All right. Well, we're going to get started with our next fireside chat. Thank you very much for joining this afternoon. We really appreciate you, and I think we're going to have more folks come in as they get some coffee to warm up.
Oh.
We have Workiva. Julie Iskow, thank you so much for joining us.
Oh, very happy to be here. Thank you. And thank all of you as well.
For those of you who don't know Julie, she's been with Workiva seven years?
Seven years, yep.
Yeah. And CEO for the past four?
Almost, yes.
Almost. We will round up. So that is great. So, what we are going to do is we are going to go through some questions, and then at the end, if we have time, obviously, we will open it up to the audience to see if they have anything they would like to ask Julie. So with that, we should get started.
Absolutely.
Last week you reported, and I think to level set the conversation, I think it would be great to kind of go through the results at a really high level.
Sure.
17% growth, really good margin expansion, so great results.
Thank you.
Maybe give us the highlights in terms of what stood out to you in the quarter, and then we can go from there.
Sure. If it's all right, I'll just for one moment just level set on who Workiva is—
Yeah.
—and what we do, just take a moment. We are the platform, the company that organizations rely on for regulatory and high-stakes work. High-stakes work meaning there are consequences if that work is not done accurately. I think where we have focused over the past several years is in financial reporting. It's in non-financial or sustainability management, as well as governance, risk, and compliance, audit, risk management, and controls. That's where we've been playing. We have begun working on our platform, transforming it to be agentic first, and with that, it has given us the ability to begin moving beyond those core categories that we have been focusing on. We've begun broadening the areas that we play in.
We've begun doing regulatory work outside of those categories, and that includes not just reporting, but we're starting to do more and more work for the customers, again, because agentic AI is allowing us to do that. We're still in those three categories, but broadening now out to more regulatory work for our customers.
That's great. Maybe any highlights you'd have from the past quarter that you'd highlight for the group?
Sure. I think you mentioned we had 17% subscription growth, and it was actually 17% total revenue growth as well, and we exceeded the high end of our guide. We had broad-based demand across the Workiva platform there. On the margins, we had 18.3% in expanding our margins in a year when we are also hitting the billion dollars. I think we were at 85 basis points over the guide, high end of the guide for the margin, and 560 basis points improvement from prior year, Q3. Both of those were good results for us. We also continue to see our Workiva platform resonating with our customers and prospects, particularly around the innovation and the AI capabilities that we have been rolling out. Just general momentum around the work that we are doing and the capabilities that we are offering.
It is also the Workiva platform itself resonating more and more in the world that we are living in today for our work, for high-stakes work, for regulatory work. The concept of trust, transparency, accountability, traceability of the outcomes from our Workiva platform, and of course, auditability. Customers can have auditors in the Workiva platform to look at the data that goes through our Workiva platform and the outcomes that are produced. Again, the traceability, the trust, the accountability, the defensibility, and the auditability are strong differentiators for the Workiva platform, particularly when you are talking about the high-stakes work.
Yeah. We are going to get back to some of those themes a little bit later in the conversation. I think maybe before we get there, you have made a lot of changes to your executive team, and I think we are coming upon the one-year anniversary of new CFO, a new Chief Product Officer, a new CRO. Maybe help us all understand some of the things that these new executives have brought to Workiva, and anything you would highlight in terms of specific things that they have done to move the needle either on the growth or the margin part of the business.
Sure. I will just state, you highlighted the three roles that we did bring in new executives for. The concept was we had a CFO and a Chief Product Officer, and we also had a CRO that had been at the company for well over a decade and a half, all three of them. They got the company to almost a billion dollars. They had been living with us for that decade and a half, and they really had not seen where we are going, the multi-billion. It was a natural progression for us, so we did bring in these three new roles, people who have scaled, and it really was around bringing in more rigor and discipline to build a company that is capable of scaling beyond the billion. I will start with the CFO.
CFO has come in and continued to move us forward to develop a culture of discipline and with operational execution. You can see our expanding margins. In fact, we hit our target, our operating margin target for 2027 a year early. We had a 2027 target, and we reached that this year. I would say on the CRO side of things, we brought in someone who, again, has seen the scale, and he's really here not to change our strategy, nor is the CPO there to change file of sellers that we have in the organization the strategy, but really to refine it and again, bring more discipline and bring more rigor. We have become a platform company, so we are elevating the or ganization. We are going higher up.
