C3.ai, Inc. Q2 FY2023 Earnings Call

Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, and welcome to C3 AI's earnings call for the second quarter of fiscal year 2023, which ended on October 31, 2022. My name is Reuben Gallegos, and I'm the Vice President of Investor Relations. With me on the call today is Tom Siebel, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Juho Parkkinen, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed today, we issued a press release with details regarding our second quarter results as well as a supplemental to our results, both of which can be accessed through the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.c3.ai. This call is being webcast, and a replay will be available on our IR website following the conclusion of the call. During today's call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking under federal securities laws that reflect our views only as of today and should not be considered representative of our views as of any subsequent date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or our outlook. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. For a further discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our filings with the SEC. All figures will be discussed on a non-GAAP basis unless otherwise noted. Also during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in our press release. Finally, at times in our prepared remarks, in response to your questions, we may discuss metrics that are incremental to our usual presentation to give greater insight into the dynamics of our business or quarterly results. Please be advised that we may or may not continue to provide this additional detail in the future. And with that, let me turn the call over to Tom.

Thank you, Reuben, and hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm here with Juho Parkkinen, our Chief Financial Officer, and we are most pleased to share our results for the second quarter for fiscal year '23. Bottom line, it was a solid quarter in which we delivered our stated objectives and met expectations despite the rocky economic situation and the generally morose condition of the markets. In the last earnings call, we described two strategic initiatives to spur faster growth. One was to recompose our sales team with an emphasis on technical and domain expertise. The second was to shift our pricing model from a subscription-based pricing model to a consumption-based pricing model. I'm happy to report these initiatives have been successfully completed in the second quarter. I will explain these actions in some detail, but first, I'll comment on the financial results and some of the successes that we achieved during the quarter. With large, the quarter was quite solid. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $59.5 million, an increase of 26% year-over-year. Operating loss improved 15 points year-over-year to 24%. We continue to maintain a healthy gross margin of 77%. Customer count grew 16% year-over-year to 236. Current RPO of $164.5 million was down slightly and consistent with our expectations as we transition to a consumption-based pricing model. We ended the quarter with cash reserves of approximately $860 million. The number of completed contracts in the quarter increased to 25, approximately a 100% increase year-over-year. Our average contract value in the second quarter was just over $800,000, down from $19 million a year earlier. This reduction in contract value was a direct result of our new pricing model. We believe the new pricing model will result in a substantially increased number of smaller transactions, providing greater forward visibility in both revenue and bookings. Our new consumption-based pricing model was well-received by our customers, prospects, partners, and our sales organization. We expect this new model to increase the number of customers with which we engage in any given quarter by an order of magnitude. As these customers continually increase their usage over time, we expect the compound effect on revenue growth to be quite significant. Our customers and prospects find the new consumption-based pricing easier to understand and easier to contract. Our market partners find this new pricing model well-aligned with how they price their own services and one that facilitates their successfully selling C3 AI products. I'm happy to report that our transition to this new consumption-based pricing model is now complete. Simultaneously, last quarter, we completed a transition of similar magnitude with the recomposition of our global sales team. We are now growing a team of highly qualified, well-trained technologically expert sales professionals who are engaging with prospective customers in selling pilots and expanding production usage with existing customers. There is no question that there is pervasive economic uncertainty in the global business community that continues to provide bookings headwinds. This has been especially significant in the tech markets that are experiencing a bloodbath in equity prices, with significant layoffs at companies including Amazon, Meta, Salesforce, Google, Snap, and many others. I believe this is just the start of what will be a significant tech market correction. Layoffs of established companies will accelerate. The many Series A, B, C, and D companies that are hemorrhaging cash will simply not survive. Just like every other tech recession that we're seeing, the human capital at the piece parts companies will be redistributed to those companies that survive. We are confident in our business outlook, especially with the nearly $600 billion addressable market opportunity that we have before us. We continue to invest in our products and in the talent required to meet our goal of building a cash-positive profitable business that will return to a growth rate of greater than 30% year-over-year within the next 18 months. Our employee base grew last quarter to over 850, a sequential increase of 83, and we continue to hire key engineers, data scientists, sales professionals, and other key roles across the organization. Turning to some of our customer successes in the quarter. Shell has continued to expand their use of our solutions in new areas, and have successfully implemented C3 AI sustainability for manufacturing at two of their key offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. We also have successfully concluded an ESG trial with Shell, focusing on leveraging NLP to generate targeted insights on the rapidly evolving ESG priorities of Shell's key stakeholders. Shell has already addressed and communicated that they are