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All right. I'm Siti Panigrahi, software analyst here at Mizuho. It's a great pleasure to welcome Ashim Gupta, COO and CFO, two hats. Yeah, that's great. Welcome you to the conference.
Thanks so much, Siti.
You know, I'll start with the pretty—you reported recently fiscal Q1. It was much better than expected. Maybe why don't you start with your puts and takes for Q1, where you saw the strength, where you saw the weakness? Let's start with that.
Yeah. So look, I think Q1 we delivered revenue very strong. We beat consensus estimates. We beat consensus estimates on profitability. You can see strong free cash flow generation of $100 million or more. Net new ARR just above what we—you know, a good beat versus what we had also guided in March. We did that in the backdrop of what I think we can all agree is a very uncertain and kind of volatile environment that we've been facing. We are really pleased, and we are super pleased by the execution with the team. I think beyond the numbers, when you go to—in the financial statements, when you just go to what the team's executed, new partner program in place, which was really well received. Strong contacts and agreements with GSIs. Good, like Deloitte for Agentic ERP.
Really good momentum, but it was underscored and highlighted by the launch of our agentic platform. I know in the world of AI, a lot of people—there's a question of like, what's real, what's hype, et cetera. We launched—we had the most significant product launch for us, tangible software that our customers had been previewing the previous three months that is now in GA that allows them to build and deploy agents at scale in conjunction with the rest of our automation platform. Agentic orchestration and Agentic testing allowing humans, robots, and agents to be working together and really bringing that to our customers.
Definitely, I want to spend more time on the AI side, Ashim. But one other question I was getting post your earnings is FX. How do you characterize the FX impact and how you look into that in your guidance?
Yeah, yeah. I think if you just step back, the first thing is we've been very consistent about the way we report and the way we guide with foreign exchange. When you go back in history, we really haven't seen as much volatility in foreign exchange, so this hasn't come up. When we reported in March and when we guided for the year, the euro, which is the most exposure that we would have, was hovering between $1.08-$1.09. When we guided in the second quarter or at the end of the first quarter, it was around $1.12. It was very minimal. If you go back to September of last year, you know, when we guided in third quarter, the euro was around $1.07. We went into December, it was more like $1.02-$1.03. These movements always happen.
We never adjust our guidance for what we see as immaterial amounts. What really confused people, I think, is when you look at other software companies, they talked about material movements. If you had done your earnings a week before us in March, you were dealing with a euro that was $1.02 versus $1.08 or $1.09. It was a much more material impact. The last point is within our ARR balance, more than 55% of our ARR is in US dollars. You take a smaller portion that is in euro. When you carve that down with contracts that have multi-year exposure, which is a good chunk of our larger dollars, you have an immaterial impact of contracts that are renewing this year itself. The last point that we wanted to make is we do not mark to market our contracts every quarter.
We will only adjust the foreign currency and realize the currency loss or gain when the contract comes up for renewal. Those are kind of three points to put that in context.
Thanks for clarifying that. The other point is at this point macro, you know, we are seeing so much variability there right now. How does that play out for you? Are you seeing some kind of deal elongation, or are you seeing the smaller deal size? Anything you are seeing?
Yeah, I think it's been across the board. I would say two ways to answer. The first is in March itself, that is when we really recognized and called into our number macro uncertainty that's there. I think when you turn on your TV or you open the newspaper for anybody who reads a newspaper still, or you turn on your iPhone, uncertainty still is very prevalent within the macro environment. We do not see that as fundamentally changing. That does affect deal cycles. Why? I think customers are still trying to understand what is their revenue and cost structure going to look like in the environment in which we're in.
I think we saw a little bit more clarity from certain customers come in the second quarter, come in the end of the first quarter, which allowed us to adjust our revenue up in the second quarter by $12 million+ . When you look at that together, I think the overall environment remains uncertain, but we're hopeful that that clarity comes within the second half of the year. That said, in our total year guidance, we remain prudent that this environment is going to continue for the near future.
