Okay, good morning, good afternoon, everybody. It's Keith Bachman here from BMO. We're part of our ongoing virtual software conference. We're thrilled to have Ashim from UiPath. With that normal process here, we're going to be about 35-40 minutes. I'm going to ask questions. I think there's a way that you can also pose questions or candidly just email me directly, and we'll do our best to get to them. With that said, let's go ahead and get started. Ashim, again, on behalf of Bank of Montreal, thanks very much for joining us. Much appreciated. Let's talk a little bit about, we're going to do some big picture questions, and then without much surprise, we're going to jump right into AI. Let's go to the big picture, though. You recently reported your quarters. We think about calendar year 2025.
How do you think about, A, the puts and takes this year on net new ARR? A way to ask the question within context is also, how do you think about, say, the coverage ratio of that guidance, meaning the pipeline, the visibility versus the years past?
Awesome. First, thanks for having me. And thanks for everybody for joining in. I think we looked at this year as we typically did for first quarter, really looked at the environment. We go through our FP&A models. We go through AI models, data science. We also go through a lot of customer stories and customer discussions. I would say second quarter is relatively consistent with what we saw, what we talked about for first quarter. From a guidance perspective, all those guides are what we see in front of us. We evaluate our pipeline in a pretty detailed way. As we're talking about our current forecast, etc., my view is they're very well covered because we guide to what's in front of us. We continue to take a very prudent approach to our guidance for the rest of the year.
The macroeconomic momentum continues to remain variable. I think you can turn on your news, and I do not think that is much of a deep in my mind. There is hopefully some reasonable peer of stability coming. When we talk about our customers, whether it is policy, whether it is kind of economic fear, geopolitical, I think there just remains a lot of, there are more questions than answers, frankly. I look at that always as having a way weighing on the environment, similar to what we talked about in the first quarter. The second is the federal transition in the U.S. It is still evolving. We remain prudent on that. When you look at certain agencies, we are still waiting for full confirmations in certain places of some key roles. There are, for all intents and purposes, there continues to be DOGE deep dives and reviews.
We are super excited about where we're positioned with the federal government. Just given where it is in the transition, we do remain prudent around that. The agentic launch, we feel very good about it. The proof of concepts, the momentum that we are seeing early from our customers, it is very encouraging, both in terms of the product feedback as well as, and I know we're going to talk about this, the synergy between our workflow automation or our RPA platform that we built over the last 20 years, or Daniel's built over the last 20 years, as well as the agentic offering and agentic orchestration. I think everybody is, this year is around proof of concept. It is early innings of a large and growing market opportunity.
We have not factored in major revenue upside from agentic at this moment, which we think is the right thing to do. Overall, when we look at what is there, we feel good about our coverage ratios. We feel good about the signals from our customers. I would tell you, I do not think we have ever been as connected as a team and as connected with our customers as we are today versus the last three years. That is a function of the restructuring, leaning out a lot of middle functions that have existed within the company.
Let's pull in a couple of those threads. One, I want to just clarify, given what you said at the outset about your macro, excuse me, your coverage ratios, because of the Fed and perhaps some of the other issues, would you say there's a higher level of conservatism or scrutiny this year, or is it the same process where you put your filter on and you come out with your forecast? Is it the same the last couple of years or a tweak higher?
My view is we're better. The reason for that is not because of the federal uncertainty, just more again because of the connectivity we have with the team. I don't think that means that we were bad in years past, but I just think that when you have, if I separate you and me with five people who are all talking, it's harder for you and I to have the signals together. I think we are much closer to our customers, much closer to our deals than in the past. I think that is structural and cultural as Daniel stepped back into the CEO role over the last year. I also think we're taking a lot of the good things of the past, the data really being understanding our FP&A models, our data science, our coverage ratios.
I think we have a very good understanding, and we've remained consistent on that as well.
So you think your visibility and your pipe is higher is the way to rephrase it because you just have better data. Okay.
Also better customer connectivity. I think that's very important. Stronger customer connectivity.