realizing massive economic value annually by deploying our C3 AI applications across the enterprise, upstream, downstream, midstream renewables. We're just getting started. There's a large and growing pipeline of enterprise AI applications that Shell is building, testing, and deploying using the C3 AI platform, realizing the strategic value of our partnership and the fulfillment of the digital transformation of one of the largest and most iconic companies in the world. Cargill has continued to expand their use of our solutions, optimizing food production and distribution to meet the dynamic needs of the market and ensuring sustained food value chains in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. This is a critical mission that has enormous humanitarian ramifications, and we are proud to participate with Cargill in this important mission. Lastly, we are proud to say that we've continued to expand our relationship with the United States Air Force, working closely with them to improve aircraft availability and efficiency of readiness programs of the entire fleet of over 3,700 aircraft. The AI capabilities that we are putting into operation today offer the potential to improve readiness rates by up to 20% and reduce the cost of maintenance for up to $4 billion per year. Let me address our partner ecosystem. In recent weeks, there's been something of a seismic shift in the enterprise AI software space. Traditionally, the primary competition to purchasing C3 AI enterprise applications was for a company to license a large number of tools from the hyperscalers, piece parts from providers like Cloudera, Pivotal, DataBridge, DataRobot, and the many scores of other point solution providers, and then engage in a long and expensive science experiment in an attempt to build a custom enterprise AI platform. No one to our knowledge ever succeeded with that. Now the market is truly changing and demonstrating an increased desire for production, tried, tested, proven enterprise AI solutions. All of the hyperscalers have acknowledged this within the last few months. Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud was the leader, announcing that GCP would lead in the market, not with piece parts, but with turnkey production enterprise applications from C3 AI. Then last week, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, announced that their customers were now demanding turnkey applications, not toolkits. This was followed the next day by Scott Guthrie, EVP of Microsoft Azure. All announced that the customers were telling them they no longer wanted toolkits to build applications, they wanted functional turnkey AI applications that accrue immediate value. With a growing family of 42 production enterprise C3 AI applications in the market that serve the needs of financial services, utilities, health, manufacturing, defense, intelligence, and other industries, C3 AI is well positioned to capitalize on this now clearly recognized market requirement. We sell with GCP. We sell with Azure. We sell with AWS. We sell with Baker Hughes. We sell with Booz Allen Hamilton. And we are well positioned to help our partners deliver to their customers the solutions they are demanding. C3 AI and Google Cloud are continuing to jointly invest in industry applications with the launch of two new enterprise AI applications last quarter optimized on GCP. Our sales teams are actively co-selling today to over 300 accounts around the world. Last quarter, we closed an expansion with a large transportation company, currently signing one of the top 50 retailers in the world to license our supply chain applications and signed several new deals in the financial services and oil and gas industries. Our GCP joint selling activity is quite brisk, and as a result, GCP is our fastest growing install base. That being said, AWS remains C3 AI's largest installed base, constituting about 56% of our customer base. C3 AI and Microsoft continue to close deals, particularly in the energy and manufacturing sectors. Azure remains our second largest installed base, constituting approximately 27% of our customer base. We announced a number of new product enhancements here in the course of the quarter that I'm not going to review in this call, but we continue to invest in technology leadership. We continue to invest in R&D, and we’ll continue to add to our industry-leading portfolio of enterprise AI applications and add fairness and increased performance to these existing applications. Let me talk for a minute about human capital. C3 AI continues to be recognized as a Great Place to Work. In the second quarter, we received over 23,000 job applications. We interviewed over 2,200 of these applicants, and we hired 90. One of the secular changes of this tech downturn is the increased availability of highly trained professionals who are willing to come into the office, roll up their sleeves, and get to work. We have never been more confident with the team that we have and with their ability to execute our strategy. Turning to guidance. Our Q3 revenue is expected to be between $63 million and $65 million, and we are reaffirming our full year fiscal year '23 revenue guidance of $255 million to $270 million. For non-GAAP operating loss, we expect in Q3 between $25 million and $29 million. And for the full year, we expect an operating loss between $85 million and $98 million. We continue to operate at roughly an 80% non-GAAP gross profit margin. We have a clear path to top-line growth, non-GAAP profitability, and cash-positive operations by the end of fiscal year '24. At this time, we do not see our cash balances falling below $700 million before that inflection. Final comment on the big picture. C3 AI is addressing a $600 billion addressable AI software market. If not the largest, we are one of the largest providers of these applications globally. Our business is exactly on track with what we have communicated to you. Our goal remains to establish and maintain a global leadership position in enterprise AI software. In the short run, we believe tech companies and tech equities will continue to face headwinds, as long as the Fed keeps its foot on the brake. The collateral damage, I think, is going to be more significant than people think. That being said, when the Fed takes its foot off the brake, be that in 2023 or 2024, C3 AI will be bigger, stronger, cash-positive, profitable, a clear market leader, and well positioned to benefit from the inevitable equity market surge that will ensue. Now let me turn the call over to our CFO, Juho Parkkinen, for a summary of our financials and additional commentary.

