Good morning, everyone, and welcome to day one of the 26th Annual Needham Growth Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald, and I lead the firm's edtech research efforts here. In this session, it's my pleasure to be joined by the team from Udemy. We've got CEO Greg Brown and CFO Sarah Blanchard. Greg, Sarah, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for having us, Ryan.
Thank you.
Absolutely. Greg, glad to have you. So for those of you who are listening in, we've got about 35 minutes for a fireside chat session here with management. We'll go through a list of questions on all the topics everybody cares about. But if there is a question from the audience that you have for management, please insert it into the chat, and I'll make sure to get those questions asked and answered. But with that, let's kick it off. So, Greg, how about we start with a brief overview of Udemy for those who might be less familiar with the business?
Yeah, sure. Happy to, Ryan. So Udemy is a comprehensive professional and personal skills development platform focused on tech and professional skills development. At our foundation, at our core, is a marketplace, a global marketplace that has over 225,000 courses in over 75 languages, 14 languages within our Udemy Business collection, that are delivered by over 75,000 now instructors around the world that are developing native content in the countries that they reside, many of which are the world's foremost experts in their chosen domain or discipline. And they're publishing that content on our marketplace on an ongoing basis, which enables us to maintain a freshness and breadth and depth of content, both in the marketplace at large, as well as in the Udemy Business collection. That is very unique, and we believe, and our customers believe, very differentiated.
So, you know, that's a little bit of background on Udemy Business. Excuse me, on Udemy as a whole and Udemy Business, but happy to go into more depth, Ryan, in any direction you want to go.
Yeah, absolutely. Now, this may seem a little bit unusual to start the year on reflecting, but, you know, it's interesting because about a year ago, Greg, you were just undergoing your transition from president of Udemy Business to CEO. So I'm just kind of curious, if you look back over the past year, you know, what have been your biggest learnings in, you know, in that transition, and sort of how is that informing your sort of strategy and initiatives moving forward?
Yeah, you're right, Ryan. It was, it was, you know, right at the year mark, the transition started. It started a little bit earlier internally, but, you know, in terms of what we did as far as public announcements. This past year, look, I think for all of us, has been a year unlike any that we've seen, at least in my lifetime, with the advent of generative AI and the impact that it's had across virtually every industry and every region.
Today, when I'm out meeting with CLOs and heads of people at the largest multinational corporations in the world, it's the number one topic of conversation, and it's the number one area of interest in terms of how they are asking us to invest in helping them as a strategic partner address what is more than likely going to end up being the most transformational technology development in all of our lifetimes. So, you know, that's something that, you know, was, unexpected, very unique, and something that, you know, we view, as a transformative opportunity for our business. So, you know, in the last twelve months, you know, on top of that, you know, we bolstered our leadership team. We added a new CMO, a new Chief Product Officer, new Chief People Officer.
So we significantly bolstered our leadership team, and couldn't be happier with the impact that those individuals have had. We've talked a lot about the product roadmap that we've developed around generative AI, or enabled by generative AI, to enable professional skills development to happen at a faster pace, to provide innovative capabilities to our instructors, to enable them to develop world-class content and learning experiences in ways that we wouldn't have had imagined a year, a year-plus ago. And that couldn't be more exciting for us. We've really leaned into our partner strategy, and we've developed strategic relationships with AWS, with Docker, 1EdTech, which is our badging and certification partner, Google Cloud, and so on. So, you know, our partner strategy now is definitely core to our go-to-market motion.
Through all of that, and through a, you know, a very difficult macroeconomic environment, I couldn't be prouder of the team and the results we delivered. It's been an exciting year, it's been a dynamic year, and it's been a lot of fun.