Yep. I hope you don't mind. I'm taking notes while I'm talking to you. We're doing two things at once, which is usually a little dangerous. As you think about, just to sort of ask it more bluntly, you said our organization is better. UiPath has gone through some changes since the IPO. From a leadership perspective, some organizational, and more so than other companies that I've had visibility to post-public. The two parts to the question are, why has there been more sort of, I say, organizational changes? B, is everything sorted out?
Yeah. I think the first one's a hard question to answer. I've seen companies that have significant change when we put the comparison. I think one is the scale at which the process, the speed at which we scaled and went to the IPO, I think was also unprecedented. I think when you get into that significant scale at a, what I would say, almost a record pace, you go through different structures to understand what really works for the company. I have no regrets about the past. I think Daniel has talked about his reasons for stepping back into the role. I think a founder-led company has really restored us to our roots. What I would say is the changes of the past actually solidify my conviction that we do feel like we have the answers today.
Those answers rest not solely on people, but on principles. Principle one, less central organizations. Central organizations create a lot of churn. They create a lot of cost. I think when you look at a lot of the leaders that have come in and out, there is also a lot of roles that are within that that have been more central or internally focused than external. The second principle is customer first. I think that lends itself to the first piece. The third is really around speed and innovation. You see that manifest itself just with the speed by which we brought our agentic platform into the market. I think if you take those three principles, I feel very good about where we are. Stability is a big point of emphasis for us this year.
When you look at our sales leadership, from the outside, it feels like there's a lot of changes. Our key sales leaders have more than two years of experience with UiPath. One, our Americas leader kind of had left and then came back just given the changes we were making and was super excited to return to the company. When you look at our major vertical leaders, they've been in seat for multiple years now. Our average tenure of our sales force continues to improve. We feel really good about the stability that we are driving within the company from our leadership team down.
Okay. Okay. I want to transition to the Fed for a second. With all the changes in Elon leaving and what have you, do you feel like the scrutiny as the Fed or DOGE has tweaked down a little bit, or is it still the same pressure?
I talked to three federal customers just over the last 15 days. I don't think it's about Elon leaving or DOGE scrutiny. I think there's just tremendous pressure given the ambition and the transition of the current administration and the goals that have been set. I don't think that pressure has been gone. What I do see as improving is there is starting to get more clarity around who are the decision makers within the administration. I think that will enable budgets to be set and priorities to be set. What we're excited about is, as we talk to a lot of our federal customers and federal partners, Department of Government Efficiency aligns very well with what UiPath does. People being able to do more with less, that is very aligned to where we are positioned. We're really pleased with the renewal rates we've seen.
We had the Agentic Airmen deal that I thought was a great deal in the first quarter that closed that shows and highlights a combination of how deep we are with some of our agencies and the Department of Defense in that example, as well as the promise of agentic. We feel very good about our position, but we have to be patient to allow the administration to kind of work through and the agencies work through the changes that they are undergoing. I think that is going to continue through the second quarter, and that is what we factored into our guidance from a prudent standpoint.
Maybe just review how you guys are thinking about the Fed in terms of the ARR growth that you've provided.
Yeah. We definitely accounted for first half seasonality to be impacted. You see that in the numbers. We talked about that in March. We really did not change much on that. We do see and continue to track a prudent level of activity for the second half. It improves, but it is still prudent from our standpoint. Just given the uncertainty that is there, we are assuming that there is going to be a level of transition that continues throughout the year.
Second half seasonality is a little better than past in terms of net?
Yeah. I would say overall volume we feel like has come down in the Fed just given the uncertainty for the year. The seasonality is more back half loaded than front half loaded. We feel like the back half is you start seeing the moratoriums release, the budgets kind of getting solidified. While we've taken a prudent approach on that, we definitely see some level of rebound of the federal business in the second half.
Okay. Okay. Let's transition to products, and we'll just jump right into agents and agentic offerings. This is a question you and I spoke about after your report, but I want to revisit it. I'm one of the few people on the sell side that actually covers a small company like IBM as well as ServiceNow. The way we're seeing the world is you have the application vendors like Salesforce and Workday and others offering their agents within the scope of their portfolio. You have horizontal plays, including agent orchestration for companies like IBM as well as ServiceNow. I'm just trying to figure out, maybe review for us or revisit why you think you have a right to win in this offering, what is increasingly a crowded field associated with agentic capabilities and orchestration more specifically.