He has experience selling to the C-suite and CIOs in addition to CFOs, account planning, account expansion, multi-solution, multi-category plays, landing with new logos, and so forth. Just again, been there, done that, seen it, and bringing more discipline and rigor there. Then, of course, on the chief product officer coming in at the right time when we're moving with software to doing more of the customer's work, not just helping them automate the human workflows and what they do. It's not just about being faster and automating. It's actually software now covering more of the work. You can see, and we'll talk about it, no doubt, some of the capabilities that we've been rolling out. All three of them came in at a good time in 2026 to, again, just in general, develop more rigor, more discipline around our growth and our scale.
At your conference in September where you had your brought your clients together, one of the themes that we heard was about selling a platform, right? Workiva is shifting from, maybe I don't want to call them a series of point solutions, but more discrete solutions to a broader holistic platform. I want to take this question in two ways. One, from a product perspective, can you help us as a group understand what needed to be done to Workiva, the product, to facilitate this platform strategy? Then secondly, on the sales and go-to-market, how are you going into customers who've used Workiva for years for financial reporting and convince them that the broader holistic platform is going to be value-added for them?
Sure. I will say at the outset, all of the Workiva capabilities and solutions that we built were built on a platform. It wasn't that we bought some solutions. It wasn't that we built something over there. They were all built on the platform. Every single solution is at least 80% the platform. We never really had to do that effort of integrating them all in that way. Certainly, you can do things where one plus one plus one is more than four, which is what we're doing. Your data, it's single source of data. As we're moving toward the agentic first platform, we are learning more about the customer, and that information can be housed in the platform where it is more helpful to all of the solutions, easier onboarding, and so forth.
You do get more out of the platform as you build it, and more of the work that each of the solutions can contribute to our customers is core to the platform. In terms of selling, I think there's been some momentum in the industry to purchase a platform in general, right? It's one single vendor, less effort. Your users are all on the same platform, easier. Just for a whole host of reasons, the platform is in vogue. When you think about what Workiva offers for, again, regulatory disclosure and high-stakes work, it is incredibly important because it is your data in a single repository, if you will, single platform. When you are doing financial reporting, you have controls and audit around that data.
That is well, and more and more in the sustainability and non-financial arenas, the data there is being treated as if it is financial data with that rigor and discipline. The financial and the non-financial go well with the audit, risk management, and controls. They do all play together. What's happening, though, is that because it is a platform play and a broader play, more stakeholders come in, right? This is where you ask about what we're doing from a go-to-market perspective and our CRO who has sold to higher up in an organization. CIOs are coming into the equation, right? You are selling to influencers and more decision-makers. Going up higher in an organization, selling more broadly, ensuring your sellers have the capability to sell AI, embracing partners.
That's another big piece of this because they are everywhere we want to be in digital and financial transformation in these large customers. When you have good relationships with your partner and strong ecosystem and you sell together with them, co-sell, of course, they can provide great influence in those deals. It is going out and landing new logos, expanding, selling higher, selling broader, selling with partners. The story is very strong, and it does resonate.
Another thing that you've been talking about as a company for a little while now is about packaging and good, better, best, and making sure that your customers are appropriately slotted within those different categories. Help me put the pieces together between the platform strategy in which you're trying to sell a more holistic platform with the opportunity to shift customers or place customers into a product grouping or bundle which better represents the needs that they may have.
Sure. When we think about where we will be getting growth and how we continue to grow, we have a number of different levers. One, of course, is selling our customers more of the capabilities and solutions across the Workiva platform. Another is selling more of the solutions that we have. If you're a customer that buys controls, we are value-based, we're not seat-based in pricing. You might start with 100 controls, and we can upsell there and sell you 500 controls as you grow or as you expand the use of it. You can buy more solutions, you can buy more of a solution, and then we have introduced more recently, over the last year and a half, the concept of the good, better, best pricing.
We did that because what we were finding is we were selling customers a solution with a lot of capability in it, but some weren't ready. They only wanted a portion of it or a core foundation of it. Instead of now discounting them and giving it all to them at once, we can now sell them an essentials package or a standards package, and then when they're ready, we can then upsell. The third way that we can sell into our customers and create more value is this good, better, best. What we have found is it's a very good monetization framework for AI. We've been adding more AI capability in that premium tier of late.