Yeah, dynamic might be the nice way of putting it. I was gonna say generative AI technology, a challenging macro, that is one heck of a start to a CEO tenure, and maybe that's where we'll kind of shift to, is within Udemy Business, you know, you know, the company's not been immune to macro pressures that have been impacting corporate L&D budgets, but nonetheless, you've continued to produce impressive growth rates in that environment. Can you talk about what you're seeing in the market and, you know, how UB has been able to still gain share in what looks like and might be looking like a consolidating marketplace right now?
Yeah. You know, it's a good question, Ryan. You know, the macro has been challenging, there's no doubt. But amidst all of it, the focus that organizations have on skills as their new currency, with respect to how they view their talent and their people, is gaining momentum, and it's gaining steam. We see it, you know, almost weekly right now. We see articles coming out from, you know, analysts and industry experts talking about this transition from degrees and experience to skills-based approach, and the reasons why, and the impact. So it's real, and it's gaining steam. You know, really, we've seen two primary catalysts this past year that have, you know, fueled our growth and continue to fuel the momentum in the category. And that is that transition to skills-based economy, that I just mentioned, and generative AI.
You know, I've spent quite a bit of my time over the last three months out in the market with customers and meeting with CLOs, and, like, as I just mentioned a few minutes ago, the common theme in every conversation is that organizations have an acute need from the CEOs to uplevel the AI literacy across the entire organization.
Mm-hmm.
The fervor and the pitch is something that I haven't seen before, and I've been doing this for a while, in terms of the urgency that organizations have to feel just so that they don't get left behind. I mean, the feeling is, at least for me when I'm walking away, that there's a fear that if we don't jump on this train and learn how to take advantage of this transformational technology development, both for internal operating leverage and external product and service delivery, we're gonna get left behind. So, you know, those are two trends that are really driving the momentum that we see in Udemy Business, and we expect that to continue for years to come because we're in the, you know, early innings.
If you listen to anybody that is steeped in generative AI, you know, we're in inning one, inning two of this, of this game. So it's just, it's just beginning, and, and we can't even foresee what three years is gonna look like right now. So, you know, these are massive trends, secular trends that are behind us that are gonna be winning our sales for, we believe, years to come.
Yeah, it's really interesting. As we've picked up in our checks as well, it's you know net new HR spending overall in the 20- heading into 2024, it seems like it's gonna be down on a year-over-year basis, but learning and training remains sort of that top spending category within the group. So... And I think it speaks to some of the the trends you were kind of talking about there. I guess the one question I would ask is, so we know it's a strategic priority for CLOs, but you know in this sort of macro, are they getting the budget to actually execute upon it, do you think, in 2024?
Yeah, we're not seeing budgets... You know, across the board, in the main, we're not seeing budgets get cut for the purposes of, of upskilling and reskilling.
Mm-hmm.
We're not seeing it. Now, are we seeing prudence with respect to how those budgets are being allocated? We are.
Yeah.
Right? So the purse strings might not be as, as loose as they were before, but in terms of the investments that organizations are making to ensure that their talent is prepared to deliver against the outcomes that they're trying to achieve as an organization, as fast as the pace of change is moving and increasing, almost daily, it feels like, that the pace of change is increasing. Surely over this last year it has, with generative AI and everything happening around skills, that, you know, it's an acute need. I mean, look, Korn Ferry just came out recently with a study, you know, that by 2030, they believe there could be a deficit of approximately 85 million people to get the work done that organizations need to get done to achieve their strategic and organizational outcomes, and that's a global metric.
But, you know, this is real, and organizations now more than ever are turning internally to develop their talent in more innovative, and expansive ways than we've ever seen. Whereas in the past, you know, if you needed two or three more thousand data scientists to allocate to a new business unit or a strategic objective, you know, a large portion of those would come from external hiring. We'd go hire data scientists and what have you. Well, the talent's not out there the way it used to be, and it's and that pool is decreasing, so now organizations are turning to upskill and reskill their internal constituents to address those needs. So that's a big change, and we believe that it's early innings on that one as well.
