Docebo Inc. Q4 FY2025 Earnings Call

Thank you, Julianne. Earlier this morning, Docebo Inc. issued its Q4 2025 results. The press release, which included a link to management's prepared remarks and our quarterly investor slide deck, was all posted on our Investor Relations website. This morning's call will allow participants to ask questions about our results and the written commentary that management provided this morning. Before we begin this morning's Q&A, Docebo Inc. would like to remind listeners that certain information discussed may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking information reflects the company's current views with respect to future events. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on the risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to forward-looking statements, please refer to Docebo Inc.'s public filings, which are available on SEDAR and EDGAR. During the call, we will reference certain non-IFRS financial measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they are not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS. Please see our MD&A for additional information regarding our non-IFRS financial measures, including reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to any financial figures are in U.S. dollars. Now I would like to turn the call over to Docebo Inc.'s CEO, Alessio Artuffo, and our CFO, Brandon Farber.

Congrats on a nice quarter. Alessio, maybe the first one for you. It was really interesting to read in the prepared remarks about the potential power of integrating Harmony Search with 365 Talents, as it seems like, over time, the search data that you can get from Harmony Search and identifying skill gaps, and then integrating that with 365 Talents, could potentially help close those skill gaps. I think, as the products are integrated, could you talk about where the integration efforts stand on 365 Talents? And do you also see a similar potential integration? And then, as we think about 2026, how close are we to that vision state? Is there a sales training to do that cross-sell motion going into place for this year? Thanks.

Good morning, Ryan, and thank you for the question. First, let me tell you I am extremely excited to be able to talk about our acquisition of 365 Talents. It has been an important milestone for us. You are correct in saying that the integration between Docebo Inc. and 365 Talents is strategically relevant for us, not just because it gives us an incremental data moat, which is a very critical aspect of our strategy. When it comes to the integration, it is designed to be a phase one. We already have customers that we share. We already have an integration that is in production. We are aligned on our ideal customer profile. 365 Talents operates in the strategic enterprise segment, and their customers are very complex organizations with very complex people workflows. So, when it comes to integrating the data of Docebo Inc. and the data flow and the opportunities, there are many. What I would say is, one of the things that I loved about 365 Talents, and one of the reasons that led us to this acquisition, is their AI-forward technology and thinking. They already have built agents that allow building entire job architectures—a job that would have required months with consultants even a couple of years ago—be done in an instant. Their agentic experience will accelerate our integration between the two platforms. You asked about our roadmap path and what it means for us. A couple of examples of integrated work that we envision. Number one, imagine this skill architecture that gets built via agents. This is available now. Learning programs execution happens within Docebo Inc. But as skill gaps are identified and detected as part of the regular workforce planning, skills are constantly assessed, and skills remediation happens in an integrated way with Docebo Inc. Imagine an agent that is capable of understanding where the workforce stands against certain business goals and the learning machinery that creates content to continuously produce the material that remediates and improves skills. That is the power of the integration between Docebo Inc. and 365 Talents.

Ryan, on the second part of your question about the sales motion and the cross-sell. On day one, right after the acquisition, we started cross-training our sales staff. Our acquisition thesis remains that there are going to be three motions. We are going to continue to sell 365 Talents on a stand-alone basis. We are going to sell back to our existing customer base and net new customers. We are going to sell a combined Docebo Inc. and 365 Talents suite. We do expect our existing customer base to start attaching on 365 Talents in H2 of this year while we cross-train our staff in H1.

Super helpful color there. And then, maybe, as we think about taking a step back on AI, clearly you have the product vision and roadmap out there. But, obviously, in the markets over the last several months, there have been plenty of fears and concerns about what AI can do in terms of disruption for broader enterprise software. I am curious if you are seeing any signs of market fears and reactions in the field. What are customers saying about AI and their internal initiatives, and how is that affecting the budgetary environment as you look ahead into 2026?

The demand environment has been very strong. The field is constantly helping us better qualify how our customers in the learning and development world think about AI within their organization. There is no doubt we live in a transformation phase. The number one thing that I am sure about is that what we have built at Docebo Inc., now combined with 365 Talents and the evolution of what we are doing, is incredibly hard to build and replicate. You just do not cloud code this stuff overnight. That is pure marketing speak for that type of concept. Beyond the surface of your first 15% to 20% creation of a productive front end, the enterprise piping required to deliver at scale to hundreds of thousands and millions of users—things like database-specific multi-tenancy, role-based permissions—all this stuff is what actually powers an enterprise application. I really like to emphasize that because beyond the surface, there is a lot of complex coding that folks do not talk about. Second, what we are hearing from customers reflects our understanding of the industry, which is that enterprises are evolutionary, not revolutionary, especially in learning and development. Radical change is slow to come by. We own the data. We own the compliance data, the skills chart data, and no large language model owns any of that. That data becomes the catalyst for those agents to take action.