We started with one of our core flagship products, SEC, which the majority of our customers have, and we've been upselling by adding more AI capability into that premium tier. What we've seen is an uplift of approximately 20% when we have in that premium tier some of our advanced AI capabilities. Traction's been strong, been very happy with it, and what it does is it allows the customers to get exposed to a variety of our AI capabilities, and it gives us the chance to watch how they're using those capabilities, which ones are resonating more, which ones are being used more, how are they using it, how much are they using it. It really gives us an opportunity to see what's going on on usage patterns.
What it really does, first and foremost, it gives them predictability in leveraging our AI capabilities, and it gives us predictability in the bookings that we're going to get. So predictability on both sides, exposure to a variety of AI capabilities, and just a really good way of charging and getting an uplift with these AI capabilities. We've been very pleased with the uptick and the reception in the market, so much so that we're starting to expand into other areas of the platform with this monetization framework.
And then maybe just to wrap on the go-to-market and sales. I think you've been pretty consistent throughout the year categorizing the selling environment as pretty stable. I guess as we head into year-end, this is a time in which budgets either get used or people start setting budgets for next year. When you speak to your selling organization, I guess, what are they hearing in terms of budgeting? Where is the budget for Workiva coming from relative to other organizations? Are you seeing tension between customers' needs to spend in other IT needs versus Workiva? Anything you'd share with the group on that?
I have said that the demand environment seems relatively stable for us, and let's not forget who our customer is. We're in the upmarket. We sell to the world's largest customers, the top few thousand, and are really where our core is. We do, of course, go to the mid-market as well. They're buying capabilities that you kind of don't want to mess around with much, as I was saying. If you don't get it right when you're giving something to an auditor, a regulator, an investor, there's a consequence. It's not something you take a chance on, "Oh, I think I'll go buy the marketing thing and hold off on this right now." So we're very fortunate in that stable demand.
But I will say, I'm hearing all around, not so much from our team, but I am hearing budgets are getting tighter this Q4 because companies have spent so much in prior quarters on AI, working to get ROI from that. Typically, where we have our largest quarters in SaaS companies is Q4, where there's budget to spend before end of year. You're kind of hearing, "We don't have so much here that we're going to be spending as much." So I'm hearing that narrative on the Q4. But again, for us, it's been relatively stable through Q3. So remains to be seen what's happening in Q4. But I'm hearing those, and I suspect that the question came because you are hearing it as well.
We've asked everybody today, so it's not just you.
Yeah. I will say that when it comes to Workiva solutions, people think, "Oh, you're going to spend it on SaaS, you're going to spend it on AI." We are AI, right? Our customers get AI when they buy Workiva. The capabilities are there, the offerings are there. We are very forward-looking in that way, and we ensure that our customers understand that we are future-proofing them by innovating and continuing to leverage the newer capabilities.
Let's talk about AI then.
Oh, okay.
I guess to start with, in the finance suite, you talked about the need for, it has to be right. There is no room for error in terms of providing these disclosures to government entities. Can you give us a flavor for how you see your customers' ability to adopt these new agentic tools? Are they ready? Are there things that generally that they need to do? Just give us a lay of the land in terms of your customers' willingness to adopt all of the new innovation that you're bringing to market.
Sure. As you can imagine, with 7,000 customers, office of the CFO, it runs the gamut, right? There are those customers that haven't even allowed their users and the people in their company to turn on AI. They're very cautious. Then it goes all the way to the other extreme, which is there is a lot of pressure and mandates to leverage AI. Don't use a vendor that is not forward-looking and leveraging AI and innovating and so forth. We're meeting the customers where they are, and I think it's something that we do have as a differentiating feature relative to some of the startups in the fields, right? You can meet the customer where they are. They can use Workiva like they've been using it over the last decade.
They can go in, they can have people in there, they can bring agents in, they can be headless because we have an MCP gateway now, and they can leverage it that way. They can use our agentic capabilities and let us do more of the work. Our philosophy is, we're going to be able to do the work for you from an agentic perspective. You choose, customer, the level of autonomy. We'll meet you where you are. You can go in and use your judgment where it should be, you feel it should be used, but we're going to be capable of doing more and more of that work for you, but we're also going to let you make the decision on how much of it you want us to do. We are encouraging our customers. It's in the platform.