Yeah, absolutely. And when you talk about sort of prudence in the budgets, you know, I think that also will lead to consolidation, more consolidation of spend as well. And so as you think about, you know, your internal strategy with your sales force, how are you, what strategies are you putting in place to sort of incentivize that consolidation? And, you know, whether it's with the sales force or even, you know, providing incentives to your customers. Do you, do you feel like you need to do that in this environment?
You know, I think one of the things, Ryan, that we've done has been an ongoing investment to broaden our platform so that we're a very attractive option for organizations that are looking to standardize on one primary partner. So now that we have, you know, our broad-based, you know, content via the marketplace, that is, as I mentioned earlier, differentiated in and of itself, in addition to immersive learning for tech learning, cohort-based learning for management leadership development, and the significant investment we made to bolster our soft skills and power skills array of content.
That, coupled with the layer of services, that we've added on over the last two years, professional services, to help on the strategic side of developing a strategy to move to a skills-based organization, and the resources we bring to bear to enable that, you know, those are big investments that really have been a catalyst for us to be able to have the conversation with the CLO and the Chief People Officer much earlier on in our engagements, to establish that even though they may wanna start in a pocket of the organization, whether it be tech or product or what have you, that they should be thinking about us as their enterprise skilling partner, and why, and the impact that we've been able to have on customers like them.
So it's the field enablement, the stories, and the case studies, and, you know, all of the tools and capabilities and the training that we've enabled our sales and customer success organization with, to have the right conversations, to establish us as the, you know, the ideal, the strategic partner in an organization will be considering when they're looking to standardize and consolidate. And we're seeing more and more of that. I talked about that in earnings calls. You know, we saw in Q3, a consolidation from four vendors to one vendor, and one of the largest financial institutions in Asia Pacific.
Mm-hmm.
The reason was they didn't feel, number one, that they had a strategic relationship with anybody, 'cause they had four partners, not one.
Mm-hmm.
They hadn't taken the time to evaluate everybody to determine if we're gonna make a bet on one platform or one company, which is the one that's got the most expansive capability and has the services to help us make this transition, and that ended up being us. You know, we're very focused on and continuing to invest in the capability to enable that type of decision.
Absolutely. Now, employee development and sort of upskilling has been an established corporate strategy in the U.S., in the U.S. really for the past, you know, 3-5 years here, if not, if not longer, but real prioritization recently. But some more recent work has sort of revealed that this is not as much of the case internationally, and India is a good example of that fast-growing economy. But maybe not putting much of a focus on-
Mm-hmm
... sort of that employee development and upskilling initiatives. Can you kind of frame up for investors the international opportunity for Udemy Business and talk about, you know, how penetrated outside of the U.S. you are today?
Yeah. So, you know, we're very international in nature. Over 60% of our revenue-
Mm
... is outside of North America.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, at our core, you know, we're an international platform and partner that organizations are looking to as they're thinking about their global needs around skilling. It's interesting that you mentioned India, though. You know, 3 of our top 5 largest customers are Indian customers.
Nice. Interesting.
Right?
Yeah.
We've got global deployments.
Mm-hmm
... with some of the largest multinational professional services consulting firms that are headquartered in India. And we couldn't be happier with the partnership. In fact, when I was in India, I met with all three of them.
Oh.
You know, we had tremendous conversations with respect to the success we've had, but more importantly, the direction that they want to go. You know, us, as a strategic partner, enabling them to develop the capability in their organization to continue to win and thrive. And so because we've got those anchor tenants, the lead bowling pins have been knocked down, if you will, in that market, as well as other markets where we have significant brand awareness, you know, that are international in nature. For us, Brazil is a very attractive market. You know, we will continue to lean in and make, you know, significant investments in enabling organizations to not only understand who we are and the value we bring, but to make those decisions in a way that's conducive to their stage of development.
Because what you mentioned is actually true about India, which is, although we do have some of the largest customers in India, in the main, they're not quite where, you know, North America may be or some of the European countries may be.
