Welcome, everyone. I'm Curt Nagle, the SMID Cap U.S. Internet Analyst here at Bof A. With me today, CEO of Udemy, Greg Brown. Thank you very much for coming. Appreciate the time, and looking forward to the discussion.
Great to be here with you, Curt.
Thanks. So kicking off, I think to begin with just a very basic question. What is most misunderstood by investors about the stock? Clearly, software enterprise market, that's not helping, right? Maybe more specifically, is it just the basic caution in terms of the belief that you're going to reaccelerate this year? Something even more specific than that. If that's the case, what's your rebuttal? And I guess, what gives you confidence that we're on a glide path or have the structure in place to get growth accelerating? You already showed a good rate, but just I mean, that's basically the kind of the I think the thing we're hanging on, right?
Yeah, that's right. So it's a good question. I think it's the right question to kick things off with. So we've been very clear that we're running the consumer business at break-even, plus or minus. That is the flywheel in terms of the content generation engine that fuels the growth of Udemy Business, which is the growth engine of the company. So if you level set on that, and then just look at the unit economics and the growth trajectory of Udemy Business, which is a business that is half a billion, $500 million in ARR, growing 20% with net dollar retention at 111%, gross margin north of 70%. If you look at that business as a standalone SaaS business, that's a top quartile SaaS business at our size. But today, we're not currently valued nearly what the top quartile SaaS businesses are valued at in that category.
So I think that's what's most misunderstood, is that we've been very clear around how we're running the business, but yet we're not quite the valuation is not reflective of the performance of the business. I think going forward, you mentioned a couple key points, which is we've all heard a lot about, and Salesforce was just on stage a little bit ago, talking about the downward pressure on enterprise software right now. That's real. We've been pretty open about that for the last four or five quarters, that we've seen some of that softness both in EMEA as well as in our SMB segment, and then in spots in Asia-Pacific that we've called out in countries like Korea and Vietnam. That continues to persist. We're not seeing that softness get worse, but we are seeing some signs of strength on the enterprise side of the business.
And we've also been very clear about that, that our pipeline continues, pipeline generation supporting the enterprise business continues to be robust. And we're energized by what we're seeing in terms of the flow-through to close business in terms of the enterprise pipeline. And our enterprise segment is 80% of the revenue of Udemy Business. So there's some soft spots. There's some areas of focus for us that we're addressing. And then there's some areas that we're quite happy with based on the macroeconomic conditions. So anyway, and I think that's also pretty consistent with what you're hearing from other enterprise software companies. So I think we're not much different right now in terms of the impact of the macroeconomic conditions. And then you talked about the category itself. And we don't consider ourselves a traditional edtech company because we are different.
We've got this marketplace model that is very unique and different than the publisher edtech companies that we compete against. That being said, the category really has been beat up a little bit as of late. I think there's some fear, uncertainty, and doubt around generative AI and the impact of generative AI long term. We saw what happened with Duolingo. I'll say emphatically and repeatedly as I have when I've been asked about this, we view generative AI as an accelerant to our business. I know we're going to talk more about that, not as a risk. Sam Altman came out not too long ago in a video talking with Reid Hoffman about exactly this point and echoed the points that I'll make around the impact of generative AI being an accelerant for companies like Udemy.
So all to say, we are a bit misunderstood right now. I think it's on us to execute our way out of it by delivering the numbers quarter over quarter on the enterprise side, and that's what we plan to do.
Just a side note to that, so good overview. You'd mentioned there are a couple areas where you're seeing some strength. Is that just in the pipeline or something more specific?
Yeah, on the enterprise side, we continue to be encouraged by the strength of the pipeline development top line, excuse me, top of the funnel coming into the sales pipeline and our ability to convert it. And I mentioned a couple of quarters ago that we just brought in a new CRO. And since we exited last year, Q4 last year, I've had my sleeves rolled up. You all know I did run Udemy Business for over two years. And I've been very close to what we're doing in terms of the adaptations we're making to be able to execute on a global basis through this macroeconomic environment we're operating in. And I'm very pleased with what I'm seeing on the enterprise side of the business and expect our teams to continue to execute quite well through the balance of this year and beyond.