Well over half of our customers have enabled it, turned it on, activated it. We do see use, and we can track usage patterns. As we started this question, there are some customers who are just still getting there and thinking about using it and testing the waters, but we're hot and heavy on the other side too. We're going to go where the customer goes, and we're going to help them get there. I mean, we put the core AI in the platform. It is available to anyone that wants to use it just to make work more streamlined, to automate things, make it better.
The multiple LLMs are available to do your work on the Workiva platform. Then we started doing more advanced capabilities in each of the solutions. We're helping them get there and ensuring that they are exposed to it, but it's really different across the customer base and how they're leveraging AI today.
One of our thesis is that to really harness and extract the true value of AI is that the way work gets done needs to change, right? If you just plug AI into your current work stream, you are going to get maybe some value, but you are not going to be able to harness the true value of what it can do. I guess, what role, if any, do you think Workiva plays in terms of helping their customers adapt their workflows to really harness the capabilities that you are doing? Is that something you can do? Is that something that your partners can help with? Is that something that maybe you do not necessarily have a role in? Maybe help us think about the way that work can change for your customers.
Sure. I think you are spot on, by the way. That is exactly right. Each of us can use it every day, but it really matters when we are, especially with cross-functional workflows and not just automating those workflows, but really changing them. That is really what agentic AI is all about. It can plan and reason and execute on your behalf in different ways than you might have done as the individual human, right? That is really what we do and the concept of adding agentic capabilities into the Workiva platform. We are modifying and changing and maybe even having different workflows, right? We do that from the technical standpoint, and we will help our customers get there as we described, as I answered your last question. But we will lean on partners because they have the deep domain expertise, and they are ready to do this.
They are moving away from billable hours on those services that they had, those recurring services, and it is taking a different form, and this is one form. Our customers are better off, especially in the upmarket, are better off with our partners and us. They know us, they have the domain expertise, and together we can make a difference in helping the customers leverage AI, get more value from it. That is whether the partner is just building AI, for example. We rolled out a new capability, our Agent Studio, and partners are going to be building agents on the Workiva platform. The agents that they build, they can be assured and the customer be assured, will be again, on using traceable data narrative, trusted data, defensible data, and of course, auditable.
They can build agents on our platform for the Our partners can build for the customer. They can guide the customer as long as they are using the data and outcomes from the Workiva platform. It is a better outcome for everyone, and it, of course, will help our customers move along. We do, of course, have solution architects, solution engineers. The concept of forward deployed engineer is evolving. Yes, we can help in these ways too, but we are better going into our customer with a partner who has that domain expertise and the expertise around Workiva’s platform as well.
The audience is investors, right? I think they'd like to know how all of this innovation you've built in AI, how it's going to affect the financial model. We touched a little bit about good, better, best, but maybe we can double-click in terms of maybe how much AI has affected the business this year, how much you think it can monetize in the future, and what are the various levers that you have to pull to monetize your innovation?
Sure. I think some of which we just discussed around, we're able to monetize it through the good, better, best model today. But we're also selling it, as we have been selling our other capabilities. An example, and I again remind you, we're not seat-based. Today, we sell based on size of company, complexity of company. We have good proxies for usage. We already sell usage-based, and in a way, consumption-based. Number of data integrations you have, the number of entities that you have, the number of controls that you have, the complexity of your organization. We already sell based on that. When we roll out our agentic capabilities, and we did at our customer conference, we rolled out some new regulatory offerings, country-by-country reporting, for example, or Bureau of Economic Analysis regulation and reporting.
Those are agentic capabilities that we are pricing in the same way that we price our current offerings. As we agentize even our current offerings, they're still going to be priced and packaged in the same way. Again, because we're not seat-based, we did not move to suddenly a consumption. We did not need to move to a consumption-based model, or a monetization framework. I'll even say we have a Builder package that we just released in our investor day and our user conference as well. It's our Agent Studio with our MCP gateway together in a package for our customers, and we are going to monetize that in the same way, based on customer size, based on complexity, and some usage metrics. Multiple ways to monetize AI. Early days, we're just getting started.