Mm.
You know, we have to be really thoughtful about the stage they're at and the progression, and make sure we sequence it properly, and we're very focused on that.
Interesting. And then as you think about, you know, new logo growth for 2024 and beyond, you know, in looking at U.S. versus international, do you think that follows, continues to follow sort of the mix of the business today of 60/40 international versus domestic, or do you feel that international sort of continue to take a greater share of the revenue mix as you drive more lower growth there versus abroad versus at home?
It's gonna be a good mix, but right now, you know, APAC and Latin America are our fastest growing regions, and we expect that to continue. So, you know, as those regions get larger and continue to grow, of course, law of large numbers, the pace will slow down as they start to get, you know, really large.
Mm-hmm.
But right now, for the foreseeable future, yeah, we expect international growth to outpace. Because the massive opportunity and you know, where we are in our maturation in these countries and regions. We just have a tremendous amount of headroom, and we're excited about it, and we're leaning into it.
Sarah, I'm curious, you know, obviously, you know, the public markets today are all about sort of a balance of growth and profitability, and a lot of times standing up a new sales force, you know, to go after a specific region or country can be cost prohibitive. So can you just talk about sort of how you're allocating budget and balancing out sort of these international growth initiatives, and sort of maybe how you can do that in a capital efficient manner?
Yeah, it's a great question, and that balance is so important, especially when you're sitting in front of such a massive opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
And so we've really been thoughtful about staging where we're investing, the places that will have the most impact, the fastest, such that then you can reap that reward and reinvest those dollars. And it's part of the reason that we've talked about, you know, the expansion that we're gonna get in gross margin in 2024. We're gonna be reinvesting a lot of those dollars, and some of those dollars are going to market expansion, as we just spoke about. But also importantly, we have a partnership strategy, and that is a way to partner with organizations, and then you're investing together. They're sitting on a lot of investment, you're sitting on investment, and you can go to market with less upfront investment, and that's been really successful for us in Japan.
We are in the early stages in Vietnam, and Korea, and that's a strategy that we're gonna continue to look at, finding the right markets that make sense for us, so that we can continue to grow the top line, invest in the things that we know are gonna be delivering the long-term sustainable growth, and at the same time, operate as a profitable company and expand that gross margin over time to get to our long-term targets.
So maybe shifting to the other side of the house, the consumer business. So, you know, impressively returned to growth in the most recent quarter on sort of improved paid conversion. Yeah, how durable do you expect this sort of return to growth to be in, you know, I think what's on the mind of, you know, a lot of investors is whether or not we see sort of some of the B2B pressures in spending, you know, shifting over to the consumer, you know, in 2024. But would just love to get your thoughts on sort of framing up, you know, what the outlook for the consumer side of the business is.
Yeah, we were really, really pleased with the consumer performance in the third quarter. That being said, what we continue to focus on is that platform and our marketplace being stable, so we are not investing for consumer growth right now. What we're focused on is what we call marketplace vibrancy-
Mm-hmm.
Ensuring that we are continuing to see the course creation, the course improvements, keeping up with the pace of change. Making sure our content is doing that is the number one focus for us, and so we think it's gonna be relatively stable, plus or minus a few points, as we said.
Mm-hmm.
But what we're doing is, as we innovate, as we build capabilities for learners on the Udemy Business side, we will be porting those over time into our marketplace. A great example is badging and certifications.
Mm-hmm.
Launched that first in the Udemy Business. We will be porting that in the near term, and we think that's gonna be an exciting product for consumers. Consumers, you know, they're still... We have, number one, we think we might see some countercyclicality at some point, but we still see historic lows from unemployment, so those things are balancing each other.
Mm-hmm.