So yeah, I'm encouraged by what I'm seeing there. At the same time, on the SMB side, like most software businesses, SMB is about 20% of our revenue, which is still material enough to have an impact. We are challenged down market right now in terms of generating enough pipeline to support the productivity that we want to see at that level. And so we're doing some things about it, of course, but that's an area that we continue to work on.
Maybe taking a step back and focusing a little bit more high level in terms of strategy. You've been very, very clear about the potential from what you describe as a shift to a skills-based economy. Could you talk a little bit about some of the investments you're currently making, which has been a very big area of focus? And then just how are you, when you or your sales force is in the executive office, how are you convincing CTOs, CEOs, CFOs, CLOs, whoever that's in the room making the decision to shift budgets to training? Again, particularly in what we've talked about as a software market in terms of enterprise.
Yeah, that's a good question. So this macro trend of organizations starting to focus on developing skills or a skills-based organization is something that's still fairly early days. Analysts came out, BCG came out recently and said, with respect to generative AI skills development, 90% of companies are still in observation mode, which means that they're determining what their strategy is going to be. They're not yet in execution mode or in that phase. And so that is indicative of, I think, what we see across a lot of our 16,000 customers globally is that they're looking for insight and from us support and assistance in developing the strategy to be able to implement this concept of a transition to a skills-based organization. And we spend a lot of time and energy on that side of the house.
Our customer success and professional services teams, we invest more in these teams than I can definitively say, more than our competition does. We view it as one of our strong differentiators, and our customers do as well. The resources we bring to bear to help them develop the right strategies to begin that transition to a skills-based organization. And then generative AI is, without question, an accelerant. So in the earnings calls, I'm talking about Genpact and some other companies that are on the forefront of this and that we've developed skills academies or boot camps or GenAI learning paths, specific learning paths, which is why we came out with our own specific set of learning packs around generative AI to help organizations in this endeavor. So it's early days.
We're seeing the more progressive organization, the 10% or 20% that are out front in execution mode, the majority of organizations are still in that observation or discovery mode. And again, we're spending a lot of time in those areas helping these organizations how to think about and then how to leverage our platform and what a relationship with Udemy would look like as we help them begin to execute this transition to a skills-based organization. So what are we doing beyond the services to differentiate ourselves and to be viewed as the platform for organizations to leverage and to partner? One area is to continue to invest in what is our core strength right now, which is the content generation engine that is our marketplace.
Today, we still spin off 5,000 new courses a month into our marketplace and harvest the best of the best content and bring that into Udemy Business. This is a very global catalog from the standpoint that we've got 70,000 instructors around the world that bring the best of the best content in their chosen domains into our marketplace. Then we bring the best of that content, 26,000 courses, into our Udemy Business collection. That flywheel is spinning faster and faster as the development of technology continues to innovate faster and faster. That's something that's very unique to our model versus our competitors, which are publishers. They cannot move as fast as we can to bring content to market. I've talked about this in the past.
When GenAI came out 2 months after the earnings announcement, we announced that we had 125 courses on our platform, 25 within the Udemy Business collection. All of our competitors combined only had released 1. That's just an example of how much faster we can move based on the nature of our content generation engine. We continue to fuel that. So from a skills development standpoint, it matters a lot when organizations are looking at us versus one of our competitors, not just where we are today, but where we're going to be tomorrow in terms of our ability to keep up with the technology changes and advancements that are happening in real time. And then it's our platform.
And we're going to talk about generative AI and how we're leveraging generative AI on our platform, but we're making big investments in our platform, many of which are GenAI-enabled in the form of our learning assistant and skills mapping that are coming out and moving the beta in H2 and coming out toward the end of the year in GA that we believe, based on the feedback we're getting in Alpha, are going to transform the learning experience. So we're adding to the breadth of our platform that sits on top of this differentiated content generation engine. And then you've got the services I talked about. Those are the three areas that were fundamentally different and unique and why we believe we will lead this change into a skills-based economy.
