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Conference · 2026-09-08

Box Inc (BOX) September 8, 2026 Conference Transcript

Concluded Sep 8, 2026 Audio replay Verified speakers
Sep 8, 2026 35:49 41 turns
Period
2026-09-08
Runtime
35:49
Sources
2 artifacts

Transcript & audio

Verified speakers 35:49 Audio
Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Great. Well, thanks, everybody, for joining us this afternoon for day two of the city's global TMT conference. I'm Steve Enders, part of the software research team here. And with us for this session, very excited to have the team from Box. So Dylan Smith, CFO, want to thank you so much for being here today.

Thanks for having me.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Um, maybe just to, uh, to, to start, um, you know, I think the box, I think you guys have been executing pretty well past few quarters. I think there's been a, been a continued acceleration. Um, maybe we can just start with, you know, what's been, what's been going on there, what's been driving that acceleration and, you know, I guess, what have you done to enable, enable that, uh, opportunity there?

So I would say the biggest driver of the acceleration we've seen, um, and just a little bit, our fifth consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth is the momentum and overall impact from Enterprise Advanced, which is kind of the highest tier offering that we have introduced about a year and a half ago into the market. And that comes with both the higher end of the 30 to 40% price per user uplift, but also enables a set of new use cases that is driving seed expansion. And that's been a big shift versus what that seed expansion was, you know, even 18 months ago. And so that's, you know, what we've done to enable that is really just, you know, kind of driving enterprise advanced, honing in on those use cases, working with our customers to really make sure that we can communicate the value proposition. And if we get that, you know, time and opportunity, you know, feel really good about where those conversations lead. And then I'd say the second piece that's kind of the indirect, you know, dynamic that we're seeing is increasingly, you know, with AI becoming a, you know, top-down initiative from the board, the CEO, you know, CIO, all the way down, is Box is an enabler of not just, you know, know, our capabilities, but broader enterprise AI strategies, because, you know, hear it all the time, you know, I don't have a, you know, AI technology problem, I have a data problem, or, you know, a change management problem as well. But, you know, we can help with that. But really, on the data side, is what we can do is, because of the power of the platform, is also make sure that we can help and accelerate enterprise readiness, you know, for their broader AI strategies.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

No, that's, that's great to hear. Maybe we can dig into, you know, some of the AI use cases that, that you enable and what you're, you know, what you're doing for clients there. You know, any, anything that kind of stands out for, you know, what's been a reoccurring use case, what's repeatable and what you can kind of take moving forward and, you know, stamp that out across a vast majority of the, the customer base.

Yeah, so it'll look, you know, a little bit different, you know, kind of industry to industry, but fundamentally, the component of enterprise advanced and, you know, kind of core of these really high value, you know, kind of AI workflows that we're delivering for customers really starts with data extraction, or metadata extraction, which is, you know, effectively pulling, you know, structured data out of unstructured contents. That can show up as part of a, you know, contract lifecycle management process where, you know, pulling out all the fields, you know, renewal date, key terms, whatever else, you know, from contracts to, you know, a loan origination process, a client onboarding process. really just, you know, at-scale ingestion of a lot of files and then, you know, taking that information and then, you know, doing something with it, which is kind of part two that we see as kind of front and center in most of the kind of use cases that we're delivering, which is the automation from there. So, okay, I have the information, have the insights, that's great, then what? And that might mean sending to, you know, compliance or legal if something's flagged to review or just sending to, you know, the business owner to, you know, set up a task to sign off on, or, you know, going back directly and signing, you know, sending in a notification, you know, to the customer or whatever it might be is really the second piece of that. So it's really extract plus automate really makes the foundation of the use cases that we've seen customers adopting okay um and when you think about you know the opportunity within you know within the customer base yeah how do you kind of see those kind of use cases expanding or maybe could just kind of like walk through you know how those um how the the box platform just kind of like progresses and you know are we at a point where it's expanding wall-to-wall how much more just opportunity do you feel like there is to capture in the installed base yeah so the expansion You know, while we have some, you know, several examples, more than a dozen Fortune 500 customers, companies who are wall-to-wall on box, you know, in the significant majority of our customers, there's still a significant seed expansion opportunity on average about 6x, you know, based on, you know, versus today's footprint. And that's where I think a lot of the use cases come in, as well as, you know, one of the big focus areas is both in terms of moving workloads and, you know, kind of freeing up dollars for further box investment is that, you know, kind of legacy displacement opportunity. So legacy enterprise content management tools in particular, which they big focus, and we see, you know, big opportunity for, you know, even additional workflows where there are, you know, a lot of capabilities around, you know, the way that we can, you know, handle, you know, custom objects that aren't necessarily unstructured, you know, files. to just some of the, you know, more bespoke, you know, workflow type capabilities are a couple areas of the roadmap that we think will allow us to unlock more and more of that opportunity.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay. I do want to touch on the, I guess, legacy monetization and ECM opportunity in a bit, but maybe before that, you know, we'd like to talk about some of the, I guess, opportunities you might see around security right now. I feel like that's been very top of mind and in focus. just in the broader tech landscape with everything from Mythos to some of the recent hacks that have been happening on the agentic side. So I guess maybe kind of where are we in terms of our customers, enterprises, are they coming to you to help kind of deal with some of these security concerns or is that driving an incremental prioritization for the box capabilities right now?