Yeah. One other topic was federal. I think you talked about some kind of cautiousness on the Q4 call. How do you characterize the federal business?
The federal.
What's kind of baked into your guidance?
Yeah. So I think the federal business is going through transition. I was down, we've talked to, I personally have talked to a number of the undersecretaries as well as several of the CFOs of the different agencies. Many of them, you know, are just going through the transition. They don't have their budgets nailed down in many places yet. They're still kind of working through DOGE's control, influence, what DOGE wants to review, et cetera. The third piece is there's just a general sense of uncertainty, even some of the areas where even the heads of an agency has either not been confirmed or is in the process of getting confirmation right now. What we factored into our guidance is really a more renewal-oriented deal flow for the first half. We do see the second half with budgets getting confirmed in September.
You know, there should be some life into the new business. That said, when we talk to our customers, UiPath is very well positioned. Department of Government Efficiency, they're not hiring back the employees that were let go. They are trying to contend with how do you do the same amount of work with less people. That is where both robots, agents, and overall automation thrives. We are very aligned with them on the vision and the opportunity together.
Okay. Now with that, let's switch to strategy. I mean, going back to 2016, UiPath was a leader in RPA. You have pretty good success there. Now coming to agentic AI, now this is something like a second act for UiPath. So help us understand what's your strategy there and what are you hearing from customers?
Yeah. The first thing is I think we haven't been an RPA company since 2016. I think that message I really want to hit home. We extended our platform to include, you know, document understanding, test automation, process mining, communications mining, which is the mining of emails to identify and drive efficiency and create routing. We had done all of that between 2016 and 2020. In the first quarter, we talked about an attach rate for our customers. There is still the customers that are using AI products have moved to the teens, which is great progress over the last two or three years. We're in the high teens in terms of the number of people who have moved beyond RPA. There is still room for expansion for that base to grow. The second piece is we look at the world in terms of deterministic automation and probabilistic.
Deterministic is rules-based. You want the same outcome every single time. Probabilistic automation is where we see agents, software with agency come into picture. When you look at our strategy, fundamentally, we want to transform the way people work by creating end-to-end automation. That requires three things: being able to do it on a rules-based, which is, like you said, kind of our founding software, our founding technology in RPA; being able to have all the extensions around it, which is what we've done with the platform between 2018 and 2021; and now incorporating agentic. If I break down agentic into two pieces, we are the Switzerland for agentic. There are companies out there that will do agentic for CRM, agentic for their HR applications. We will do it across applications. Many companies have 10,000-15,000 applications in their tech stack.
In order to really automate, they need to go across. The second piece is we're going to lead in governance and controls. If you're in healthcare doing claims processing, the governance and controls is a significant part of your decision-making. Our first quarter, our deal that we talked about in our first quarter earnings, that highlights where we're differentiated when a Fortune 10 company picks us as their leading agentic platform, as their leading agentic technology. The last piece to underscore is we also Agentic orchestration. think about a world where you're sitting down and you have applications, but then you have robots doing transactions, agents doing transactions, and humans doing transactions. You need one orchestration layer to be able to make sure that happens. That orchestration layer, that is something that we launched here on April 30th. Incredible, incredible feedback from our customers.
That is part of our strategy to move not just at the transaction layer, but the overall orchestration layer as well.
That's great color. If I remember during the, you know, strong adoption of RPA time, a lot of companies started their, you know, chief automation, you know, Center of Excellence kind of new role started, right? Now are you seeing that's the same kind of department extending, becoming like chief AI officer, or is it now what are you seeing?
It's different. Yeah, it's different. I don't think any one customer has one approach to AI, which is reasonable and kind of understandable. In some cases, the CoE that was doing, you know, RPA is extending their scope and doing end-to-end automation inclusive of agentic and AI. In other examples, we see a head of AI that we are selling into that is in charge of the AI decisions and really driving the agentic world. Interesting enough, you know, the few that we've started interacting with, they actually came from the RPA CoE, which is very, which is fascinating and obviously helpful for us as well. I think in other areas, it's spread across different areas. You can have it under the CTO organization making the decision, the CIO organization. I think all of them, depending on the company, have different governance models.