And then I guess in terms of kind of where Udemy is now and I guess where you could be, let's say a year out, in terms of some of the investments you're making and the ability to customize, whether it's courses or curricula, I guess how does that change? And then could you help us with any statistics, whether it's productivity, whether it's retention, whether it's internal mobility for your clients? To me, those seem like really important criteria that I think would convince them to invest with Udemy in terms of driving real-world outcomes for them. Anything you could, any deals you could provide on that?
Yeah, absolutely. I'll answer the first question. Both are good questions. Two-part. So the first question is, how do we address gaps that may be in our catalog as a result of engagement with customers? So we have the capability built into our platform to systematically take feedback from our customers in terms of where there may be a gap, where we may not have content in our Udemy Business content library that they want or need to support skills development in a specific area. The first thing we do is our team goes and looks into our marketplace. We have 220,000 courses in the marketplace and then a subset, which is 26,000 courses in the content collection that we sell to our enterprise customers.
If we don't have that course in the 220,000 that is available to the broader marketplace, then we have the ability to systematically message to our instructors to give them insight that there is an unmet demand right now that they can develop content against. They rapidly then develop that content, and then we move that content into our enterprise collection. Now, to bring that point home, last year, we moved over 2,000 courses into our enterprise collection that were not there as a result of feedback from customers and requests for demand that was unmet. So we're very systematic in our ability to move content in and develop content to address gaps on an ongoing basis. And then second, the second part of your question is we are very outcome-driven in terms of how we engage with customers. Because especially in this environment, you have to be.
Nice-to-haves aren't getting funded. Whatever we're doing, we've got to be able to show that we're having quantifiable impact, ROI, and be able to move the dial. An example, one of our large APAC customers, Serco recently brought our platform online, and then they published themselves in their sustainability report the fact that we more than doubled because we were the only factor that they changed. So the attribution was to our platform. More than doubled the percentage of positions that were filled from internal candidates to 30%, which is material. And the employee engagement scores went up significantly year-over-year. And we were the only variable that they changed that was fundamental. So they attributed both to the implementation and development of skills associated with our platform.
So again, those are the quantifiable type case studies and use cases that we're looking for that we want to be able to harvest and enable our sales organization to tell those stories to convince the C-suite, folks that sit in my chair, and CFO and the CHROs that this is an investment that is a must-have, that is a need to have to develop skills that are going to help you achieve organizational outcomes.
Before we dive a little more into GenAI, in terms of just thinking about maybe it's a relatively wide swath, but your most direct competitors within enterprise, who are they? What do they do well? What don't they do well? And who do you kind of keep a closest eye on?
Yeah, good question. So in terms of the folks that we see in the enterprise, it's the organizations that I think you all cover and would expect: LinkedIn, Pluralsight, Skillsoft, and to a lesser degree, Coursera, because Coursera's strength is on the consumer side. And Jeff and team have done a great job building that consumer business, but we don't see them as much in the enterprise. So in terms of our strengths, I talked about some of our strengths earlier. It's the marketplace model and the value and impact of that in terms of our ability to keep up with the speed of technology changes and advancement, and then the global nature of our catalog. How in Japan, our content is locally developed by instructors in Japan.
It's not dubbed and subtitled, which is effectively how all of our competition sell into these other markets: Germany, Brazil, and what have you. It's not locally developed content. Ours is very unique to us. That is a sustainable competitive advantage. I won't go through the litany of things that organizations look at when they are comparing us to the other folks, but I will say the investment in services is unique on our side. That's something we're very convicted about because organizations need the support and the guidance and the strategic involvement of a partner when they're thinking about making a transition to a skills-based organization. We lean in hard to that. It does affect our CAC and so on and so forth to some degree.
But look, we've been able to move the dial from less than 5% of revenue multi-year contracts to now over 50% of our revenue in multi-year contracts in three years since I've been here. That's largely as a result of the impact that we have on an organization's ability to strategically develop skills to achieve organizational outcomes. Otherwise, these companies aren't signing multi-year contracts. You're not a large enterprise signing a multi-year contract if you don't believe this is a strategic investment with a partner that you're making a big bet on. We know that the bet on services is the right bet for us.