We're seeing rising credit card debt, so there's things going in a lot of different directions. The good news, I think, for us, is as we continue to focus on the relationship with our instructor partners-
Mm-hmm
... delivering tools for them so that they can get better content out faster, different types of content, and be able to deliver, and be able to deliver what is needed, for those learners, we think that that will get to growth over time. Just not a focus for today, but really happy with the stability of that platform.
That's helpful color . You mentioned the word relationship, focusing on the relationship with your instructors, and so, you know, I think we've now 8 questions in. I suppose I should talk about instructor fee changes, since that's a top, top of investor minds. But, you know, prior to the last earnings call, you sent a letter to your instructors informing them about the lower revenue share that would go into effect in January of 2024. You know, can you talk and provide a little bit of perspective on what led to the instructor fee change, and maybe how you expect it to impact the business?
Yeah, happy to, Ryan. So look, as we talked about, you know, the opportunity in front of us is massive, and we couldn't be more excited about it. We feel like, and felt like, that coming into this year, this was our time to make some strategic investments in product, brand development, and our go-to-market teams to take advantage of this, what we believe is a once in a lifetime opportunity, yeah, to build an iconic company that is synonymous with skills development. That takes investment, and so we needed to pull some levers to enable that investment to happen, and that's exactly what we did. Those levers started internally with a tremendous amount of optimization, adjustments, and we talked a lot about that in prior earnings calls.
But this was one that we needed to pull, yeah, a lever that we needed to pull, right, to enable us to make the investments, to take advantage of this opportunity. And so that really was it. That was the primary driver, right? And, you know, I'll just talk a little bit about... Because I'm sure there's interest in, you know, what's the response been? You know, how's the ongoing conversation with our instructors, been evolving? And, you know, we couldn't be happier with the progress we've made, and although not every instructor is tickled pink, as you can imagine, I think there's a general understanding that we win together. If we're growing our business at a disproportionate rate, that, you know, we win, our instructors win as we win, right? Because obviously, the payment pool grows if we're selling, right?
So that was the commitment last time that we made this change, when we went from... And this predated Sarah and I. When we made, in 2018, I believe it was, we made the adjustment from 50% to 25% in Udemy Business payouts, and that is exactly what played out. Because of the growth of Udemy Business, it more than compensated for the rate decrease, and most instructors profited handsomely from that. And that's our goal here, and that's our expectation. We're gonna continue to grow the business disproportionate to the three-year adjustment that we're gonna make, and so we're gonna see modest—we expect to see modest growth on the instructor pool through this period, and then accelerated growth thereafter.
And I think, you know, largely, our instructors understand that now, and happy to report that we have a process in place. Because we have exclusivity with instructors that have content in Udemy Business, that you have to give us 12 months' notice if you wish to no longer have your content hosted within the Udemy Business content collection. And out of our top instructor pool, we've had zero notice for cancellations, so feel really good about that. Our team is doing just a wonderful job keeping our instructors informed, and we're investing heavily into the communication streams and forums, you know, be it on-site summits and a lot that we're doing to ensure we maintain a very tight and healthy relationship with our instructors. And as we said, right now, I think we're in a pretty good position.
That's helpful, and this might be in a helpful time for... We got a question from the audience about maybe just help us understand sort of the makeup of sort of the instructor base today, and whether or not you have an 80/20 rule, where, you know, you have super content creators that, you know, are taking 80% of the share of the revenue generation, if you think about today. How does that sort of shake out?
... Pareto, that principle does play out here like it does in most cases. So yes, it's not exact, but roughly 80/20, meaning roughly 20%-30% of our instructors generate the vast majority of our revenue or make up and develop the courses that generate the vast majority of our revenue. So I think that is accurate. But Sarah, is anything, any more detail you think would be interesting for the audience that you'd like to add?
No, I think what's really important is as we look at our top categories, the verticals that generate the most time spent on the platform, the most revenue, you know, we pay a lot of attention to not just the top instructors, but that bench strength and making sure that we have different instructors with different styles of teaching that can speak to different organizations. And so you have the Pareto principle, but it's also about making sure you're as balanced as possible across all those verticals.