Yeah. The first thing is I think crowded also defines by the opportunity. I think we don't think there is a one winner in this space. It's too large of a space. If you look at every manual task that is being done that can be automated with rules-based automation and then further enhanced by reasoning or probabilistic automation, we feel like it is a massive, massive market. We are one of the players that has a right to win. I'll expand on that here as we go through the question. The first piece is to really understand what's UiPath's platform fully. We have both our traditional workflow automation capabilities, RPA, document processing, communications mining, process discovery. I say this and it doesn't always move the needle from a sentiment. We are not an RPA company. A year ago, even pre-agentic, it was not RPA.
It is the end-to-end automation platform that existed. Now when you add agentic capabilities, it further broadens that. You put agentic orchestration, which allows us to orchestrate agents, humans, and robots. You really do not find a company that has that breadth of automation capabilities as us. The second piece of it is there is an inherent link between agentic automation and deterministic or robotic process automation. The notion that says that all automation will be probabilistic does not make sense from a governance standpoint, from a cost standpoint, and even if cost came down, which we do see, from a complexity standpoint. The third piece is we are Switzerland. I think Salesforce, incredible platform. They are going to be more geared towards the agentic automation within their spaces, right? You see that for companies that specialize. We really are the Switzerland.
Whether you are a mainframe application within a large bank, whether you are a newer company, we really sit across the entire stack and automate across it, which gives us a difference. Now, that's the vendor talking. I admit I'm representing the vendor. When you look at our customers, agentic airmen closed the first quarter. When you look at kind of second quarter, we talked about closing one of the largest deals or a significant agentic deal with a Fortune 20 healthcare company. We had to sell into the head of AI, and they look at real transformation, both with our RPA platform, but really with the agentic capabilities and agentic orchestration that we're doing. We have hundreds of POCs right now that we feel really super positive about. Customers are seeing that ability to do so. We are also verticalizing where appropriate.
If you look at our Peak AI acquisition, we are now agents that can do pricing and inventory optimization. We are specializing agents within healthcare and within financial services. Our customers have really been pleased with what they have seen. Just to give you a couple of examples, a medical device company, they're implementing agents into their revenue cycle management process. Now, why that's important? When you think about the best place to find agent opportunities, go to find where the robot and human are working together. There are things that that human is doing that now an agent can do. When you have 10,800 customers, hundreds of thousands of workflows that are in production, you really can go to that set of workflows and start looking for agentic opportunities.
We feel really comfortable about that also being a core differentiator for us and giving us a head start kind of in this race for customer trust.
Right.
Sorry, I did forget one last thing. As the investors look across, I really want to emphasize there is personal productivity. Summarizing an email. There is enterprise-grade productivity. The level of governance and controls that are needed that are inherent to our platform to automate mortgage processing, patient record management, revenue cycle management, customs, that is significant and that is inherently differentiated within our platform as well.
Okay. Before we move off the competitive context, I just wanted to hear your thoughts on Microsoft, which admittedly, in my opinion, is behind in agents. They had sort of a toe in the water in RPA. It seems like it's not a focus for them. How are you guys thinking about Microsoft as you articulate your strategy on humans plus robots plus agents?
One is I think we have really good product partnership with Microsoft. Ironically, internally, it is more of a friend than it is a foe. We have really good relations all the way up throughout the entire Microsoft senior management. Our Azure consumption is actually significant and is important to them. They are interested and invested in bringing workloads to our platform because that in turn creates workloads for Azure. They are a partner, and that's why even three, four years ago, even when in the RPA space, forget about advanced agentic capabilities, they talked about us as being their preferred automation partner and vendor. That's there. The second piece is I think when you look at Microsoft, they still are going to be geared more towards that personal productivity side. We differentiate really through the enterprise-grade productivity that we want to go after.
We look at that as separate spaces. Frankly, the feedback from many of our customers is those are separate capabilities that are there. That is why you continue to see net new ARR growing for us as a company, despite Microsoft now having been in the automation space, quote unquote, for the last how many years since IPO for us.