In terms of the platform, our platform of now, which is multifaceted as far as having management and cohort-based management and leadership development capability, soft skills and power skills capability that is best in class, which is demonstrated by ServiceNow selecting our content to be brought into their bundle that they're selling to their customers now to develop skills within 16 different career journeys. And then we've got what has always been a strength of ours, which is the technology, the tech content, the technology skills development capability we have. And then on top of that is the immersive learning product that we've developed, which is Udemy Business Pro. So we have a platform of capabilities that's unique. Everything I just described on one platform, none of our competitors have.
That's, I guess I would say, the final way that we're a bit unique and different in the enterprise segment.
So you brought up ServiceNow. Maybe that's a good segue into talking about some of the partnerships you've developed. AWS would be one of the bigger ones, Google Cloud, Docker. In the case of AWS, I think their Salesforce can sell direct Udemy product, compensated one for one. So that's pretty powerful. So just maybe talk about the potential of those partnerships. And then you guys made an announcement today in terms of a new GenAI product with AWS. So we'd love to dive into that a little bit more.
Yeah, look, we're very committed to our multi-distribution channel strategy. And this is an area that we've evolved significantly over the last two years from being primarily a point solution selling almost exclusively through our direct sales organization to now having channels and partners like ServiceNow, Docker, and AWS, which you mentioned, which we could not be more excited about. We are at a level now to where it's a strategic partnership that is demonstrated in a number of ways. Today was a good reflection of that.
The announcement we made, we've co-developed an AI learning bootcamp, if you will, that is in our leadership academy that the entire 20,000 and growing AWS field sales and service folks are now selling aggressively into their customer base based on their commitment around generative AI, their commitment, meaning AWS's commitment to compete on that field with the other folks, the other hyperscalers that are out there. So this is co-developed, something that they're very passionate about, something we're very passionate about supporting. And yes, their sales reps across their 2.5 million customers now get dollar-for-dollar quota credit for selling Udemy products into their customer base. In addition to that, all the retainers that AWS has in the large enterprise customers, those are drawn down by Udemy products.
We've already seen over the last couple of quarters the positive impact of that and multi-six-figure and beyond deals getting closed on Amazon paper as a result of that relationship and that dynamic playing out to where the customers can actually just draw down the retainer by putting everything on Amazon paper and running Udemy products purchased through that relationship. So this is a strategic relationship, and we could not be more excited about the long-term impact that this is going to have on our ability to scale. Again, we're 16,000 customers. They're 2.5 million. So there's leverage there that we're thrilled to be able to, again, take advantage of as we build this relationship with them.
How should we think about the economics of these partnerships, at least from a margin perspective?
Very attractive. We're not disclosing that at this point, but very attractive economics. At some point in the future, we may provide more insight there, but we're very happy with the economics on the relationship.
Okay. Bouncing around a little bit more, just want to go back to AI. So from some of your initial comments, I mean, at the very early, people were trying to figure out kind of what to do and how to approach it. And from a course or learning perspective or just more generally, I mean, the world changes seemingly by the week in terms of some of these things. So at this point, what is, I guess, the demand for AI training? Is it still just, like you said, just we're at the absolute ground stages and just really haven't seen a deployment yet? And then what has been the response to some of the products you've rolled out in earlier stages?
Good question. So in our general marketplace, we've seen massive adoption of our generative AI content. We've got now over 2,000 courses focused on generative AI in our catalog in the marketplace, over 4 million enrollments in those courses, and a significant portion of those are in our enterprise customer base. So it's not as if we're not seeing a tremendous amount of momentum and interest in generative AI because we are by far the fastest growing content segment, if you will, in our marketplace and in the Udemy Business Catalog. And we're still, as I mentioned earlier, in the early days of organizations making the significant investments to make this transition to skills-based organization and then with the concerted focus on generative AI. So it's early days now.