Mm-hmm. That's super helpful. And then, you know, maybe just from a perspective of competitive landscape, you know, at least as the work we've done, it doesn't seem like, as you say, that you're seeing... That instructors would be seeing anywhere near the level of volume growth or exposure if they were going to another platform. But maybe of just, you know, providing sort of a lay of the land on the UB side, of who you kind of run into most often and why, you know, maybe you're winning against those vendors.
Let me talk about... So I'll answer both questions, which I think you touched briefly, Ryan, on from an instructor perspective.
Mm-hmm.
Is there an option for them or what options are there to move to a competitor?
Mm-hmm.
One of the things that we, we did, we feel like was really important, is that we did not adjust the instructor payout on the consumer-
Mm-hmm
... side of the business, right? In the marketplace, which is 37%.
Mm-hmm.
And so that's where, you know, our instructors enter that way, you know, on the consumer side, and then the best of the best bubble up through ratings and reviews, and then we run them through our process, you know, AI, machine learning, and then deem them credible and viable for opportunity within UB, and then we move forward, sign an exclusive agreement, and that's how the whole process moves. So, all of our instructors monetize on both the marketplace and UB.
Mm-hmm.
Blend those rates and assume that there's a you know... Today, if you just look at our revenue, our revenue is fairly balanced between consumer and UB. You know, roughly fair, Sarah, right now, the Q3 was 55/45, roughly, right?
Roughly. Mm-hmm.
Okay. So if you've got, and so then if you blend that 37% with even if you take that down to 15, we're still very competitive, I think, paying at a higher rate than the vast majority of our competitors in the marketplace. So-
Mm-hmm
... I feel very confident that we're not gonna put ourselves in a position from a competitive perspective that is gonna make it attractive for instructors to move to another platform that has better rates, but not only that, our scale.
Yeah.
Right? You know, we've got 67 million learners now on platform. So, you know, we believe we're in pretty good position. We're paying a lot of attention to it, as you can tell, and this is something that we monitor very closely, so I feel good about that. Now, as far as competition within UB, it's really the same cast of characters. We haven't seen much change at all, and we really haven't seen much change in terms of how everybody is competing from Q2 into Q3. It's been fairly consistent.
So, I really don't have anything interesting or material to report on that front other than, you know, we continue to, you know, see the same folks in these deals, and, you know, they continue to, you know, run the same play, so to speak, and we're adjusting accordingly. So, if there's anything specific, Ryan, around competition on the UB side, happy to go there.
Yeah, no, and I would think... I think one maybe last point on this before, you know, beat it to death, but is on the consumer side, you know, we've heard the conversations around, you know, the platforms like a Kajabi or a Thinkific out there that sort of help you sort of create your own, you know, help you monetize your own content, direct to consumer. Maybe just briefly touch on sort of the tools you provide on the consumer side to give your instructors more exposure, draw more eyes into their content, 'cause I think that's a big differentiator.
That is the differentiator, Ryan.
Yeah.
By the way, we love those guys.
Yeah.
In fact, I know both CEOs of Thinkific and Kajabi, and they're great guys, and they have great businesses. The big difference, and the fundamental difference is what you just described, which is we generate the majority of the demand-
Mm-hmm
... that our instructors monetize. They're not a demand generation, you know, platform. Neither one of them, right? They develop amazing content... Excuse me, amazing tools-
Mm-hmm
... to enable instructors, you know, individuals, entrepreneurs, typically is who they attract-
Yeah
... to market on their own, and they, you know, provide, you know, CRM capability and SFA capability, and they provide transaction capability in their platforms, but they don't generate demand for their instructors. And as you know, and as most of you all know, that is something that we invest heavily in. We spend $ millions a year to generate demand for our instructors, and the majority of, for the vast majority of our instructors, if not all, the majority of the demand that is generated is generated by us.
