know, costs down, they improve, employees' productivity, they improve, also customer satisfaction. We are seeing meaningful new customers, that, are getting into automation by buying the entire platform. I can, for instance, in the case of, Orica that, I think Rob mentioned, the power of our testing was instrumental into driving the adoption of the entire platform. It was the competitive takeout of two of our competitors. I would say that the benefit of, automation is, even more relevant in this environment for the new customers.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Brad Sills with Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead.
Oh, great. Thanks so much. It's great to see some of the early success with the changes in go-to-market. Maybe on that topic, please, Rob, if you could expand a little bit on where you've seen some success. I know it's early, but, you know, with some of these verticals you called out, some of these solution accelerators, are there any ones in particular you'd call out? Are there any learnings from your success in those areas that you might be able to apply more broadly?
Yeah, Brad. you know, some of it's anecdotal, because we, you know, we're very early into actually the numbers. I think, first of all, I think the proof points around HCA, Bank of New York Mellon and Orica are proof points of the Northstar approach that we the value selling around Northstar and then driving significant value, and the speed to value, is showing progress. We also have seen our solution packages. We started to launch them. Significant interest. We don't have actually clear KPIs, but we're seeing significant interest. I think our sales organization has more tools in the bag to deal with the environment we're operating in, and they're doing really well around that. We see significant progress, obviously continue to see significant progress in the United States around that.
You know, we're starting to see with the team in Europe, that's having benefit as well. Look, I mean, Orica is a world-class leading energy company based out of Singapore, operating globally, and it shows that, you know, we're starting to see progress with our strategy globally as well.
Wonderful. Thanks. Then one for you, Ashim, if I may, please, on just the outlook that you provided at the Analyst Day for next year, ARR growth exiting the year at 20%. It's down quite a bit. I mean, this quarter you're at 38% constant currency. You're guiding to 27%, maybe 29% constant currency for Q4. A pretty big deceleration. Are you assuming a worsening macro in that outlook? Or if you could just remind us what are you assuming in that number? Thank you.
Yeah. Brad, like we discussed at Investor Day, the anchor points that we provided for next year, you know, assumes the current macro environment that we've all, you know, that we've been talking about and as well as the FX or the foreign exchange environment that we've also been seeing. We really see this as consistent from forward in our Investor Day till now. We'll provide more, you know, more of an update as we get into next year and report fourth quarter earnings.
Our next question comes from Mark Murphy with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and congrats on the great margin progress. Ashim, I don't think you actually spent quite as much time on talking about macro issues tonight. I'm wondering if it would be logical to think that this period of Q3 and Q4 could represent the trough for the net new ARR. What I mean is if it's declining here in this 25%-40% range, and then maybe there'd be an opportunity to kind of improve on that as you get farther into the repositioning and the repackaging and, you know, the go-to-market changes in the first half of next year. As a general framework, is that a fair way to be thinking about the trending of the business? I have a quick follow-up.
Yeah, Mark, it's very consistent with what we've talked at Investor Day and Analyst Day. You know, we look at the environment as consistent. We probably have talked less about it just in terms of, you know, the environment between Europe, APAC and Americas, we feel relatively, you know, the same environment as we talked about just a few months ago.
In terms of our commitment to, you know, executing on the strategy that we laid out at Investor Day, we are all committed and actually excited about the progress that we're making around segmentation, solutioning, focus, identifying high propensity customers. All of those factors in our mind, you know, we feel are gonna yield positive results, and that's what we're executing to. You know, I would remind everybody just, you know, we're gonna see typical seasonality as we get into next year between, you know, first quarter we mentioned in the script, but also first half, second half. Overall, we're pleased with the execution of the strategy, and we're executing that strategy because we believe it will yield positive results.
Okay, understood. Maybe as a quick follow-up for Rob and Daniel. Could you touch a little on the expanded Microsoft Azure relationship? I believe Microsoft said that UiPath is gonna be one of their largest partners that's built on Microsoft technology. I think they refer to it that way. What type of opportunity do you see with Microsoft, and is that something that's helping you win business out there incrementally at this point?
Thanks for the question. Let me start and then Rob might add more color to it. I feel that we made a good bet on basing on having our technology built on the top of Microsoft Azure cloud. That help us derive, you know, create a cloud offering that resonates with most of our customers. It really help us to reduce the sales, the sales cycle when it comes to the cloud. It reduce the sales cost, and it increase time to value to our customers. Microsoft has been really a good partner for us, both on the technology innovation and partnering on the go-to-market side. We are really looking as a positive development on this front. Rob?