Yeah, for content security, absolutely. And we're very fortunate in the way things have played out that if you think about what we've been building for more than two decades and the focus on security and compliance as a differentiator is just as relevant in a world with agents and actually more relevant than it is for humans. And that's because if you think about it, it's basically the exact same problems that you'd be looking to solve or opportunities that we can address, but you think about instead of X employees, you now have an order of magnitude, more agents running around, and unlike relying on the just EQ and good nature of human beings not to want to do anything too malicious with the content, you know, sharing with people they shouldn't be sharing with, accessing information they shouldn't have access to, et cetera, you know, agents lack that capability or understanding. They're just going to want to do whatever you tell them to do in the way that they think is the most efficient, effective way to get there. So having, you know, those airtight permissions, you know, access controls, as well as, you know, kind of monitoring for, you know, threat detection, et cetera, just becomes that much more important and relevant. And so absolutely, you know, top of mind for, you know, any customer we're talking to and increasingly differentiator that's standing out in those conversations.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Is it changing, I guess, the prioritization that CIOs and CISOs might have and maybe elevate some of the, I guess, demand environment for you all?

Um, I mean, I would say that ultimately the demand is still, you know, driven by a lot of the use cases and AI and just, you know, kind of managing your unstructured content and having a data strategy that is increasing in importance, you know, having far more, you know, CIO led, you know, conversations or even, you know, CEO, COO type conversations because of that. And then security is the reason that Box is, you know, further up in the consideration set as a result. But I wouldn't say, I mean, the reason that Box is so strong in terms of security, you know, generally still stems from a specific, you know, use case or set of use cases that are, you know, kind of top of mind for that organization.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay, that makes sense. Um, maybe I'm going to ask a little bit about box AI and, and kind of the agentic, uh, strategy that, that you will have, um, just maybe, how do you think about the opportunity that, uh, agents enable for, for you all? And how do you think about, you know, first party agents versus, versus third party agents and, and how that maybe comes together, you know, with the rubber meeting the road in terms of what actually gets put into, uh, to practice for companies.

Yeah, I mean, we think about, you know, kind of agents and that agentic opportunity as, you know, effectively synonymous with the broader AI opportunity. If you think about these kind of high value and complex workflows, you know, those almost, you know, inherently involve, you know, an agent or agents who are performing those tasks, you know, on a repeatable basis, you know, replacing the work that would have been, you know, manual or done by, you know, a human or that you'd ship off to, you know, a BPO or something like that. and now it's agents doing it. So those reviews kind of one in the same. And then in terms of first versus third-party agents, I mean, certainly all else equal, we'd love for every agentic workflow to be initiated on Box for that to be the orchestration layer, for Box to be the orchestration layer. But that was never the expectation. The reality is it's going to be a mix, right? Where in some cases, it's going to be on Box, especially for content-centric workflows and where the data, you know, starts, you know, and then ends on box in other situation, that's going to make more sense for a customer to be, you know, in a different, you know, providers platform or, you know, using the direct, you know, LLM as the interface. And, you know, we love all of those situations. And, you know, I think that's kind of naturally how the world is evolving is how does this fit seamlessly into, you know, kind of a user's workflow and day and what they're, they're already doing. And, and then kind of that interface is probably, unless that, you know, provider, you know, kind of drops the ball is probably going to be the interface that it makes most sense to kick off some of those workflows.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay. That makes, that makes sense. And then how do you kind of think about the, I guess, monetization opportunity for, for agents? And is there, I guess, a difference in terms of, you know, this first party versus third party agents and the monetization angle?