Thank you, Tom. Now I will provide a recap of our financial results, add some color to the drivers of our financials for the back half of the year, and conclude with some additional color related to the consumption-based revenue model we introduced on our last call. As Tom mentioned, we ended the quarter with revenue of $62.4 million, which represents 7% year-over-year growth. Subscription revenue increased by a solid 26% and was 95% of total revenues. Gross profit increased 5% to $47.8 million, and gross margin decreased 122 basis points to 76.6%. The decline is primarily due to a higher mix of trials and pilots, which carry a higher cost required to ensure customer success during this early phase of engagement. Operating loss of $15 million improved $7.6 million year-over-year, and operating loss margin also improved from 39% in the prior year to 24% in Q2. Our customer count increased by 16% year-over-year to 236, and we closed 25 deals during the quarter. It's noteworthy that deals under $1 million grew 167% year-over-year in Q2. Now turning to RPO and bookings. We reported RPO of $417.3 million, which met our expectations as we continue to convert to consumption-based deals. Current RPO was $164.5 million, down 8% from last year. We continue to see positive trends in bookings diversity outside of oil and gas, particularly in the Federal, aero, and defense sectors, which grew sequentially and year-over-year. Turning to cash flow. Free cash flow for the quarter was an outflow of $77 million. Breaking this down, $23.7 million was for the build-out of our new headquarters. As I have mentioned previously, this will be amortized over the term of the lease and will not have a meaningful impact on our path to profitability. Normalizing for this payment, our adjusted free cash flow was an outflow of $54.3 million. Turning to guidance-related assumptions. As Tom mentioned, we have completed our transition from a subscription-based pricing model to a consumption-based pricing model and are now focused on ramping revenue from consumption-based deals. With respect to gross margin, as the number of pilots ramp in the coming quarters and as the proportion of period revenue is more weighted towards pilots, we expect gross margin percentage to decline. However, consistent with the financial model we shared with you as part of the prior quarter earnings call, we expect the gross margin to increase to historical levels by the same time we expect to reach our initial non-GAAP profitability. Operating margin model and guidance includes our expectations for revenue growth and gross margin impact. Looking at our cash reserves, we have sufficient capacity to execute our plan to invest for growth in the coming quarters. We are well capitalized, having approximately $860 million available. With the planned expenditures related to the build-out of our new headquarters and investments in our business, we expect our cash investment balance to bottom out in fiscal '24 before we see improving free cash flow and improving cash balances thereafter. As a reminder, one of our most significant cash usages has been for the build-out of our new headquarters, which, unlike many high-tech companies, we actually occupy. We are on track to achieve positive non-GAAP operating margin in the fourth quarter of the next fiscal year, driven by accelerating revenue growth and improving gross margin. Regarding the transition to consumption-based pricing, as a reminder, we do not require existing customers to move to a consumption-based arrangement. Our customers have been satisfied and are expected to remain in their current contract terms. As such, we expect the RPO to decline as our new deals will not require a significant upfront non-cancelable arrangement, but rather a consumption-based usage arrangement. The assumptions we provided last quarter for modeling the consumption-based business remain unchanged. In summary, we are focused on delivering profitable growth to our shareholders, and we continue to expect achieving non-GAAP profitability in the fourth quarter of fiscal '24 while growing the top line in excess of 30%. With these remarks, I would like to open the call up for questions.