In terms of how we're leveraging GenAI into our products and services, we publicly announced that we're announcing, and I talked about this earlier in general, but I'll give you more specifics, an AI learning assistant and skills mapping that's coming out in the second half of this year. We're in alpha right now. The feedback has been tremendous, both on skills mapping. The feedback is this is going to save us hundreds of hours and months of time to be able to not only get it done the first time, but then to keep it fresh in terms of being able to adapt the skills associated with the jobs and roles that the company is focused on, making sure they can continue to deliver against the outcomes that are strategic to the company. This has all been done manually today. So that's going to be a huge one.
The AI learning assistant is going to do two things: hyper-personalize the learning experience down to the lecture level so that based on the skills that I'm trying to learn and acquire, it's not just going to be down to four or five courses, and then I have to go through and take courses that in some cases may already have content that I have skills already developed. I don't need to relearn that information. Through our effective Q&A capability with the interaction with the chatbot, we're going to be able to filter down to just the specific areas and skills that I need to develop, and then down to the lecture level, put together a learning path to give me the focus and efficiency that I'm looking for in terms of the learning that I want to partake in to develop those skills. So that's number one.
And then the learning system is going to be available to you through the entire learning experience to ask questions. And that's the Copilot experience. And that's not something that's necessarily unique to what we're doing. Coursera and others have talked about that bit. The personalization bit, that's very unique. That's something that we're going to be able to uniquely deliver based on the breadth of our catalog and the array of content that we have access to and the data that we have access to. So anyway, very excited about that. Feedback has been tremendous on both sides. We're on track in terms of timing to move to beta in H2 and then release shortly thereafter.
Great. Okay. Maybe just playing devil's advocate a little bit. This is something perhaps more topical over the past few weeks, and occasionally we'll hear sort of a counterpoint, but I guess a structural risk from AI. People see some of these pretty wild demonstrations from AI assistants, whether it's Astra or Teammate or whatever it might be. What would be your rebuttal or your counterpoint to that? This tool will not subsume at least parts of your business potentially.
Yeah, I touched on this a little bit earlier, and this is the question that Sam Altman answered that Reid Hoffman asked him in the video that I mentioned. AI in short to midterm, I'm talking 3-5 years, there is a huge chasm between its ability to create a transcript and then just read that transcript, which is effectively what it could do today, and to be able to bring that content to life with the examples and experiences and stories and use cases that world-class instructors layer into lectures and series of lectures and courses that they develop. And the divide is so massive in terms of the quality of the experience.
That is not something that I'm really not concerned about that right now, and nor are our top instructors who make seven figures on our platform and that couldn't be more excited about the work we're co-developing with them in terms of virtual instructor-led training, which is future stuff that we're not going to talk about on the roadmap today, but then also leveraging generative AI to help them continue to advance the learning experience. None of us are concerned about AI subsuming their ability to demonstrate and deliver a world-class learning experience. That's not something that we're concerned about today. In fact, quite frankly, we're leveraging all the same tech you just talked about and including it in the learning experience as an assistant, as effectively a, I would just say, a Copilot. I mean, that's the right word.
That's why they came up with the name that technology, Copilot, because effectively that's what it is.
To your point, maybe context is something that is very much not in a great, I mean, all sorts of examples of just AI systems not getting it right. In terms of exactly what you're saying, having the coursework and the instructors and the adaptability, that's just AI is just not there.
It's not. I mean, look, when we're in university, we all had those instructors that would just read from the book, which is effectively just reading from a transcript. And what did we do? We stayed home. We read the book on our own. We went and took the test, and that's how we roll, versus those instructors that brought that experience to life. You couldn't wait to get there because you knew you were going to have a dynamic learning experience. It was going to be very unique. I remember having those instructors in university, and I'm old, but I remember 35 years ago wanting to get to those courses because I knew it was going to be transformed. There was something I was going to learn that I was going to be able to take forward, and it was going to really infuse life into that learning experience.
Generative AI can't do that. That's not something that is equipped to deal with in terms of the human experience that we all know and expect from the world-class instructor. And so no, I'm not concerned about that. Our focus is around leveraging the technology to enhance that instructor experience.