These are capabilities that we just announced, and we'll probably begin focusing and monetizing those in earnest probably over the next few quarters. But again, the advanced agentic capabilities that we've been putting in our good, better, best model in that premium tier have been seeing good traction and good interest, and we're already starting to monetize those.
So maybe we can shift gears and talk about a couple of other different product areas. Maybe first, we can start with sustainability. I mean, I think everyone in the audience knows the environment for sustainability has changed. I guess what I am most interested in learning about more is about how that slowdown is going to affect the business and how you think about the growth algorithm into next year. I think my understanding is that in late 2024 and in early 2025 was sort of the peak bookings for—
Yes.
—sustainability. Obviously with revenue recognition, it takes a while to flow through, but it seems like we are lapping some of that now. Maybe just help us sort of get the lay of the land in terms of how that is affecting, at a high level, the business model, and when are the sort of the peak lapping headwinds? When do you think that they are going to fade?
Sure. I will start by saying we have a few dozen solutions and capabilities and offerings across the Workiva platform, so it is very broad-based. Sustainability, less than 15% of our revenue, never has gone beyond that. But we did have a very strong year and a half in 2024 and the beginning of 2025, and that was from a bookings perspective. It was a solution, a growth lever that we rolled out, a category that went from zero to $100 million in ARR in just a couple of years. So, that was a very strong solution for us, and it peaked in 2024, as you said, and beginning of 2025. Then, the political situation changed, here in the U.S. and worldwide. We had the Omnibus and the CSRD, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, was de-scoped and so forth. We did see that tailwind that you had seen subside.
Our bookings subsided. But what was happening in 2025 is the revenue, which is the lag from the high bookings in 2024, was high in 2025. Even though the bookings have subsided in some from sustainability, we are seeing, even today, we are seeing some of that hard-to-compare growth rates, right? Because 2025 revenue was high, 2026 lower, and the comparison of the two is what you are seeing, right? So that is the impact of sustainability. But again, we have managed to keep the growth rate up given the resilience of the Workiva platform and the capabilities. We are also fortunate, capital markets had been down while sustainability was going up, and then when sustainability got moderated, still a growth lever for us, did not go to zero, then capital markets and SEC were coming back and so forth.
I wouldn't call it whack-a-mole, but we've been very fortunate around the resilience of the Workiva platform because of it. We're continuing to sell very broad-based across the portfolio. We're rolling out new solutions, whether it's the Builder package, it's our new regulatory offerings, and so forth. We're continuing to sell and bring value to our customers in a number of ways. We also have the uplift in the premium categories of our solutions. The growth levers are available. We're expanding globally. We're getting better at account expansion. Growth's coming from a number of ways. But yes, as we've described, that tailwind that we saw in sustainability has definitely subsided.
Sustainability, if I go back a couple years, I think was one of the ways that you were thinking about unlocking the European opportunity more generally.
Yes.
Has your views on the attractiveness of the European market changed, and maybe what are you doing to unlock Europe now that maybe that is not as big of a driver as it was a few years ago?
Sure. It is still a very strong growth driver for us and a significant growth opportunity. When you think about Europe, they're on the forefront of regulation. It's a very rich regulatory environment, so it's beyond simply sustainability. And I do think sustainability is still alive and well there. They're on their third year of the wave one large filers for Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Wave two comes in 2028 for 2027 reporting year. So it is still alive and well and is still a growth driver in Europe for us. And integrated reporting, the financial and non-financial sustainability together is a driver because that is a requirement in Europe for these larger companies. So we are still going strong. We're still investing there. We are doing the same thing in Europe as we are here in the U.S. We are leading with the Workiva platform.
We are focused on new logo growth. We are focused on account expansion. We are focused on delivering and co-selling with our partners. It really is quite similar. I mean, regions differ a little bit here and there, and regulation differs a little bit here and there across. But by and large, it is still the same approach across the world for us. Platform, logo lands, expansion, and partners. That is really our go-to-market strategy there and here. When you think about the revenue outside of the U.S. for Workiva, we are now around approximately butting up against 30% on the revenue outside, and that is predominantly Europe. So very strong growth lever for us, and it remains so.
You mentioned capital markets two questions ago. So maybe we will just talk a moment about capital markets and what you are seeing there and how that momentum has sort of evolved as the years progressed.