What I will tell you has not changed amongst all of that. ROI drives the decision because the lines of business are funding the next round of implementation. I think in the past, you saw all these innovation funds that were moving and giving temporary bursts to things. ROI is really defining software evaluation today, which I think it's a little bit economic, but I also think it's a little bit of the learning of the past three to five years of AI, of a lot of overpromising and under-delivering from just the overall market. Frankly, when you look at ROI, that's where we feel like we have a really good advantage. We can provide really tangible ROI to our customers.
What kind of adoption are you seeing right now with some of your, I think, Maestro and Agent Builder, some of the product already in the market?
Yeah. We have hundreds of proof of concepts right now that are going there. Think about our 10,800 customer base. Our top-tier customers, we're seeing enormous penetration of just getting the proof of concepts moving. The number one request that I'm getting right now is the need for more pre-sales and technical engineering on the front end of our processes. To me, that is a great sign because people aren't content with a video or a PowerPoint. They want to get the pilots and the proof of concepts moving. We see incredible demand from there. We closed Agentic Airmen for the federal government. That is helping operations officers using agentic technology, freeing their time, whether it's logging, whether it's logging weapons or different inventory, inventoriable items. That is something that we are able to help with.
The healthcare deal that we closed in the first quarter, that we closed early in the second quarter that we talked about. Sonic Automotive is a third one. We do see tremendous adoption. We see hundreds of thousands of agent runs for a lot of our private preview customers, which means they are truly putting their hands on the technology and running them in production and getting to understand what their impact could be.
This is the question I always get from investors: is agentic AI, I know it's pretty early, but when you look at the opportunity, you had RPA, a certain opportunity to automate some kind of workflow, some actions. Now when you think of AI coming in, is it going to replace part of it, or is it going to complement or augment it, or is it partly, you know, cannibalistic? How do you see that opportunity now?
Yeah. From my standpoint, it's complementary and augmentative. I can't say there's not going to be any cannibalization. I think that would be disingenuous. That's not the primary stake. I'll just give kind of like two reasons why. Remember, in personal productivity, you're not as worried about rules-based automation versus probabilistic. If I say download 10 emails or, you know, download 10 attachments, there's very little chance for error. If you look at our customer base, healthcare, financial services, public sector, you are not going to take a chance with a patient record of their medical history to be sent with a probabilistic piece of software. There's a risk element to it. There's a cost element to it. Even if cost comes down, there is a complexity of maintenance to it that you'd have to contend with, right?
In our view, when you look at a workflow today, you're going to find a lot of agents that are agentic opportunities that are hovering on the next step after a robot where a human would have gone in. I think that's the first. Just one interesting anecdote, and I've said this in a number of my one-on-one tables. We had a partner that did 20 customer roundtables. In those roundtables, of 100 ideas, 70 that came out were actually robotic ideas. Customers don't know the difference, really, nor should they between probabilistic and deterministic. Their technology arms do, and they do not want to put deterministic processes in a probabilistic framework for both what we talked about is complexity and risk. I look at it as augmentative. As you look for agents, I think you're going to find robots.
If you look around your robots, you're going to find agents.
Okay. In terms of adoption, I think if I remember, a pretty strong attach rate to the $1 million+ ARR, I think 85% or so, but that's still 20% of the base. What could you do to further incentivize that kind of adoption?
For the $1 million+ base, Siti?
Yeah.
Yeah. I think one is just being close to them. I don't think we have to incentivize. I think the ROI is going to incentivize them. The main thing is education. I think in this world of like AI confusion, which ebbs and flows, we have to make sure people really understand what software is capable of doing. Just to give you an example, we don't have to produce any of our own LLM models. We partner with everybody, and we have very open architecture. Sometimes we get asked, you know, are you tied to any one model? Because that creates security restrictions or vendor restrictions from their standpoint. I think there's a lot of education that goes into the first round. From other incentives, I think it's really the ROI that will incentivize them.