Right. Right. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about the cadence. Break it down into two parts, and we're staying on agentic capabilities for the moment. You mentioned you have hundreds of POCs. How are those POCs unfolding? What I mean by that is, are these more experiments within the context of companies? And sort of the root of my question is big opportunities you identified, why is it not moving faster? I guess you alluded to it in terms of governance is probably one of the key sources of friction. I know it is for Salesforce and others, but maybe just talk about kind of the pipeline of agentic opportunities within those POCs and what's the source of friction?
I kind of don't agree that it's not moving fast. I think it's a question of expectations and perspective. First is we just launched our platform at the end of April, right? From that perspective, we had already closed a number of customers in private preview. We had already closed some of those deals that we've talked about, whether it's agentic airmen or whether it is the healthcare example that I gave. The second is I think it's unrealistic in the enterprise productivity space, in the enterprise workflow space, to say everything's going to kind of just shoot through in a couple of months. In fact, a lot of customers had been burned by overpromising of the AI hype.
We see that as really contributing to making sure there is more proof of concepts that have been really tried, trued, and vetted as they're making their decisions and their investment decisions, right? That is something I think that's been well covered and that's been well heard by us from our customers. We actually thrive when it comes to a bakeoff because we have product truth. If somebody comes and says, "We want to do a proof of concept," it actually makes us super happy to do that in terms of where that looks. The third piece is I think when you look at I came from a large company in GE. As fast as companies change, their organizations also need time to adjust to it, right?
You have entire organizational dynamics and security dynamics and all of these things that are taking shape within an enterprise. I think those things just take time. At the same time, having hundreds of POCs right after you go into your GA, the activity that we're seeing with our customers is super exciting. Frankly, the success rate of our proof of concepts is also super exciting. We look at those things, and I feel like we're moving at a good speed that's realistic. It's become cliché, but everybody says everybody overestimates the short term and underestimates the midterm. I think we're trying to be realistic about that. We look at this year as really proof of concepts, but we see this as a meaningful opportunity. It should be bigger than the RPA opportunity.
The RPA opportunity helps scale us in five years from almost nothing to $1 billion.
Right. If you think about, I wanted to ask, the second part of the question is you said a little bit of contribution this year, but more meaningful contribution in CY2026, right, has been, excuse me, the agentic kind of backdrop. And is there enough to make some contribution in Q4, though, in net new ARR? But it's really, or we should be really focused on CY2026.
I would be more focused on CY2026. I've given my guidance. I think I factor that in. We've talked about no meat, nothing meaningful for this year. Nothing meaningful doesn't mean nothing. I think that's really important. I think sometimes people forget that word meaningful in that discussion. In our minds, we really look at this as the year of proof of concepts. The first set of customers coming on board, as you get those success stories, I think success breeds success. A successful 2025 in terms of fiscal 2026, I think will breed a successful 2027 from that standpoint.
When you're in the POCs, presumably these are done with RFQs or there's competitive dynamics surrounding even doing POCs. I would assume. Is that true? Who's also in there with you trying to win those workflows?
Great question. It's interesting. You don't get a lot of RFPs or RFQs in a lot of examples. As I talked about that 10,000 customer installed base, we are getting called in just because people are like, "Wow, we know UiPath. We've had great success with UiPath." They hear our launch. They know our products. Our reps and our customer success teams and presales teams are very close with them, and they just want to see the product in motion. In the examples where you see kind of real tests and trials that are more competitive, actually internal, people are testing their internal capabilities. Is this something we can build, or do we need a plan? What's fascinating is I think the models people think that they can build, the platform, the governance, the orchestration, the connectivity, that has really been able to differentiate.
We did not really talk too much about Maestro. Maestro connects agents, robots, and people. It delivers fixed workflows at the enterprise level, and it gives you insights into those workflows. That, built on a modern stack, is a real differentiator for us. It is almost impossible for an internal organization to replicate that. That really gives us a step up versus just saying, "How are you incorporating a model into automation or a workflow?" There are multiple tools, and there are multiple dimensions that we are able to win in that discussion versus internal.
Okay. Thank you. Yeah, Maestro is going to be my next question, so I appreciate you bringing it up. Ashim, how about the journey from POCs to revenues? Again, not this year, but what does that process look like in terms of this agentic world combined with Maestro or the whole category? How should we be thinking? How does that translate into I shouldn't have said revenues. I was more thinking ARR, but what does that journey look like?