Yeah.
You know, that, that is the fundamental difference.
Yeah, super helpful. All right, so Sarah, so the change that we're making here is expected to unlock about 300 basis points of gross margin expansion annually from 2024 through 2026. However, the rate of instructor fee cuts is not obviously as even as 300 basis points per year over the next three years. Can you sort of walk us through, you know, and help us understand sort of the other areas of incremental leverage, more notably in 2025 and 2026, you know, when you're only cutting by about 250 basis points a year on the rev share side?
... Yeah, so the Gross margin expansion, while the majority of it's going to come from the instructor revenue share, we're also getting meaningful expansion from the continued mix shift-
Mm-hmm.
from consumer to Udemy Business, as Udemy Business growth continues to outpace. And so that will be the second biggest contributing factor to growing gross margin, such that, you know, we're gonna see overall gross margin near 70% in 2026. So a stable gross margin expansion each year, majority of the contribution coming from the instructor revenue share change. And again, in 2024, a lot of that we're going to reinvest across brand, across some really great product initiatives, and increasing our go-to-market teams in some of these regions that we spoke about earlier.
Yeah, that's helpful. And then how would you say that the gross margin gains for 2024 are informing your expectations for Adjusted EBITDA margin in the next year?
Yeah. So, you know, again, we're not at the point where we're setting out our outlook for 2024, but I'll just, you know, reiterate what we said on the last call, which is we are gonna be reinvesting a lot of that. So we expect modest expansion. But we have some really great initiatives in front of us. You might have seen that we announced a sponsorship with McLaren.
Mm-hmm.
We're very excited about that, not only because it's a great brand with a great global presence, very important for a business like ours, but also because our values are aligned. They're very focused on learning, skill development, and performance, and that's what we're looking to help individuals and organizations do.
I thought you did it because it's my favorite F1 team. I'm a big Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri fan.
That too.
Yeah, yeah.
That was a factor. Yeah, input into the decision.
Perfect. As we think about maybe longer term, you, you set the target of 15%-20% Adjusted EBITDA margins, you know, for that longer term goal. Where should we look, as we look across the P&L, maybe like in the OpEx line items, where do you foresee sort of the most points of leverage or, you know, or how that breaks down as you work towards those longer term targets?
Mm-hmm. Well, you know, while we'll be getting leverage and continuing to drive operating efficiency across our P&L-
Mm-hmm
... the biggest point of leverage over time is on the sales and marketing side of things, and so the gross margin will be expanding. You'll see expansion to the bottom line coming from all of the OpEx line items, but the majority of that's gonna come from sales and marketing.
That's helpful. Okay. Okay, one quick one from the audience on the international discussion: Are there any specific markets that you're not in today that you feel like there is a real big opportunity for you to incrementally invest in?
No, there's no markets that we're not in, but there's markets that we're underinvested in.
Mm-hmm. There you go. Okay.
That we're excited about, there's no doubt. And look, I mentioned two of them.
Yep.
In terms of the opportunity for us, you know, we have the highest traffic of any country in the world coming out of India, and it's been like that for quite a while.
Mm-hmm.
We've got some of the largest companies in India and in the world as our customers, and not just customers, but fully deployed.
Mm-hmm.
And so we have a big opportunity here that we need to take advantage of, and we will. The country we had the second highest brand awareness, and I've talked about this on the earnings call, is Brazil, and so the opportunity is in Latin America. So, you know, we're gonna take advantage of that opportunity as well. So, you know, it's not that we're in, but we're in both countries, we're already there-
Mm-hmm
... and we're generating revenue. But the opportunity to invest, to accelerate growth, and the opportunity is massive in both countries, is real, and that's where our focus will be. So no, no new countries but, you know, it's going harder and faster and more strategically in some of these countries that we're in.