You made some leadership changes recently. So new head of UB, your Chief Revenue Officer, Rob Rosenthal, you were very clear this was a priority. You made the hire. I guess why Rob as the person to scale? I guess how do we think about that? I don't want to say so much as in terms of improving execution, but why is Rob the guy to get this on a path that can get $1 billion in terms of revenue?
Yeah. So over the last couple of 2, 3 years, we've evolved from what was primarily a point solution, a content play, primarily direct sales into our customer base in EMEA in the U.S. And from a complexity perspective, fairly minimal. Fast forward to where we are today, multi-channel. We just talked about all the channel relationships we've developed. Very international. 60% of our revenue is outside North America. We have the highest brand awareness in India and Brazil of any countries in the world right now. And we're very underpenetrated in these countries as it is. And the platform that we've developed is a very different sale, presents a very different opportunity than the point solution that we started with 3 years ago when I arrived.
So the fact that we actually now are selling a platform to an international set of customers through a multi-channel distribution model is a very different game. We needed somebody that's actually done this before, that's played at this level, that's been where we're going, that has the ability to bring those experiences in and help develop the right strategy and plan of execution to support the massive opportunity that we have that I've just described. That's what Rob brings. He's got tremendous experience from being the SVP and general manager of SAP Hybris when he was there, and then onto Adobe, where he was responsible for a $2 billion revenue stream. Then most recently at Bloomreach, where he was a CRO and came into a situation where they were struggling a bit in terms of growth and transformed that into a very nice growth story.
The feedback that we got from folks he's worked with was tremendous. Then the last bit for us is really important. We're a mission-driven company. It's culture fit. We feel like he's just a wonderful fit, somebody that balances that. We talk a lot about that balance and that complementary purpose and performance and something that we care a lot about. We believe he brings a really good blend of both.
Okay. Only about a minute or so left. Maybe just quickly touch on consumer. Performing, I think, a little bit better than expected. One, I guess anything you do to sort of maybe harness that a little bit. And then as kind of a subset to that question, badging has now been extended, I think, to consumers.
It's coming in the back half.
Yes. It is extending. So how important is that as perhaps a catalyst to drive a little bit more business in that segment?
Yeah. So we did modestly raise our guidance in terms of the consumer business for the year. But look, we've been very clear that we're not optimizing to grow that consumer business as it is. We're investing in the growth of the Udemy Business. So that's going to ebb and flow a little bit. We're very concerned with the content generation engine, the flywheel that is that consumer business, and making sure the vibrancy stays very, very high. And that is the focus on the consumer side. That being said, we're making significant investments. You mentioned one of them, which is badging and certification that we initially brought into the enterprise segment that's been the fastest adopted new capability that we've seen in the enterprise segment in our platform to date. And we're bringing that capability into the consumer experience.
So we know that Coursera has done a really nice job with badging and certificates in the consumer side, which has been partly the reason that they've had the success they've had in the consumer growth of their business. And we do expect badging and certification to also have a positive impact on the growth of our consumer business. So we're not at this point putting numbers on that, but do we expect that capability to provide some lift and have a positive impact? We do.
Just one last quick one in terms of the badging acceptance or importance to enterprises. If you're, I guess, someone on the ground looking for a job opposed to within an enterprise where perhaps it's, I don't want to say more accepted, but maybe part of.
Equally important. Enterprises care a lot about it because the leaders in organizations want to know where skills lie. That's the validation bit. That badge or certificate validates that that individual's not just gone through the course or series of courses, but they've acquired those skills necessary to do the work associated with that skill development. So it's really important in the enterprise, which is why we launched it there first, and equally important on the consumer side so that those skills are marketable. You can say, "I've got that AWS badge or that data science badge or what have you" to make you a more marketable candidate when you're interviewing for that next job. So equally important.
Seems important. Okay. Well, we're at time. Gregg, thank you so much. Good discussion, and we appreciate your thoughts.
Really enjoyed it. Thanks, Curtis.