I would also say getting beyond the top base and getting to the rest of the customers, that's why we're super excited by the partnerships with Deloitte and our regional partnerships for smaller customers like Lydonia, TQA Accelerate. We have become very close with them over the last year as we have simplified our partner program, focused on enabling them, and really invested in them to grow and drive adoption across our customer base.
The other topic I want to hit on is your recent acquisition of Peak. That kind of gets into more of a vertical strategy. That was kind of a surprise in the first place when I saw that, but you talked about the vertical strategy there. Can you help us understand how you're thinking about, is it more doing more talking acquisition? Maybe talk about your strategy itself.
I think horizontal is a strength first. Just to give you an interesting metric, you know, of the customers that we have in our private preview, there are no use cases dominated more than 10% of the number of use cases, like not one. Which means that a horizontal platform unlocks the ability for a customer to go after where they see ROI, and it also speaks to the ubiquity of what our platform can deliver. The area where verticalization comes in, horizontal is great because it has a massive TAM. At the same time, it is a harder sale in some cases because you are reliant on the customer to figure out what they want to go and solve.
Verticalization will have slivers of that TAM, but it will cut down the time to value by giving them software that immediately hits the outcomes that we're looking at. If you look at Peak, inventory optimization and pricing optimization, gathering all of the data and being able to do the transactions in the system to make decisions on whether you're producing inventory, and if I add prices, what does that do to sales, and then correspondingly to production. That is a great outcome that is relevant to any customer that has a high number of SKUs as a part of their business model. For us, we've seen great uptick, great interest right when we brought Peak into our company. I think we can selectively go after verticalization to drive faster time to value while still maintaining the horizontal benefits that we have of our overall platform.
This AI agents, how do you think the pricing would be? Is it more user-based, agent-based, seat-based?
Yeah. Right now, we've rolled it out in what I call more of a pseudo-consumption model. Similar to Mac credits that you get on the Microsoft side, people will buy bundles of use it or lose it, but it will be used upon consumption. We can monetize a bundle of X or, you know, 10,000 units. Every time they do an agent run or every time they consume a model, it will draw down against it. That's our current pricing model that we're going with.
Last year when you were here, you talked about the go-to-market transformation. I think recently you talked about that. I think you completed it. How does the now current go-to-market strategy position you for the growth or the next phase?
I think our go-to-market has never been stronger and more stable. If you look at the average tenure of our leaders, there are greater than two years of UiPath experience now that are sitting in seat. The average tenure of our field has increased because we've moved the organization less, and the number of accounts that have been switching hands because of various initiatives has come way down. We're getting better customer intimacy, more stable, and probably the most impactful thing from my perspective. We eliminated all of the central organizations that really put distance between us, our product teams, our management teams, and our field teams, which has made us faster and more in touch with what customers are happening.
If you look at agentic, our ability to respond to customers fast, if you look at our agentic launch, making sure there is consistency of message and consistency of approach, both of those are all of the changes we made. You know, I just don't think we would have had this much momentum with our agentic launch had we not made those changes.
I want to ask you on the AI side that I've been asking other companies as well. How are you using AI internally for your soft product development, go-to-market, any of the areas?
We've definitely employed AI across our engineering teams. A lot of the code is generated by AI internally, and we're looking to increase that. The second piece is we are deploying agentic. We are customer zero. We have been. Just yesterday, I did a meeting just on the number of agents and agentic ideas that are there. Similar to our customers, we are literally starting with all the workflows that we automated with the hundreds, if not thousands, of robots and looking around and saying, what are the agentic ideas behind that? Within three weeks, we've come up with hundreds of opportunities to be able to agentify UiPath using our own technology. The third piece is we employ and experiment with tools for personal productivity. You know, whether that is Anthropic, whether that is ChatGPT, we're going to go and experiment and see how it is.