Capital markets, the fun one. Yes, we have been having some fun. As you know, we are helping a large language frontier model provider with preparation for their IPO, one of, if not the biggest coming. We did disclose that we helped SpaceX as well over the line. So we have had some fun customers of late. But we continue to get our share of the market, particularly upmarket, which is where we focus in capital markets. It has seen over years, since the pandemic, it has been up, it has been down, it has been almost nonexistent for a period.
It has had a comeback, a bit of a comeback over this year. So we will see what happens with Anthropic. Right now, everybody is waiting, so a little bit of a standstill. We will see if and when that really does happen and if that opens up the IPO market more or if it blocks it. We will see what happens. But we do not have a crystal ball. If we did, maybe I would not be sitting here with you.
I hope not.
But we're prepared either way. I mean, we have baked the comeback that we've seen into our guide, but we're very thoughtful about the way we look at that market. I'll remind everyone too, the revenue, 5%, it's less than 5% of our revenue, cap markets. It just happens to be a very good opportunity for us to land or add on and expand. A lot of those companies come to us 12, 18 months before they go public and buy our private company reporting, they'll buy our private company controls, then when the IPO comes, they are ready with their discipline and so forth and rigor to be a public company. Then they go ahead and add on SEC and SOX and multi-entity reporting and so forth. So, many of those customers come to us already at IPO with multi-solution.
So, you've mentioned this a few times in the conversation about why Workiva is so relevant, especially around the auditability and the trust factor. I will say in another presentation today, unasked for and volunteered, a company said that they built their own reporting solution with AI. I'm sure you've gotten this question many times, so I think it'd be helpful to sort of wrap a bow around why a customer would buy Workiva instead of building something themselves.
Sure. We really do not see any startups in our space, and it truly is. It doesn't mean companies aren't trying, but the earned advantages, I call them, we don't use the word moat, we call them the earned advantages over a decade and a half, deep regulatory expertise, the delivering of regulatory investor-grade reporting and investor-grade and regulatory work. The almost 7,000 customers we have worldwide in the world's largest companies, we already have their data, their financial data, their pre-public data. They already trust us. So it's trusted data, it's trusted customers, it's our expertise, and it's the fact that we do have the proprietary technology that ensures that when there are outcomes from our platform, the analysis, the reports, your submissions to regulators and investors, it is absolutely traceable, defensible and auditable. Those things are earned advantages over a decade and a half.
We are just trusted in the office of the CFO. To think that one of our customers in the large market, customers that we have, that they will decide to stop using Workiva or not get a Workiva to use Claude on their ERP, it's very hard to imagine. That trust that CFOs can have when the data comes out of the Workiva platform is front and center and a key reason why we are looked at as the premier provider in the office of the CFO.
I will wrap up the question with capital allocation. Workiva has made huge strides in profitability, huge strides in terms of generating cash. You haven't really been a company that's done a bunch of acquisitions historically. Can you help us lay out the land for the philosophy of capital allocation as you go to your 2030 targets?
Sure. I will say, we're focused on optionality here. We want to make sure that we are managing dilution with our dollars. That's front and center. Barbara, I didn't highlight, but Barbara Larson, our CFO, has been focused on that. I think we've bought more than four times our stock this year already than we bought in its entirety last year, four times more than last year. So, we are focused on that. But we do scour the world for, literally the world, for acquisition targets that make sense for us. It's very hard over these last couple of years. I would be happy, our head of corporate development, I would be happy to purchase things that would be additive to our platform, maybe additional capability adjacency that makes sense in the office of the CFO and beyond.
Something that helps us accelerate our growth and get through our TAM. Things that we acquire that might bring us expertise that we don't have, whether AI or domain, that we believe we need. So, there's plenty of reasons to, but you look at the valuations, you look at the capabilities, you look at the additions in terms of their margin. We want to be thoughtful for investors. We have done a few tuck-in acquisitions that have made a lot of sense and have actually brought value. So, I'm very bullish, but I'm also scrutinizing, very thoughtful about what we bring on. So, it's possible. What we have left ourselves with our capital, our working capital, is optionality, to buy stock, to buy acquisitions, and of course, across the board, to do what's right for the company.
That's fantastic. We're up on time. Julie.
All right.
Thanks so much for being with us today.
Thank you for having me, John. It was great. Thank you all for being here. Appreciate it.