And our first question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank.

I guess my first one is either for you, Tom, or for Juho. Just as we think about the plan that you've laid out, and it's nice to see the progress relative to what you told us last quarter, but traditional metrics obviously don't tell the full story. So what's the right metric for us to track the progress quarter-to-quarter that you're making? What are the milestones that we should be looking for? And maybe can you tell us what metrics do you measure yourselves against internally and hold the sales force accountable to and incentivize them on so we can just get a sense quarter-to-quarter? In addition to customers, obviously, they eventually translate to dollars, but any insight there is helpful. And then I've got a follow-up.

Brad, it's Tom. The key point is that with this new model, we are focused on the number of customers. We want to know how many new pilots are closing each quarter. We anticipate that in the upcoming quarters, this number should be significantly larger than what we currently have. Last quarter, we completed about 13 to 15 pilots in roughly half a quarter, since we announced the shift to this model around the middle of the quarter. Essentially, we are focused on the number of customers, and we will also monitor how quickly they increase their usage of our products. If we indeed gain a much larger number of customers and they continue to expand their usage as previous customers have, we've carefully modeled this to show that we can expect a significant acceleration in revenue growth.

Right. Brad, just one thing to add to that. So we guided in our original model for the analyst community to expect five pilots for the quarter. We actually closed 13, which was a combination of trials and pilots. So we're quite excited about how this started, this kicked off.

That's helpful. And maybe just one follow-up. Appreciating the accelerated path to profitability and naturally, just given what's going on in the world, you guys are in a pretty interesting position for sure. But what would need to happen to get you to positive free cash flow ahead of the fiscal '24 expectation? And maybe can you just clarify for us, is that an exit rate? Is that for the full year? How do we measure that? And what circumstances would maybe cause you to accelerate that? Not that you need to, you've got plenty of cash, but I mean, this is clearly the discipline that the world wants to see.

We can become cash positive and profitable within 90 days by laying off about 40% of our workforce. While this may please some analysts and shareholders, it isn't in the best interest of the shareholders, employees, or customers. Essentially, we could stop our marketing expenses and reduce our workforce significantly, whether it's 40%, 50%, or 35%. That would make us cash positive and profitable this quarter, but I don't believe that would be responsible or beneficial for anyone involved. You asked the question, and we've provided the answer. Juho, do you want to add anything to that?

Only thing, Brad, that we've modeled our path to profitability, we feel confident on that and we stick to that.

Got it. So just to clarify the expectation though, it's for the full year? Is it an exit rate when you say fiscal '24...

It’s an exit rate of Q4 FY '24.

I did want to circle up on some of the customer count dynamics just because I know that is going to be 1 of the metrics we're looking at while you guys are going through this transition. I think you guys had cited 236 up from 228 last quarter, right? And I just wanted to see what has the customer behavior been like since you guys announced this transition? And what I really would be interested in hearing I know you guys are not forcing your customers to migrate down to the consumption model. But curious to hear, have you seen customers trade down to the consumption model since you announced this transition? And then the second question there is, have you seen any changes in customer behavior from a churn perspective?

Mike, it's Tom. No customer has requested to convert to the consumption-based pricing model just yet. I understand that these customers are huge. I mean, you get into Shell, and you get into Koch, Baker Hughes; I mean, these are very, very large relationships now. And you can imagine their licensing terms are pretty favorable and unique to them. Have we seen any significant change in customer churn? No.

I appreciate the insight. As a follow-up, I wanted to revisit what we discussed last quarter regarding deals being delayed due to the current environment. You mentioned last quarter that 66 deals were pushed back. Have any of those deals been closed in the meantime? Are we still looking at a similar number of deals being postponed considering your transition? Are you working to make the adoption process easier for those customers and speeding up the sales cycles?

Mike, this is Juho. Yes, we have successfully closed some of the deals that were delayed from last quarter. As we anticipated in our revenue guidance, the macroeconomic environment was more challenging in the second quarter following Q1, but it has since stabilized. In particular, our new consumption-based pricing seems to be well received by both our existing customers and potential new customers.

Got it. It makes a ton of sense, especially when I think about that average contract value declining from, call it, $19 million to less than $1 million this quarter.