Look, I think proof of concept shows proof of there's two things that you're proving out: technology and ROI. I think the proof of the technology gives you the right to play, the right to compete. I think the proof of the ROI gives you the right to revenue, the right to ARR. We're not going after our proof of concepts of a few demos or PowerPoints or precast videos. Our proof of concepts is saying, "Can we make things faster, better, more accurate?" In my mind, Bia, as we solidify that, you're going to start seeing not far behind proof of ROI is realization of revenue.
The question becomes like, "What is going to be the bite, the first bite, and how big are the subsequent bites from it?" I think that is going to be a function of both the environment as well as budgets, as well as kind of internal organizational culture. I do not have a formula for that. I think it is different depending on the technology. If you look at the early wins, we are really excited by the mix of some companies going all in, both in their proof of concepts as well as organizational. I think that is going to be a relatively similar mix to the past, but we are going to have to see how that unfolds.
Okay. Ashim, one of the, as you're, I'm sure, well aware, and Jake also, I think the reason UiPath has what we would characterize as a relatively modest multiple is because it's viewed to be still an RPA company, which you've asserted is an inappropriate reflection of the business. Part of a way to respond to that is to give more granularity about the business mix. And so would you envision at some point in time giving metrics associated with legacy or robots versus other, or do you view them now as all intertwined so that's not appropriate?
First, I'd point everybody to kind of our fourth quarter earnings back in March. We did disclose RPA and the attach rate of our AI-based products. When you look at that, I think we said 18%, if I recall, but we can get the exact number that was there. When you look at the first thing, we have increased our disclosure around it. The second is we go through it. We always want to give as much granularity as possible. We increased, as an example, the disclosure around customer cohorts, so customers greater than $30,000 and how they grow. We will always look to give as much disclosure to give the best investor decisions. It's a double-edged sword because once you give it, obviously, then you're committed to continuing to give it.
I think there's a maturity that we also want to make sure is realized that's there. At the same time, I think agentic, we're giving a lot of transparency into the script of our agentic wins around metrics around our trials, the number of customers, the number of agent runs that we've seen. Formal revenue disclosures we'll continue to evaluate.
Okay. Perfect. Okay. We only have about eight minutes left, and I've only gotten to two subjects, so shame on me. With that said, if I step back for a second, I understand that net retention rates are a backward-looking metric, but with all these really interesting opportunities unfolding surrounding the expansion of your portfolio, if you think about over the next 12 months to 18 months, how would you envision NRR moving around?
Yeah. Look, I think first is it is backwards measuring. It's a trailing 12 months. We've talked about this year being a point of stabilization. If you adjust for macro and Fed, that is essentially what we feel from our internal execution and market capabilities. I look at, Bia, when you think about our second-half guidance, you can see implicitly what's assumed in there. We don't see a substantial shift from expansion to new logos. It's pretty easy to see the trajectory of net new ARR that's there. Again, that's with no meaningful agentic revenue inside, implicit within it. I honestly feel good about what the future holds and the stabilization of not just that metric, but overall metrics that we have.
Okay. Yeah. We actually do that breakout. Let's shift gears for a second to a small company, SAP. How do you think about the evolution of your relationship with SAP? How does your agentic maturation with your product portfolio, how does that impact the relationship with SAP and incremental opportunities?
Look, I think our partnership has really started with kind of our core automation portfolio because we had just launched agentic recently. We'll continue to explore not just with SAP, but with every company the ability to partner with us. We look at partnerships as a strategic lever for both mind share as well as wallet share within a company. That being said, I think we still see tremendous opportunity with the S/4HANA migrations for getting our core automation platform out there. Just to put it in perspective, we ourselves had implemented our ERP here internally, and we had a 93% clean core. Just if you kind of think about that, that is a step function and a game function change for ERP implementations. That is really possible by our technology and UiPath's platform.
I think SAP sees the same thing, and that is why we are continuing to focus on driving joint customer pursuits together. That partnership, like you said, as you indicated, it is a large company. It takes time, but we feel positive still about the overall potential for what SAP could bring.