Yeah. So things are, you know, evolving rapidly. You know, as of now, we think about that monetization of those agents as being in the form of, you know, what we call AI units, which is effectively, you know, kind of token consumption that those agents are, you know, know, kind of driving. Uh, and so whether that's first or third party, that would be the case. I mean, uh, in a lot of cases, uh, that, uh, consumption element is, uh, heavier for those first party, uh, you know, agents and use cases, uh, but there are often, um, you know, kind of tokens, uh, being consumed on the, on the box end by customers, uh, in some of those third party use cases as well.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay. Um, I do want to keep this interactive.

Speaker 1

So if there's any, any questions in the room we want to make sure to uh to get to those um have one in the in the back right here uh we have a mic coming so give one second thank you thank you um i just uh i guess box is um has been seen as like an app company so if we were want to think about box as infrastructure company, what do you think Box need to deliver from both products and positioning perspective to be valued as infrastructure software company?

Yeah, I mean, the reality is that we do, you know, I think already offer the capabilities of, you know, kind of that, you know, being part of the infrastructure layer. I mean, literally the, you know, the place that you're managing, securing all of your unstructured content and then you know building on top of that that's what we do so i would say you know you are free even today uh to be thinking of us as an infrastructure company um but at the same time you know we're also a core part of the application layer um and so you know it's a bit of both and don't want to um you know kind of uh you know muddy things or you know do a massive pivot and in terms of messaging when fundamentally what we do is continue to evolve and kind of strengthen our capabilities in both areas, but do think that certainly as an enabler of broader AI initiatives, as I was talking about a little while ago, that is much more as an infrastructure provider. But if you think about, okay, we are now, have the capabilities to replace a contract lifecycle management system or to kind of orchestrate a lot of those workflows we were talking about, that really is, we view more are on the application side. So long went away saying, you know, effectively, you know, I think, you know, we do both already, we're going to continue to expand our capabilities at both levels. But do think that the capabilities that we offer as a, you know, as an infrastructure provider, are certainly more and more appreciated, you know, just given the ways that we can then, you know, kind of enable, you know, the broader AI workloads that companies are looking to implement.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay, thanks. Thanks for that question. I guess maybe, you know, similarly, I think there's been a lot of talk about, you know, legacy transformation and modernization and customers looking to move off of, let's just call the incumbent or legacy ECM vendors and move that to the cloud. I think that's probably been slower than, you know, what we would have expected historically, but just, I guess, what unlocks now with AI, and how do you kind of think through, you know, that versus the data gravity concerns that have maybe, you know, limited that historically?

Yeah, I mean, I think realistically, this is still going to be a, you know, multi-year journey and transition, just given, I mean, to your point, you know, there's data gravity, you know, inertia, a lot of these systems have been in place for literally decades, you know, despite not, you know, innovating over that entire time period. But, you know, you have high value, you know, workflow that's, or use case that's been sitting there. And it just historically has not been a big priority to change. You know, if you think about, because the company was, you know, trying to, you know, move in and capture, you know, a mobile opportunity or, you know, moving to the cloud before that, or, you know, whatever, maybe an ERP implementation, I mean, whatever it might it might have been, the reason that it's a lot more top of mind and the reason that, you know, kind of unstructured content is actually a strategic, you know, initiative for CIOs, you know, now more so than they've, you know, ever been in the past, than it's ever been in the past 20 plus years is because AI and that fundamentally, if your data is siloed, you know, and especially if it's siloed and sitting in, you know, fragmented on-premises, you know, systems, you just can't access that data and get the capabilities and unlock the use cases that you could with a solution like Box. So we're hearing not just from customers that, okay, this thing that's, you know, it's probably time and catalyzing those conversations. But with the SI ecosystem as well, who might've put those systems in place and are responsible for that, you know, kind of that implementation and that maintenance, and they're hearing from their customers and then reaching out to us to help their clients modernize. I think that's really what's changed is instead of it just being an annoying, painful thing that was then offset by inertia, now it's literally a gating factor to be able to actually execute an AI strategy.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Maybe that's a good time to ask about the SI opportunity and the partners. I think over the past year and a half, two years, it feels like you've really started to lean more into that go to market motion. I guess two questions. What does that unlock for you all in terms of, you know, the opportunities that it creates and what it brings incrementally to you? And secondly, just, you know, where are we in terms of that journey for building out those partnerships and, you know, the SIs and partners driving opportunities to, to you guys at this point?