I was talking to myself, I want to ask about the subscription revenue outperformance. It seems like a big outperformance in the quarter. Was that largely because of the outperformance in the number of pilots that you're doing? Because even if you have closed some of the deals that got pushed, I wouldn't have thought that you would recognize a ton of revenue from those. So help me understand that.

Well, I think you kind of got it. There were some previous transactions that were not based on consumption-based pricing but did close in the quarter. That did contribute to that. So I think you called it accurately, Pinjalim.

Okay. It was due to the deals that closed. Tom, could you provide some insights on what you're hearing from CIOs regarding IT budgets for the upcoming year? Given the macro challenges you mentioned, are you noticing any shifts in how people are planning their budgets for next calendar year? What have you observed?

That's a great question, and the answer varies among companies. Many organizations, including those in the Federal government, view this situation differently. I should mention that our Federal business is quite strong, particularly in the defense sector. If you look at the defense budget, it has significantly increased, by about $200 billion compared to last year, if I recall correctly. This represents a substantial opportunity. There seem to be two categories emerging: some companies are actively using these technologies to save money, like Shell and the Air Force. On the other hand, there are other companies that I won't name, which are severely cutting expenses across the board. They're preparing for a potential recession and will likely experience some customer churn as a result. This situation is serious, as they are drastically reducing costs. We see both groups out there — those investing in savings and those reacting to a possible substantial recession by cutting costs. It's hard to predict how long this will continue, whether it will last 12 or 24 months. However, when it's over, we will still be here if we continue to push forward. But it's undeniable that the environment is challenging right now.

I want to do a couple of sort of financial ones to start with, if that's okay. So gross margin, if I'm looking at it right, non-GAAP was 77%, down from 81% last quarter. Is there anything worth noting there?

Pat, it's Juho. The only thing to call out there is the trials and pilots, as Tom mentioned in the opening remarks, there is more higher cost than those than the ongoing subscriptions. So as we see increased pilots and trials even in the coming quarters, we are expecting some pressure on gross margin before it climbs back up to historical levels.

Okay. So as I look forward, should I be around this 77 level?

I think you should expect a little bit more of a pressure as we increase the pilot as a proportion of total deals. And by the time we are back at Q4 FY '24, we should be back at these rates and higher.

Okay. And then the subscription fee, but services missed at least my number by a lot and went down sequentially by a lot. What's to note there?

The services are a direct result of our transition to the pilots in our new consumption-based pricing model. There are minimal upfront large professional services deals associated with these. As the pilots convert to ongoing license arrangements, we expect the services component to increase as well. In the second half of this fiscal year, we anticipate services to return to 10% to 20% of our total revenues.

So for Q3, it would be 10% to 20% of total revenue?

I'm saying the full back half of the year. So it could be somewhere in the range for Q3 and higher or lower in Q4.

Okay. And then if you look at the subscription revenue of $59 million and change, the footnote says 32% of that is from related parties. Do you mind just explaining that for people, because I do get that question quite a bit?

It's just the related party is relating to Baker Hughes. So Baker Hughes is our, of course, still a significant shareholder of C3 AI, and any revenues that we interact with Baker Hughes is direct purchases. We call them out in the financials.

Yes. And so Tom, the bear case would be that in some way is a lower quality revenue, what would your response be to that?

I’m not quite sure how to respond to that, Pat. We are planning to secure many more deals and attract a lot more customers. We will convert a significant number of these into production, leading to growth similar to what we've seen with Shell, Baker Hughes, Koch, and others. Currently, the outlook appears quite positive, and I believe we are on the right path.

Okay. Great. Last one, and this one is probably for you, Tom. It's been a year since you signed that $500 million production agreement with the Department of Defense. How would you say it's going so far compared to your original expectations?

DoD is really big. So I think that year-over-year, DoD grew by what percent?

100%.

Roughly 100%. The DoD is a real bright point, Pat, and you're talking specifically on MDA; the MDA agreement applies to all of DoD, by the way, and then we have a $100 million agreement with RSO, and you will announce not in this release, but tomorrow morning an announcement about a big partnership that we're doing with Booz Allen Hamilton in all of the Federal, particularly DoD. But that business is looking strong.

And our next question comes from Sanjit Singh with Morgan Stanley.