Okay. Ashim, I know you're an automation company, and you sort of have the business that you grew up with and robots, and you've broadened the portfolio quite broadly. Do you feel like the legacy business, for lack of a better word, is at a point of stabilization? Some of that, you've had what I'll call low-end customers that have been degrading a little bit. That's probably more of a customer issue than an ARR issue. How should investors think about if they want to break the business into two pieces, the RPA business unfolding versus all these new opportunities, Maestro and agents?
The first thing is I will want to change the concept of a legacy. I think it's still very relevant and present. Why? Just think about the number of tasks that still remain to be automated across enterprises. It is a highly relevant technology. The pace of technology has moved, so our attention span seems to change. Actually, from that perspective, in our minds, there's still a large and growing market. You can look at IDC's numbers of double-digit growth within that segment or in that area of automation, excluding agentic. I think that that is the first piece that I would emphasize. If I think about foundational or deterministic automation, we still see that as a growing base. We see that as attracting new customers. We see people who are still able to expand across departments to cross-sell into different capabilities within workflow automation.
To break apart agentic and RPA is like breaking apart a workflow, Bia. In our minds, it is highly synergistic to have robots, humans, and agents working together. From our perspective, when you go to the robotic workflows, they should lend itself to more agentic workflows. Just go to any workflow where a robot's working with a human and say, "What is that human doing?" There's probably an agentic capability that's there. It can be unlocked in that existing workflow. Let's say we unlock a new process. One of our partners actually said this. They did a workshop with a number of customers. They said, "One of our conclusions, which is interesting, every idea that in the first two days that started actually was more of a robot idea or a deterministic idea than a probabilistic idea.
That's why I asked that.
It's going to capitalize in there. Yes.
Yeah. I sort of asked a question in that spirit, in that do you think customers understand the difference in terms of.
Not fully.
Or is that actually creating confusion on, "Do I use an agent, or do I use a robot?
I don't think it creates confusion for the right people who have to make that decision. If I'm a business user, my goal is to say, "How do you make my life easier?" The fact that UiPath has both robots and agents means I don't have to ask, "Do I talk to UiPath, or do I not?" We can do either. Our goal is to have faster, more automated, less costly, more accurate workflows. When you turn it around, we feel really good about automation leaders, heads of AI who know to say, "If something is rules-based, I am not going to go and put a probabilistic agent in there and create a 5% or a 3% additional chance for error." I want something that has both UI automation, API automation, and advanced AI capabilities that can go across any application in my stack.
From that perspective, we feel really good about where we're positioned.
Okay. Yeah. There is lots more we could do there. Maybe I will just ask my last question. I am going to, unfortunately, have to condense it a little bit in the interest of time. It is just on go-to-market. In terms of how do you feel about the stability and where you are now in terms of feet on the street as well as pricing, the unified pricing models? What is the feedback? Do you feel like there are still some tweaks you may need to make? Any comments there?
Yeah. I think first is go-to-market is stable, more connected with our customer. We're talking more, and we're innovating more with our customers. We feel really good about the core tenets of our go-to-market organization. Our partner ecosystem, they're a good measure for us. I feel like even in that area, we're more connected, whether it's companies like Lydonia, Accelerate, WonderBots, which are regional, or companies like Deloitte, where we're advancing agentic ERP together. And EY, PwC, Accenture, we feel really good about our connection and our position there. I feel like go-to-market as a whole, we feel very good. The discussion around unified pricing, the first set of feedback has been really good. It's early, though. I don't want to oversell on that in the beginning. I think people like the idea of a simplified pricing model.
I think we and our customers both value the platform, which in our pricing 2.0 is more explicit of the value of the platform. It empowers customers really with more choice and more opportunity. Initial feedback is good, but I want to see how this year progresses before I declare victory or we declare victory in that role.
Yeah. A good practice, good policy. Ashim, again, we're going to leave it there. We're one minute over, but I appreciate you coming on and spending time with us. Really interesting time for UiPath, and we wish you all the best of luck, and we'll be focused on the journey and how you guys unfold all these opportunities in front of you. Again, thanks very much for your time. We appreciate it.
Thank you.
Cheers.