Yeah. So I think in terms of the, the, you know, what it unlocks, it's, It's really a couple of main things, you know, first of which is just, you know, customer reach and extending, you know, the reach of our direct sales force, you know, because with, you know, several hundred, you know, kind of quality carrying AEs, we can't possibly be, you know, having the type of conversations and talking to the number of customers where, you know, Box is a, you know, a good fit. And so it helps extend the reach of our sales force and provide some, you know, kind of go to market, you know, leverage in the process. But also, you know, with those SIs, they tend to be, you know, very close to, you know, that business's challenges, have the technical expertise. expertise and, you know, the lifeblood of their business is, you know, a lot of these, you know, pretty complex, you know, implementations that require a lot of, you know, handholding, you know, a lot of development efforts in many cases as part of, you know, broader, you know, kind of digital transformation initiatives is just one example. So they could also help go in and customize those solutions whether it's for specific you know geographies or verticals or whatever else and they have that expertise um you know at a scale that's much greater than we have internally um and so it's not just the reach but also actually the capabilities to customize and make customers um you know successful uh on box is is really um you know kind of what what uh what they bring to the table. And then in terms of, you know, I don't know how this, this translates to a, you know, an inning point of view, but pretty early in that opportunity. And we are starting to see traction, you know, starting with some of the regional players, but also now with some of the, you know, large global systems integrators. But, you know, very early days in terms of the type of, you know, kind of impacting that can have on our business overall.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Do those tend to be more of a, I guess, you know, lift and shift in a legacy modernization? Or are they bringing, you know, net new use cases that a customer maybe, you know, didn't have before where it makes sense to use Box for that use case?

It's a little bit of both. But, you know, we see it as really the, you know, broader, you know, kind of replacement opportunity lift and shift is where a lot of them are coming to us for. Because, again, they might be a, you know, like an open text, you know, shopper, have a big practice there and hearing from a lot of those customers that that's just, you know, not going to, you know, kind of meet their needs going forward. And so, you know, that's where we see a lot of the big work. And that's obviously where, you know, these SIs are most motivated versus, oh, we can drive this one use case for Box. that exists too, but that wouldn't necessarily be a, you know, dedicated and as impactful from a growth standpoint, partner us that might be part of, you know, a, you know, a Salesforce implementation or some broader, you know, kind of digital transformation effort. So, you know, that's where the, again, kind of, I would just summarize as both, but with the bigger opportunity being the replacement side.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay. Maybe this is a good time to kind of talk about the, competitive environment and, you know, kind of what you're seeing out there, you know, I guess beyond the legacy replacement cycle, you know, I think we tend to get questions around, you know, the shift to, you know, AI models and them being able to, you know, pull data from anywhere and everywhere and integrate with all these, you know, all these I think there's a question of, you know, does that just mean like Box becomes just a storage layer or, you know, the capabilities become, I guess, less relevant moving forward, just how do you kind of think about that dynamic and maybe, you know, the right to win and kind of change that perception versus some of the, you know, model vendors or other AI focused vendors out there?

Yeah. So I think there's, you know, beyond, you know, just storage, you know, everything that we've built up around, you know, permission, security access controls is, you know, incredibly relevant, even in those use cases where the interface might be an LLM. And at the same time, there are just so many things we do within our platform, you know, around document generation capabilities, e-signature capabilities, all the stuff we were talking about before that, you know, those model providers aren't going to offer anytime soon, which is why you see us regularly. I mean, not just as, you know, getting early access to all the models from these players, you know, so that we can run those evaluations, have them available with insights to our customers day one of when they launch. But, you know, when they're giving a keynote, talking about these, you know, kind of new workflows that they can drive and, and, you know, the future of work and whatever, you know, transformative thing they're focused on, Box will be featured as the place that they are, you know, kind of pulling that content from and then saving it back to, right? Because they know that it doesn't make sense to try to replicate all of the capabilities that we've built out. And that goes, you know, far above and beyond storage, which is why they've been such strong partners for us. Okay.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

With those relationships that you have, you know, to your point, like, I think you've been a launch partner with like Anthropic and OpenAI and, you know, many of them. Does, like, are they pulling you into opportunities or does that like recognition that they give you, does that create incremental opportunities that you're able to taxicute on and monetize?