I think that's good. Thanks, Mark.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays. Please state your question.
Thank you. Two quick questions. One on staying on partners, competitors, et cetera. Rob, you have spent obviously a lot of years at SAP. Like, how do we have to think about that SAP relationship? A lot of your business is in that SAP install base, helping on process, optimization, et cetera. SAP is making more noise about doing it themselves. Like, how is that relationship evolving? That's my first question. I have one follow-up for Ashim.
Yeah. Look, I mean, I, first of all, I would say you've got to look at our portfolio. Our portfolio, we're very strong in financials and healthcare, so we have a broad portfolio that we go after. It's not only the partnership with SAP that we're working on, and we have got a partnership. We, they utilize some of our technology. We obviously work closely with them, and we continue to work closely with them because we believe we have a mutual benefit in helping customers add value. Together with the customer base and the customer set they have, we think there's incredible value for our customers. That also includes other companies in that space as well. We continue to progress.
You know, key partnerships are clearly part of the strategy we laid out at Investor Day. We continue to evolve that every quarter.
Okay, perfect. Thank you. Ashim, obviously a lot of investors look at net new ARR added, and you had a really strong, $67 million this quarter. If I look at the implied number for Q4, it does seem different than what we saw Q4 last year. Could you just kind of speak a little bit if there are specific factors that might drive that? I remember, like, a couple of years ago, we had to change in the year-end, et cetera. Just anything that we should know about or remember about Q4. Thank you.
Yeah. In Q4, we have a more pronounced impact from foreign exchange. I think that's the first notable point. Raimo, the reason for that is a lot of our renewable base, which obviously, you know, will renew at a potentially lower FX rate, you know, at the current FX rate, I should say. You know, that has a $20 million impact year-over-year. When you look at what we've implicitly guided, you know, at around $66 million and you add 20 back for that takes you to $86 million. Then you take into account the macro, you know, the impact from the macro environment. You know, we've been consistent in our guidance philosophies in terms of guiding what we see in front of us.
That's kinda how you think about the components of the guide and the factor for why it's 66 right now.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Matthew Hedberg with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hey, this is Simran on for Matthew Hedberg. Thanks for taking our question. With the uncertainty you noted earlier about the current environment, has the tone of your customer conversations changed at all? Do you see more hesitancy with customers or are experiencing longer sales cycles?
Yes. you know, what we've been very clear about is we see a consistency between the quarters that we saw in Q2 into Q3. We believe that we are actually managing it really well right now.
Got it. Also earlier, you announced an additional reduction in your workforce. How are you thinking about the reallocation of those budgets towards greater efficiency and execution and customer strategy?
Yeah, good question. You know, the restructuring, that we announced. Two weeks ago, I think, you know, part of the strategic discussions we had at Investor Day and the rollout, that is a cross-functional restructuring that we have. It has very little impact or minimum impact on our quota carriers and our go-to-market. We continue to execute the go-to-market as we designed it around the strategic initiative.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Excellent. Thank you guys for taking the question. Ashim, on the operating margins, you guys really outperformed kinda what the original guide was there. Is that all coming from the headcount reductions, or is there more efficiency kind of improvements that are coming from other parts of the business? How should we think about that kind of the potential for further progression there, into FY 2024, perhaps?
Yeah. not, you know, the headcount reduction, just to answer directly, and then I'll walk you through the operating margin, Keith. The headcount reduction was announced on November 15th, so what we announced had very little no impact on our third quarter results. When you break down and you look at how the operating margin beat came together, the first is the top line. The team did a great job on executing in the environment, and so we outperformed the top line and of course that flows through, and, you know, falls through to the bottom line. The second is, while we know we were in a period of reorganization, we had a hiring freeze, you know, that we put in place.
We instilled a lot of operate- We- You know, in this environment, our entire employee base, I think, understands the environment, and we're operating with a lot of discipline. You, you just take those two factors in there, that's really explains the beat. In terms of the go forward, you know, I'd point you back to kinda our discussions at Investor Day and the anchor points that we provided. We're committed to margin expansion. We see a path to be able to grow durably and profitably, and we're gonna operate with discipline, but still execute a strategy for growth, that we've laid out together.