Really helpful color. Thanks again.

Alessio, I wanted to talk about your DNA. So growing 9% in Q4 and guiding for 10% to 11%. My sense is the DNA of this company is built very differently for much more significant growth. So I wondered if you could discuss that—if anything has changed there. And then I wanted to pair that with your substantial issuer bid and your desire to buy a lot of stock down at these levels.

Love the DNA question. I think your intuition is right in the sense that, over the years, we have continued to operate the company with a few drivers that make up what you are seeing reflected in the data. Staying ahead of the curve in market technology advances will fuel growth as a result. The investments in AI that we have made over the past few years are aimed at that. This is a story of continued evolution. The second driver is disciplined execution. Innovating and building great products and being on the forefront of AI should not be inconsistent with great financial discipline and focus on profitability.

2026, if we think about how we reaccelerate and beat our guide, we really look at our business previously in three ways and now four. Firstly, mid-market had a really strong 2025, and we expect that performance to continue, but that is not a real lever to reaccelerate growth. EMEA had two strong quarters in a row, and we do expect that to continue. The enterprise business is the real lever for us. To be completely transparent, we were not happy with our performance in 2025. Some of it was due to the macro environment, and some of it was performance-related. Our guide does assume that we perform similarly in 2026 to 2025. We are seeing early signs that this business is turning. The demand environment is there, and execution is getting better. Really, Q1 is the time for us to just execute. We have the demand.

And now it comes down to execution.

The last one—or, sorry, the last two—is government. We are still in the early innings of government. If I could use a hockey reference, the national anthem has not even finished singing. From partnerships to pipeline to RFPs, we are extremely early in this motion. We just became FedRAMP in May. We are seeing pipeline exceed expectations. We have the pipeline to win some large whale deals in Q3. But when you think about how annual recurring revenue converts to revenue, our baseline assumption is that ARR comes in September 30, and we have three months of revenue. So not significant revenue acceleration for 2026, more in 2027. And then March, I would say we already have a fairly aggressive growth target embedded within the guide.

Wonderful. Great. Just one quick, more narrow question on your quick-service restaurant win. Understanding that the organization is doing this through franchises, I am curious if your deployment will be mandated by the entire system, or is this a hunting license situation?

Nope. It is company-wide, corporate, and all franchisees.

Great. Thanks for the question. Brandon, you just mentioned not being fully pleased with 2025, but some of those same assumptions around that execution are embedded in 2026. Could you unpack that a little bit more? What exactly are you assuming in the 2026 guidance regarding converting that pipeline, contribution from new customers, expansion from existing customers?

Our fundamental point of view is grounded on the observation of the work that our teams have been doing over the past few quarters and the leading indicators resulting from that work. We instituted a new leadership team in the go-to-market area a couple of quarters ago. After Kyle Lacy joined Docebo Inc. as CMO, we appointed a new CRO, Mark Kosoglow, and reshaped our go-to-market motion as a result of these leader changes. This new go-to-market initiative brought improvements across the board. We have focused on a number of areas where we thought we could do better: process reengineering, people optimization, and a deliberate strategy to focus on qualitative demand rather than quantitative demand. We have taken steps to be deliberate in the leads that we believe are most suited to win, that belong to our category, and have implemented processes to pass on to certified partners very small business leads that are not aligned with our strategy. We are a mid-enterprise to strategic enterprise company, and we need to focus there. That exercise is paying off. We are seeing that in the leading indicators about enterprise pipeline.

Okay. Thank you, Alessio. Just to follow up there with some of the refocused go-to-market, looking at the annual contract value for new customers, which was down, is there anything to read into that? Is that a result of the reshaped go-to-market? Or, obviously, just one quarter of that new customer metric can move around a lot. How should we think about that?

It is really our mid-market team firing on all cylinders. When you look at that metric, it is heavily skewed by the number of customers you sign during a given quarter. Enterprise wins tend to be one unit at a high value; mid-market tends to be many units at a lower value. So the mix overall tends to skew it from quarter to quarter.

Hi. Good morning, and thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to ask and dig into the net dollar retention for 2025, down year over year to 99%. I expect a lot of that was largely due to AWS. Can you unpack that number a bit for us?