Yeah, I would say that it's not as much like, hey, they're saying, hey, we have this massive deal. Like, you know, we're meeting with this customer, like, you know, come up to our offices for this, you know, customer briefing, you know, next week. But I think it does raise the awareness of, you know, all of the things that we can do, you know, just kind of given the reach and, you know, all the things that they're doing. Plus, then when they are talking to their customers, you know, they are kind of reiterating their same point. So that's where they might be directly saying, oh, yeah, well, we don't do that or we don't do that well. But, you know, if you're starting this or, you know, putting it on Box, you'd be able to solve that problem. So that's where it is more of like a, you know, friendly, they'll refer things, but less of a like formal, you know, reseller type relationship where we can say, yeah, you know, a significant percentage of our pipeline is directly attributable to their sales force, you know, pushing box and more of the kind of informal, you know, kind of lift that we get there.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay. And then maybe also competitively, I think Microsoft comes up a lot in terms of a coopetition kind of dynamic. Just what have you kind of seen from them lately? And how do you kind of think about the relationship that exists there today?

Yeah, and the funny thing is that as much as we still see Microsoft regularly and still remain a very strong partner and a very viable competitor of ours, but the interesting thing is as much as the world and the landscape and our respective offerings have evolved over the past several years, the actual competitive dynamic with Microsoft really hasn't changed as much. It's still, you know, use Box for the same reasons and choose Box for the same reasons that you would before. Only, you know, I think with our capabilities expanding, there are more and more, you know, situations, departments, types of use cases where, you know, what Microsoft would be offering as part of their, you know, Office 365 bundle is no longer good enough. But the high-level dynamic has actually remained, you know, pretty consistent. Wow.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Pause there, see if there's any questions in the room real quick. Okay. I do want to talk about the forward-deployed engineer opportunity. You know, I think it's been, I mean, you've had consulting services historically, but I guess what's different now with what you're doing with FDEs, and how does that maybe transform the kinds of opportunities that you're seeing as a result of that?

Yeah. So I would say that, yeah, the high-level approach of, okay, both pre-sale and post-sale, we're going to be as close to our customer, helping them identify use cases, implement those use cases as possible. um you know again like you said that's been you know part of what we do and what we've uh you kind of invested in uh for years and years but fdes um and we also have several employees on the consulting side and you know sales engineers or value engineers who are doing effectively that work without an fde title um are really uh you know focused on uh the ai model uh you know side of things, which is, you know, we know because of, you know, just, you know, the breadth of our customer base, the depth of our understanding and evaluation with models is we can sit down with the customer and say, okay, you want to do this, you know, run this loan origination process. Great. We have seven other customers of similar scale who have already done basically the exact same thing. Now let's work together and say, okay, how important is accuracy versus cost? Here's some of the options. You know, you can kind of feed us the budget and we'll tell you like, you know, I would probably use this model. You'll spend 35% as much. You'll lose a few basis points of accuracy. Is that a trade-off you want to make or, you know, do you want to go here? And we have that depth of understanding and have actually delivered those use cases and seen them in action with customers in a way that can get us closer and be a more valuable partner at the table to them versus, you know, the number of times we have now, it's just because they're, you know, it's a very sexy role at this stage where people are like, oh yeah, we can send over FDE. And it's, you know, it's a, you know, 22 year olds, very smart, capable, technically strong person who has no idea about our business or the problems or whatever else.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

And it's just like, that doesn't add value to the business we can actually go uh and work with our customers and help them you reduce in some cases costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars um for a given use case uh because of uh you know kind of the capabilities that we have okay that makes sense uh maybe we can start translating this a little bit into the to the financial model um you know look at crpo growth i think it was what 14 this quarter uh 40 growth yeah and constant currency um you know which is again ahead of of the revenue acceleration you know i guess as we think about the durability of the acceleration is that the right way to think about it looking at crpo or how do you kind of think through you know what's the right metrics to to to look at um you know maybe something pipeline or something that that can give confidence and the growth opportunity from here?