Got it. Then one follow-up, and I think this is probably for Rob. In terms of net new customer growth, it looked pretty weak in the quarter, like just overall net new customer growth at like 150. That's the lowest that we've seen since you guys have gone public. Even the customers over 100K, this was a relatively small increase versus what we've seen historically. Is this part and parcel of the distribution changes or more of a macro impact? How should we think about kind of the pace of the ability to sort of recover and accelerate that pace of net new customer adds on a go-forward basis?
You know, when you look at it, Keith, I mean, the majority of the churn is in the smaller customers. If you remember the chart that we showed at Investor Day shows that, you know, we have to move those customers from the, from the left to the right. We feel really confident that we actually that's actually happening and that we are getting more success or with more positive signs in the Forbes Global 2000, and that's gonna continue to be our focus, and that's how the segmentation is actually set up. We'll move more over time into the distribution side with the smaller customers. You should expect to see churning in the smaller customer markets.
Got it. Like this retention rate remains really strong, but the smaller customer that probably the customer retention rate is kind of we're seeing the impact of that on the net new customer adds.
Yes.
Got it. Excellent. Thanks so much, guys.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Kirk Materne with Evercore. Please state your question.
Hi, this is Chirag on for Kirk. Thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on the strong quarter. Just one question from me around the reception of the automation platform. How deep would you say you all are in terms of customer adoption of the overall end-to-end automation platform today within your existing customer base and largest customers when we're talking beyond core RPA use cases? How are you continuing to pursue the opportunity to go deeper?
Yeah.
Maybe if you could call out any specific areas, that are carrying more weight or seeing more demand. Thank you.
Obviously we feel very positive about the business platform, and what we can achieve with the business platform, and we see significant future positive signs in terms of the customer opportunity that we have in front of us, even with existing customers to expand. If you just look at the expansion, you can see with Bank of New York Mellon, AT&T, customers expanding to the full platform, and we see many, many more opportunities in that space. You know, it's clear that solution sets like Test will have the big impact, and it can be a significant driver. It's also clear that Document Understanding is a significant driver of the platform.
We believe with our Process Mining and Task Mining, as we described with Total Quality Logistics, that the broader platform is now starting to have an impact. It's pretty clear in our customer conversations that the platform is the way to go for automation. We feel really strong about where we're headed, how it's tied to our Northstar strategy, our selection of packages or doing packages and our platform pricing. Early days, but really confident about how we've laid it out and how we're starting to execute.
Yeah, this is great, Rob. I would like to add that if you look from an airplane perspective, our platform strategy, it allowed us to move from our traditional market of automating existing manual processes into going more to end-to-end processes. Automation. We are the only company that has a platform that covers the entire spectrum of automation from, you know, large business processes to manual repetitive processes, to even micro tests that people are doing as part of their daily job.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Bryan Bergin with Cowen. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Thank you. It's good to hear some of the early go-to-market initiatives here are having some success. I'm curious on that, how the land size on some of the new deals are comparing to before. I know it's early, but I think the company had talked about an average land size of 15,000-25,000 in the past. Can you just give us any sense on how we should be thinking about the average land size under this new approach, just as you cite some of these notable new third quarter deals?
We see progress on the land size. Bryan, it's, you know, as we see it slightly up as we, as we look at the numbers right now. You know, our focus as we move forward though, is just overall expansion. What we're really excited about is that we feel good we have a healthy pipeline. Customers are expanding. They're expanding into multiple elements of our platform in terms of the number of the LA's, et cetera. Both the land size we see slightly up, but we see progress in terms of customers wanting more of the platform that is very tied to our strategy in terms of driving further expansion and getting into the C-levels as we outlined at Investor Day.
A follow-up on free cash flow. I heard some of the opportunistic actions you took here in the third quarter. How should we be thinking about the 4 Q levels on free cash flow and just anything to be mindful there as you work through some of the restructuring actions?