You are exactly correct. Excluding AWS, we actually would have been up 1% year over year, so we would have been at 101%. There are good trends within net revenue retention. We saw sequential three-quarter improvements in net retention, excluding AWS, from Q2 to Q3 to Q4. When we look at 2026, from a retention perspective, we forecast four quarters out. We are seeing strong trends into 2026 as well. One thing to note is that in Q4, even with record gross bookings, our mix of gross bookings is typically 65% new logo, 35% expansion. In Q4, it was 60% new logo, 40% expansion.

Brandon, that is a lot of helpful color there. Maybe one more for you, or Alessio, if you can give us an update on the AI credit pricing model that you talked about last quarter. Is consumption pricing something you have been looking at moving towards more broadly? Or how should we think about that?

Hi, Erin.

Yes, it is Alessio. One of my favorite topics. AI credit pricing, and more broadly, the topic of monetization, are hot topics in the industry right now. We have spent considerable time lately thinking through this deeply. First, let me say we are testing AI credits at Docebo Inc. We have about a month and a half worth of data, so it is early days. The results of that work have been a mixed bag, frankly. Customers, particularly technology-first customers, are somewhat receptive to the idea. In other instances—frankly, more—there has been pushback that is CFO/CIO-led, stemming from their desire for predictability and discomfort with non-strict controls. That is where we stand with credits. In this new AI-first era, per-seat pricing is being considered a legacy model. We analyzed over 30 companies and found that a majority of AI-native companies are using a hybrid model, similar to what Docebo Inc. has today: a mix of per-seat pricing combined with credit pricing. The second finding was that many AI-native companies do not have any credit pricing concept. What we are not going to do is force a pricing model on customers. Rather, we will work with customers to understand their buying trends.

Thanks, Alessio. That is a lot of helpful detail there. I will pass the line. Thank you.

Thank you, Erin.

Hi, good morning. First question for me will be on the force reduction that is after the quarter. It seems both optimization and R&D, but I am trying to get a better idea of what the drivers are there—if that is just duplication after the acquisition of 365 Talents, or if it is a more permanent reduction. Are you preparing for a shift towards hiring in AI? Maybe if you could talk about what that implies on the strong EBITDA margins you reported this quarter. Should we expect that to continue to grow higher on the back of this force reduction?

Rob, good morning. Our restructuring followed a few specific criteria. The most important fundamental is we continue to use performance as a strong mechanism to grade ourselves against our expectations and our shareholders' expectations. Our job is to continue to have the best people in season. Second, we took targeted action to accelerate moving our product capabilities closer to our customers. Our customers are predominantly in North America, and very few product team members are in North America, creating distance that we've chosen to address. We want our product team and organization to be closer to our customers. We are not pausing anything to rebuild; we are accelerating. We have retained our core architectural leaders to ensure continuity. This transition will not delay, but if anything, will accelerate our agentic roadmap. In general, as we tap into new markets, we are excited about hiring the right talent.

On the EBITDA side, as Alessio mentioned, the main goal of the reduction was not for cost savings. Although we are expanding EBITDA margins, the main reason for that is discipline throughout the business while we grow it. When you look at the guide relative to how we performed on EBITDA in 2025, it is about 2% EBITDA leverage year-over-year. When I think about that, there is going to be 1% leverage gained in G&A year-over-year. That is just continued discipline. There is roughly half a percent of leverage in sales and marketing and R&D where we continue to focus on sales efficiencies.

Okay. Thanks for all that. Second question, adding on to a previous question around the quick-service restaurant traction. You have had a lot of traction in that space over the last five-plus years. Can you talk about how much opportunity is left and what the competitive dynamic looks within that specific market?

You are right. QSR is relevant for us, and we have continued to win landmark logos as a result of a focused sales strategy and a better-defined targeting of accounts that have a higher likelihood to convert. Some of the needs of this industry include complex ways of mapping users across various geos and entities. The QSR opportunity is significant for us, and we are investing in it. We believe the QSR opportunity is compelling.

If we think about the top 10 QSRs, we have about four of them as customers. There are still the top four largest QSRs that we do not have. There is still a large market opportunity for us to continue to gain.

In the gross bookings metric you gave, the 12.5% growth, does that include Dayforce and AWS, or is that just Dayforce?

That is our total ARR, so it includes gross and churn. That includes AWS.