Yeah. So I think that is, you know, kind of current RPO is a very good leading indicator of revenue growth, growth generally. The one note why it's, you know, not perfect in our case is because, you know, at the same time of the last year, which is the measurement period of that growth rate, we've seen a lengthening of customer contract durations, which, yeah, Great thing. But what it means is, you know, if all of our customers were on annual contracts, they'd have some portion of their contract value in current RPO. If everyone's on multi-year contracts, you know, more often than not, they're going to have a full 12 months. And so there's a little bit of a tailwind in impact because of that duration dynamic. So, you know, as that normalizes, it'll be an even better leading indicator. But right now, you know, I would say it's directionally, you know, helpful to understand the underlying momentum of the business. But I wouldn't just take the current RPO growth and say, OK, that's going to be the company's growth over the next 12 months because of that duration factor.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay, very, very, very clear. And I guess if I'm thinking about your medium term, longer term guide, you know, I think it still shows, you know, growth in 10 to 15% range, which I guess we're now right at the right at the threshold. But just how do you think about, you know, the further levers to maybe see that accelerate further and get into like the upper, upper part of that range?

Yeah, so it's really a combination of just the continued momentum and impact as enterprise advanced penetrates more and more of our customer base, particularly because we've seen, you know, even in the early cohorts, the net retention rate really driven by seat expansion of our enterprise advanced customers is stronger than non-enterprise advanced. So the more of our customer base, we move to enterprise advanced, you know, the better that is for our overall, you know, model and growth profile. So that's a, you know, kind of a core component. And I think another one is really just of some of the newer initiatives and kind of growth opportunities that we've talked about, just the level of success we can see there, especially over a multi-year period. Whether that is, you know, the consumption side of the business, which we expect to grow from, you know, about 5% where it is today to 10%, you know, plus over the next three to five years to, you know, the impact that, you know, kind of those SIs and the partner ecosystem can have on the business to, you know, kind of success in some of the less mature markets or less penetrated markets, whether that's EMEA or some of the emerging markets as well. So think about a combination of enterprise advanced and, you know, newer kind of growth initiatives.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Maybe on margin here, you know, I think if we look at, you know, where margin has been, you know, I think there's been a little bit less expansion this year. I think for the medium term target, you're still talking, you know, high single digit to 10 points of expansion. Just, I guess, what needs to change here? Kind of what are you assuming, you know, changes that will show that leverage over the next few years?

So I think a lot of it is, and the rate of margin expansion is, you know, largely going to be a function of what is that growth rate? What is the confidence in, you know, kind of in investing incremental dollars, pouring more fuel on the fire on those go-to-market investments in particular? And so, you know, right now, you know, given that those investments are really working, you know, delivering multiple points of acceleration in revenue and billings this year, you're on track to do that versus the prior year, biases continue to do that and show more metered operating margin expansion. But at the same time, a lot we're doing across the business to drive efficiencies. So, you know, even this year, you know, more than a point of, you know, kind of OPEX leverage is what we've been delivering. And then, you know, still a lot more, you know, kind of room to run and efficiencies to drive, whether that's from our workforce and location strategy to the ways that we able to free up capacity, drive efficiencies and hard dollar savings through the way that we use AI internally to a lot of the, you know, kind of continued gross margin optimization we're making for years, even though, you know, those are being counterbalanced in this moment by some of the, you know, know, kind of hardware and capacity, you know, constraints that that we're seeing out there. So still very focused on driving the efficiencies. And I think ultimately, whether we drop that, you know, kind of incremental dollar to the bottom line, or reinvest it in growth is going to be a function of, you know, what sort of return we've been getting and think we can get on those growth investments.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay, just real quick on ungrossed margins. And since you brought it up, just, you know, with the component costs coming through, and I think the AI, you know, costs as well? Just maybe what does that kind of look like, you know, moving forward here? Like, you know, when do you kind of see that abating and starting to see that level off?

Yeah, I mean, hard to say exactly, you know, think about that sort of pressure, especially on the, you know, kind of on the kind of public cloud provider capacity side as being temporary, but, you know, probably not short term. So would expect that to persist at least, you know, probably through next year. but you know eventually as those constraints start to ease and we can get access some of the newer gen hardware to drive those efficiencies you know keep doing what we've been doing as we scale you know that that should that sort of pressure should subside.

Steve Enders Analyst — Software Research

Okay perfect. I think we're out of time we'll leave it there but Dylan I thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

Analyst Q&A · 1 question
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