Excellent. This is Seaton for Sanjit. I would like to discuss the consumption growth you are experiencing, particularly with the Ex Machina product. Can you provide some insight on how you see consumption trending with those customers and your expectations going forward? Additionally, in this current environment, how are customers using it differently than before?

Great. This is Tom. Of the various products we have in the marketplace, we currently offer 42 production products, with Ex Machina being one of them. We are not achieving the expected sales performance for Ex Machina. It is a far superior product compared to others in the market. The unit price is around $1,000, and we have not yet established an effective sales strategy to scale its distribution. We have set objectives to improve this, but I cannot confidently say that we are making significant progress, because we are not. It is an excellent product, and our customers love it. We have three customers who are using it significantly more than others.

Baker Hughes and Con Edison almost 300% increase.

300% increase there. But can I look you in and tell you that we're killing it, that we're realizing the potential of that product? That product could be an entire separate company. Our CRM product could be an entire separate company, our ESG product could be an entire separate company, stand-alone company. And in all three of those, I think we really need to get full steam going, and we haven't done that yet.

That's helpful. Your commentary seems more concerning than the 270% increase in consumption that you're experiencing. Can you provide some insights into what is driving that increase in consumption? Additionally, how are you approaching your other products to encourage similar consumption rates? Is there anything noteworthy that you're doing differently with those products to achieve the trends you're observing in this particular product, even though you haven't specifically emphasized it?

Do you want to focus on Ex Machina, or is this about overall products?

This is more broadly.

More broadly. Go ahead, Juho.

No, I think, let me just kind of add on to that. For Ex Machina, just what Tom said, we're still very early stages on that. Yes, we see those key customers that started early with us, massive increase in consumption. Yes, we're excited about that. But that entire product is completely in its infancy, and we have high expectations on it. The other point on other consumption. So remember, again, we start these targets, the consumption deals start with a six-month pilot and then it moves into consumption. We started this quarter. So we're not really seeing any consumption until the initial six-month phases are complete. That question, and as we start talking about consumption under all the other deals that we do, we'll start reporting and discussing that in more detail probably in Q1 next year.

And our next question comes from the line of Kingsley Crane with Canaccord Genuity.

So for Tom, it looks like there's strong traction in the Department of Defense, new and expanded deals with numerous agencies. Imagine the AI Defense Forum with a helpful touch point to close these through. So how would you characterize momentum in this sector? And then are these companies embracing the new consumption model? Or are they preferring to commit more upfront in the legacy model?

Great question. It takes some time to really get traction in DoD, and we've been working on that since 2014, at the level of the Secretary of the Army and the Secretary of the Air Force and the joint chiefs. We have really been working it hard. I think we have 12 projects, all delivered on time, on budget, to spec. And really, what we're finding is the consumption model there is really well received. They like it, and they're kind of used to seeing these multibillion dollar juggernaut projects from the Lockheed Martins of the world or other providers, and we're coming in, where hey, we bring the project live for $0.5 million, after that $0.55 per CPU hour. It's like where do I sign? So there it's been very well received in that market.

Okay. That's really great to hear. And then for you, Juho, I just want to touch again on the services revenue, understandable that it would be lower given some of the trial-like activity. So since we expect trials to continue in the new consumption model. Just trying to get a better handle on how quickly services should ramp back up to that 10% to 20%?

Well, again, there's a component of the ongoing gradations with our existing customers and potential services engagements with them. And then our expectation of services engagements as these pilot deals convert to consumption deals. So what I was alluding to earlier, to Pat's question, we are expecting services activity in the second half of this year. And then separately, in the long-term models, you should expect that as the pilots convert to consumption, there are services deals associated with those as well.

And our next question comes from the line of Arsenije Matovic with Wolfe Research.

This is Arsenije on for Gal. And I think on the call, you said there were 13 consumption pilot wins in the quarter, and maybe that was better than you initially expected. Is that a run rate you're comfortable with going into the end of the fiscal year? The back half? And any particular call-outs for sectors where the consumption model is maybe getting better traction than you initially expected?

I apologize for the confusion in the second part of your question, but I’ll focus on the first one. We are enthusiastic about our progress, having conducted 13 pilot plant trials. These still include a mix of trials, but we anticipate that they will shift to a consumption-based model at the conclusion of the trial period. However, we do not want to adjust any of our projections in the model we shared in the last quarter. Although we mentioned five this quarter and achieved 13, I prefer to maintain the model as it was presented last quarter.