We don't, we don't guide to free cash flow. Just, you know, to make that clear to start. At the same time, we've talked about being roughly cash flow neutral. When you look at the numbers, we expect to be able to you should expect to see that free cash flow be positive and move us closer to that neutrality. In terms of that, we're on track for those areas. You know, our free cash flow expansion, will be, you know, is the same as we move forward in terms of our commitment on profitability that we talked about earlier.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for taking my questions. Maybe the first question, it's a multi-parter, then I had a follow-up. Rob, for you, in terms of like earlier in the year when y'all were putting forth some of these initiatives to optimize the business and improve the execution. On the go-to-market side, I think there was the idea that there could be some disruption to go-to-market activities because of the things you're doing. Ultimately, have you seen about what you had planned for in terms of disruption to ARR or the business, or has it been less? Are you done with kind of like the right leadership team and the bench strength now? Then I had a follow-up.
You know, it's difficult to disaggregate that. What I feel really good about is, you know, how we looked at testing a lot of the initiatives in the U.S. and how they came through getting the right leadership really quickly in place in the U.S., and we've seen them execute. That's allowed us to actually move that to other parts of the world. It's pretty clear our European business is in very good shape now. Mark has done a good job with the leadership team, where they are actually stable. They've made all the changes necessary. Then bringing Lee on in Asia Pacific, we feel like that's gonna pay dividends as well.
We feel like we've got the framework and the formula now to actually enable the sales force to execute to the market that they face.
That's great to hear. I guess for Ashim, you had, I think, called out Automation Suite and Automation Cloud being up triple digits on an ARR perspective. Do you think I mean, I know it's still early days with those solutions, so maybe it's just small numbers, but can you continue to grow triple digits? What would be that per portion of ARR next year? Just trying to understand the size and scale. Thank you.
In terms of go-forward guidance on cloud, et cetera, remember, we really drive customer choice, for that in terms of allowing them to decide what is their deployment method. That being said, the team's executed well, and we see continued progress and excitement in the field and our customers around, you know, our cloud-first philosophy and the product releases that are coming out. In terms of just modeling, you know, I would say we're consistent with what we discussed at Investor Day, and previously. You know, in terms of modeling our go-forward cloud mix, we feel like we're in line with what we've discussed previously.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Scott Berg with Needham Please go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess I got a couple. We'll start with on the sales side. Ashim, you talked about deal sizes improving a little bit with the change in sales execution. You know, one of the things we see often from companies, from vendors in this environment is actually trying to sell a little bit smaller, especially when the ROI and value proposition is high and has really good expansion rates. Is that an angle that you have looked at to help maybe try to address a smaller pain point initially during this, you know, challenging macro, just to get your foot in the door and then use your natural strength to expand from there?
Yeah. You know, Scott, that is the natural sales process that existed at UiPath, and UiPath is really good at that, right? of acquiring, you know, smaller deals. That continues to show positive signs for us, and it's one of the levers that we said early on we would continue to invest in and we continue to invest in. We completely agree with you. That's something that we will continue to drive. We also mentioned that as we change the segmentation, we will start to use propensity and graduation, and then we're starting to see that take effect. That allows us to take You know, quick acquisition and start to focus on how do we expand it. That strategy is what, you know, that we're executing, and that'll drive the deal sizes up.
It's a combination of one, it's both. We believe that the way that automation can play in this market with the Northstar approach, we're well set to actually help customers also get some of the value returns for them at speed as well.
Got it. Very helpful. Kind of a follow-up around along the sales side there is, what are you hearing from customers in terms of automation and RPA on the priority list today? We continue to hear, you know, positive things about the technology, and obviously it's great for reducing costs in a, in macro such as this. Are you seeing any changes in terms of how customers kinda, you know, look at this priority today?
I think it's two ways to look at it. Definitely feel like customers understand now or getting to understand how automation can help them achieve the objectives in terms of efficiencies and actually expanding it into more in-customer experiences. You know, as Daniel described, we are really good at dealing with mundane tasks, standardizing tasks, seeing regulation, but we're also getting really good at implementing new business models that are really complex across the board, which is the broader aspect of automation. We are confident that there's a market, we're confident that the market is in front of us, and we really feel good that our strategy that we launched at Investor Day is aligned to where the market is headed.
Wonderful.
Thank you.
Thanks for taking my question.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Alex Zukin with Wolfe Research. Please state your question.
Hey, guys. This is Ryan on for Alex. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to go back to the vertical question from earlier. You know, you talked about a good win in FinServ. I think you talked positively about healthcare. I know those are two areas where you're prioritizing efforts, but any verticals that you would maybe call out that underperformed your expectations or surprised you from a land or expansion perspective?