Interesting. I, I wanna close out the discussion on, on Generative AI. I think we can't really do any fireside chat without discussing it a little bit. And, you know, like, it's been a great benefit, I think, to the business in terms of driving new learners and looking, you know, for interest in, in, in sort of learning about the technology. But, but there are ways that Udemy can utilize Generative AI within your business, you know, to operate more efficiently, enhance the learner experience. And, you know, on the recent third quarter earnings call, you, you talked about a few areas in terms of skills mapping, personalized learning paths, automating content creation, like quizzes. You know, when should we expect to see these innovations to be sort of made generally available? And, and which are you most excited about, you know, a-a-across the list there?
If this conference was held about a week and a half from now, I'd be able to talk about a lot. We've got a press release coming out very soon.
Nice
... focused on some capability that we are going to be releasing in the months ahead that we could not be more excited about. But it's all of the same ilk that we've talked about in the past, which is enabling our instructors with tools and capability to enhance and, you know, significantly extend the learning experience, you know, to both marketplace learners, individuals, as well as organizations, in ways that, you know, we just didn't have the capability to do before we had access to GenAI. And at the same time, the mountain of data we sit on, we now have the ability to provide insights into employees...
Excuse me, into an organization's most valuable asset, which is their employees, in ways that, you know, we didn't have the ability to do before we had these large language models, and being able to pump our own data into these models, and enable these models to learn our datasets and language, and then be able to provide those insights. So nonetheless, couldn't be more excited about it. More to come. Wish I could say more. We've got press releases coming out, like I said, in the next two weeks, and, you know, we'll talk more about it around next time we get together, but, you know, that's a little bit of where it's at. Internally, though-
Mm-hmm.
I did talk about on the Q3 earnings call to where we've already lit up the ability to. We believe that over 70% of the inbound support calls and requests that come in-
Mm-hmm
... are, by the end of the year, are gonna be handled through our GenAI bot and, you know, avatars and what have you. In every—I've challenged, you know, every leader in every function of the organization to innovate in a similar fashion, and we've done a lot of our own enablement, right? So talk about organizational—I mean, one of the things we believe strongly is we need to be the best in the world at doing what we're trying to teach organizations to do, is transition to that skills-based organization. So we put everybody, including senior staff, myself, all of us, through a bit of an AI boot camp-
Mm
... so that we could at least get a baseline of AI literacy around how we should be thinking about this technology and how we should be thinking about leveraging this technology in each of our functions and disciplines in the organization. And that's already happened, and that's ongoing. So that level of innovation is happening, as I just mentioned, across every function in the company. So, you know, it is gonna transform how we operate. There's no doubt about it. It should transform how most organizations operate.
Mm-hmm.
Well, we'll talk more about it as we, you know, start to manifest some of these exciting, you know, internal developments. But, you know, right now, the one that we did talk about in Q3, that again, we're really excited about, is on the support side.
Yeah, that's, that can be really powerful in terms of a cost-saving tool. I'll just say from my perspective, well, I'm excited to see the press release in the next week or two, but I think skills mapping is potentially really powerful here because we, when we speak to organizations, their biggest challenge in moving from job-based hiring to skills-based hiring is effectively mapping skills to roles and sort of creating that framework. So, at least me, personally, I'm excited to see what the sort of updates are there, because I think that can really be a big unlock, I think, for the industry and how this shift is happening.
Well, good. You know, stay tuned. We'll make sure we send that, that release to you the day it comes out.
Oh, perfect. I, I'm sure I'm already on the list. That's good to know.
You are.
At least I hope.
You are.
Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, good. Well, I think that we've got about a minute left, so this is a good place to end it. But, Greg, Sarah, I really wanna thank you for joining me today and participating in the conference. Thank you, everyone, who listened in and you know was very active with your Q&A as well. So we'll leave it there. Have a great rest of the conference, everyone, and we'll speak soon.
Thanks so much, Ryan.
Thanks, Ryan.
Thank you.
See you later.