Great. And then just a brief follow-up. In terms of stock-based compensation, I think it's the second consecutive quarter where stock-based compensation as a percentage of sales is above 85%. I think in Q1, we talked about maybe that was a lot to do with share refreshers. And I wanted to see what dynamic was that happened in Q2. And what level of stock-based compensation should investors become comfortable with moving forward?

Yes. I think broadly speaking, you see this across the industry. But stock-based compensation under GAAP is stuck with the grant date fair value of the underlying equity instrument. And as you obviously know, the history of the entire tech sector on C3 AI in the last 1.5 years, we are carrying significant stock-based compensation cost for awards that were granted when the share price was much higher than it is today. So unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about that unless the underlying employee decides to seek for other opportunities. So for now, until the end of these vesting terms for these awards, we are going to be carrying these pretty high stock-based compensation costs.

Never realized by the person who was granted the stock option. Never, but no time soon.

And our next question comes from Adam Bergere at Bank of America.

Great. This is Adam on for Brad. Juho for you, can you talk a bit about the shape of the revenue curve for next year? I guess, naturally, we expect it to kind of increase sequentially every quarter given the new sequential given the new consumption model. But is there a chance there's still some lumpiness in that, as you know, certain larger customers may renew on kind of like the non-consumption license?

Yes, I think the short answer to that is yes. And what we guided last quarter, we beat it for this quarter. Our guidance for next quarter, you see sequential increase and it does have the Q4 as an increase to that with respect to the implied guidance. The revenue curve is flattening due to the consumption-based pricing business model. But as we enter into FY '24 and especially the second half of FY '24, you should start seeing the graph getting steeper and steeper in line with the presentation we shared last quarter.

That's helpful. And then, again, just like the gross margin, could you kind of call out when that might trough out and what kind of level of that might be? I think it was at like 77% for this quarter. So is it fair to assume that that's kind of like a trough level for that?

Thank you for your question. It's important to note that we anticipated some pressure on the gross margin when we provided our guidance on operating margin and operating profit, as well as our path to profitability. We do expect some decline, but this does not alter our trajectory toward profitability. I can't specify exactly how low it might go, but in your projections for the business as we move into Q4 of FY '24, we should be back to a gross margin above 77%. There may be a temporary decrease before we recover as we approach profitability.

And our next question comes from the line of Arvind Ramnani with Piper Sandler.

I had a question on some of your kind of partnerships or alliances to help drive sales. Are you able to kind of dimension how much of your new sales or bookings come from in-house sales teams versus your partners? I'm sure it's probably pretty difficult to kind of bifurcate the two. But if you're able to do that, that would be great. And on the same topic of partnerships, are the margins higher or lower on sales that are brought in by some of your partners?

Virtually all of our sales today are made in collaboration with a partner, which means we are selling with them completely. They might introduce us to the account or bring their executive teams, similar to how Google, Baker Hughes, and Microsoft have done in the past. We are actively involved in the sales process. Currently, we are just starting to list our products on the marketplaces of various hyperscalers, which might change this dynamic in the future. However, there is no difference in margin since there are almost no instances where they sell independently of us.

Our next question and our last question comes from the line of Michael Turits with Keybanc.

This is Michael Vidovic on for Michael Turits. Could you just talk about linearity in the quarter and then trends you're seeing to start out November for fiscal 3Q?

So are you talking about that deal velocity in the quarter? Or what are you asking about?

Yes. And just was it month-to-month, how do deals trend? Was it a constant uptick to reach throughout the quarter? Or was it stronger back end of the quarter or the beginning of the quarter?

We see activity all throughout the quarter, but it's not unusual in this business where as you approach currently, you have slightly more activity.

Okay. And then just a quick follow-up on the vertical standpoint, particularly energy, have you seen like an uptick in deals in that area? And I guess, which areas besides Federal are you seeing particular strength in this time?

So if your question is relating to the diversification of industries, we see continued diversification, which we’re very excited about. Yes, there are deals in energy, but defense, as we discussed, is really exciting for us as many other industries as well. We continue to expect more diversification with the consumption-based pricing and scores of new customers.

Okay. I guess that was our last question. And gentlemen, thank you for your thoughtful questions. And we appreciate the courtesy of you participating in our call. And we thank you all very much for your time.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.