Yeah. You know, I would say, we obviously saw financial services, healthcare, technology, media and telecom. I would also, you know, I didn't mention, and maybe I should have, I think it was in, you know, at the government, we feel like we've really done well with the government in different departments there, expanding. I would say for the most part, I can't say there's a laggard that stands out, but there's definitely industries where we've actually seen obviously stronger progress in this quarter. I don't know, Ashim, can you think of any? I honestly can't think of an industry that's a laggard right now.
No, I mean, we've talked about this, it's very ubiquitous, and I would even tag on to the previous question in terms of priorities. I mean, you meet with CFOs, our platform aligns perfectly with their priorities. Rob and I actually went to a joint customer, one of the leading construction companies in the U.S., and as five, six minutes going into the platform, we're sold. We just wanna now work on how do we implement this?
How fast can we do it? How fast can we move? How fast can we implement it? Can you show us the proof points fast?
Help us. I think, you know, that speaks to the priority, and it also speaks to how ubiquitous it is. Construction, as we were going through it, they themselves started rattling off use cases.
Great. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Frederick Havemeyer with Macquarie. Please state your question.
Hey, thank you. I wanted to ask about the solutions-based selling motion that was discussed back at Forward IV. I know it's relatively early days here, any thoughts or updates about this strategy, any sort of solution sets that are coming together based on perhaps some of your prior experience with professional services is particularly compelling? Do you have any early feedback on how customers are responding to this?
Yeah. I would say it's too early to go to give you a broad customer feedback on that. We launched one that's on the marketplace. One of our customers Bank of New York Mellon is basically gonna utilize the solution package in it to accelerate their journey. Then we have another four packages which actually are either launched or will be launched this month. It's continuing. It's certainly helping our sales organization position, and it's certainly helping the customers understand that the solution accelerators can help their speed in terms of implementation, getting started quickly and moving faster for them. We feel really good about it. Just too early to tell you the full feedback yet.
I mean, we're excited, to be quite honest. We're super excited internally about it, and if I could get 100 out tomorrow, I would.
Hey, thank you. I mean, I'm excited and looking forward to seeing what's gonna happen there. I also wanted to ask about the partnership with OutSystems as well, because there seems like a very natural alignment between what you're driving as an automation platform and what low, no-code companies are doing for their own, like, enterprise application development acceleration cycles. You know, can you perhaps expand upon a bit of that partnership there and what it is that you can perhaps accomplish with an enterprise application platform as a partner?
I think there are natural synergies between a low-code, no-code application platform and a low-code, no-code automation platform like we have. We've built our platform with a very open mindset. We have our own apps Platform that are automation centric, and they wanted to offer our customers the ability to build even more complex, like what you call Tier 1 type of applications. With our system, you can even build custom CRMs or healthcare medical records, ERP type of application, and they are tied very well into our automation platform. We offer, I think, a really end-to-end way of imagining new businesses, as Rob said very well.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Turits with KeyBanc. Please state your question.
Hey, guys. Just one question for Rob. Rob, where are we in terms of the focus on selling more to the end user versus selling to IT? To the extent that maybe in the past there was more selling to the end user, has that created any issue with shelfware or licenses that, you know, are being in the hands of end users that, you know, now there's perhaps more of a focus on the IT department?
Yeah, Michael, this is what I would say. You know, our, if you look at our focus in bringing out solution packages, platform pricing, and as Ashim just mentioned, you know, when we talk to a CFO, we're talking about the full end-to-end spectrum of how we help them in their business. So when I look at the concept of shelf-ware, for me, that's something that we focus on, and you'll see, you know, changes to compensation plans coming in next year that'll actually help move that, move that needle and ensure that we actually, customers get time to revenue really quickly. That's the focus. I mean, that's the focus on the Forbes Global 2000 to ensure that the time to revenue is moving at a much faster rate and the whole organization is behind that.
Okay. That's it for me. Congrats on a very stable and solid quarter.
Great. Well, everyone, thank you for joining us today. I would like to wish everyone a happy and healthy holiday season here in New York, where it feels like a holiday season in the streets. The lights are out bright and we feel really good about it, and we look forward to seeing many of you in the, in the coming weeks. Happy and healthy holiday season to you and your family.
Thank you. With that, we conclude today's conference. All parties may disconnect. Have a great evening.