It's been, honestly, the success of all three of them has been awesome. I was talking about it today. Like we had one of our groups, they were able to take four hours' worth of work to condense and understand and help the documentation for a cloud migration for a customer. Between our platform and different reasoning models, they were able to bring that down into minutes versus the hours that it would have taken. Super excited about what the potential is.
Now you're having a dual hat of operating role and CFO. Do you see this as kind of one of the key drivers of operating leverage?
Yes.
Not only your company, for other companies too.
100%. 100%. I think you get to choose whether you want to reinvest. Is there another step function change in productivity? I think you would have to be in a significant minority to say no. I think the biggest thing is having the leadership culture and incentives because it's deeply personal to people, right? When you do just I automated a forecast for ourselves using two reasoning models. It's hard to admit that that reasoning model did it faster and more accurate than the hours that an analyst may put into it. It comes with a certain sense of humility and ability to transform, but 100%, there's a step function change, not just for UiPath, but to me, the overall industry and our entire customer base.
I mean, your comment certainly validates one of my team, our team published a note. So it's a plug, but we did it internally. How companies using and bring operating leverage, we quantify that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting. All of the analyst research reports that come up after earnings, just to give you an idea of deterministic and probabilistic, we were able to, and Jake's sitting in the audience here, we were able to go and gather all of that, put it into a reasoning model, and get a quick summary of 36 or whatever is the number of reports and number of pages, and it came out in minutes. Now, the interesting thing is you still have to go and gather all of those documents. Now attach that with a robot. Now attach it with an agent to say, bring me all press releases as well that you think are relevant. You're giving it a probabilistic task with a deterministic task of gathering all of the documents that you specifically want so the agent doesn't overlook something.
You use a reasoning model to summarize it and provide an output. That is a simple workflow that you can put and watch it happen with UiPath Maestro.
Let me pause here and see any questions in the audience. You can raise your hand.
Do you see any competition from the traditional BPO companies, or are you at totally a different company?
It's an interesting question. They are some of our best customers, so just to put that in context, and some of our best partners. At the same time, I think there's always going to be a competition between labor and technology, right? We definitely don't play in the labor. We look to augment labor from that standpoint. I think different companies take different tasks. I think the BPO is about timing. I don't think it's about outcome. Outcome one is a customer automates and then takes whatever they can automate and moves it to a BPO. Outcome two, the other route is a company moves it to a BPO, and the BPO uses technology and then their own skill sets to drive efficiency, right? Either way, technology is employed. It's just a question of when. In my mind, I don't see them as a direct competitor.
I look at them as really good partners, really good customers. At the same time, they do introduce different paths to get to an end outcome of technology driving efficiency for a company.
In the same context, your traditional competitors when RPA, how has that evolved the competitive landscape as you're looking to the next phase of your agentic AI automation?
I personally feel like they've been left behind. Like I look at our competitors as we are now going to emerge as competitors to other companies, whether it's Salesforce or ServiceNow or different things for different workforces. I think we've leapfrogged those competitors both numerically as well as technologically. To be candid, we leapfrogged them technologically, which is why we've leapfrogged them numerically. In my mind, you know, while we will see them in pure RPA at small scale, our win rate is very, very high. We don't really lose customers. We do see areas where we can displace them. The agentic landscape, that's a different group of competitors from my standpoint. We're not playing against them.
Okay. Probably last question here. We talked about some AI agents, agentic solution. When do you think that's going to uplift your revenue growth? Is this something in this year, next year?
I think this year is around proof of concepts. I think when you look at POCs and pilots, to me, they are going to validate the technology, and they are going to validate the ROI. You know, I think the last couple of years, a lot of companies have been burned by the over-promise of AI. ROI is going to be the defining characteristic for revenue. I look at it this year being proof of concepts and pilots, and I look at, you know, as we get beyond this year, we definitely see like meaningful revenue potential coming from this technology and this market.
I look forward to hosting you again around this time, and we'll talk about more use cases then.
Thanks so much, Siti.
Thank you.
Thanks.