Yes. Thank you. With respect to the environment in general, has this AI narrative impacted your sales cycles at all? Is there a swell building as your prospective customers evaluate what they want to do?

Richard, we monitor our demand in multiple ways. If the question is, are you seeing headwinds relative to this AI-first narrative, the answer is no. Our sales cycle and execution velocity have improved. We have shaved off weeks in sales execution, particularly in our mid-market. This improvement means gaining a month of selling action over the course of the year.

With respect to capital allocation, with you continuing on the substantial issuer bid, there is a high degree of conviction. If the stock does not move higher off the back of that, how are you thinking about capital allocation?

On the acquisition front, doing an acquisition the size of 365 Talents in 2026 is unlikely. We have a lot of things to focus on for 2026. From a buyback perspective, we will continue to buy back shares under the SIB if our shares continue to trade at depressed valuations.

Fantastic.

Alessio, I wanted to touch on 365 Talents. This is the largest M&A at the company. M&A is not exactly a competency that you guys have. What is your comfort in your ability to absorb such an acquisition?

I would say the discipline of skills intelligence is adjacent relative to the learning space, presenting obvious overlaps. We are maintaining the 365 Talents entity and brand while integrating from a product capability standpoint. Integration is priority number one alongside the blend of commercial motions. We structured our organization to have experts live within the world of 365 Talents to communicate its value in the market. We believe this will lead to a successful second-product story that impacts our net dollar retention ratio in the future.

From a March perspective, I would say we did not take a conservative approach. We had a very tight business case. When we think about Dayforce, it will be down to roughly 3% to 4% of total revenues. We continue to put no deals greater than $1 million ARR within our guide.

Fantastic. Thank you, guys.

Yes. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Now that you have the go-to-market team reorganized, where do you feel like you are at in terms of sales headcount? What is the plan baked into the guide for 2026?

From a sales headcount perspective, we invested in additional quota carriers in 2025. We are well set up from a quota perspective at the start of 2026. The focus is to win more business with the same amount of headcount by improving sales productivity and using tools to enhance efficiency.

How much demand—or maybe even deals closing—are you finding as customers want to have a more complete platform to train their employees on the usage of LLMs?

Among the trends, AI readiness is one of those trends. Specific companies in the tech sector are focused on advancing their people's AI capabilities. Conversely, sectors that are more institutional are requesting strict measures for AI controls. We are seeing evidence of this across the government sector. There is a balance between those on offense—eager to use AI—and those on defense, still skeptical. We are actively engaging in both scenarios.

For my first question, I wanted to touch on the competitive landscape. More broadly, how are you seeing competitors respond to AI?

Philosophically, we are self-centric and self-focused. I do not want this company to chase others. We will lead the pack, innovate, and remain focused on ourselves. There is not a high degree of innovation happening from competitors. AI by marketing is a common trend—calling everything 'agents' when they are not. There is a lot of marketing fluff, but we understand the difference because we are building both. The market is frothy, but when we introduce AI capabilities, we stand out.

From a bookings and pipeline perspective, can you speak about the contribution trending in your pipeline from SI partners?

Nearly 80% of our enterprise pipeline has a system integrator attached. Our collaboration with system integrators like Deloitte is paying off. We recently completed a process to enable customers to purchase Docebo Inc. products through AWS Marketplace, which is a beneficial purchasing vehicle for large enterprises. Our progress with system integrators is encouraging.

I am curious what market feedback you are getting from clients and prospects regarding 365 Talents.

We are in the early days, but feedback has been positive. Many companies express a strong interest in solutions to address their skills strategy. The automated cycle across the skill gap with education integration excites them. Our integration strategy is still in its infancy, but we are optimistic about executing our vision in the coming year.

You mentioned Docebo Inc. has the data moat. Could you break down that data moat?

Our data moat includes compliance-related forms and external use cases. We have years of experience demonstrating that enabling customers and partners leads to better experiences and retention. We are also adding the skills data from 365 Talents, which enhances our moat further. This data is crucial for agents, who require clean datasets to execute workflows effectively.

How does your annual contract value compare to your customer's corporate learning budget?

The learning tech stack is wide and varies by company. The average ACV reflects Docebo Inc.'s movement upmarket, with enterprise tickets now averaging around $250,000. There is no pushback on price, and companies recognize the value of an LMS.

Just one question for Brandon. You talked about reaccelerating organic growth. What is the organic growth expectation for Q1 after 365 Talents?

We are modeling acceleration starting in Q3 and Q4 as we move past the impacts felt due to Dayforce and AWS wind-down. As those quarters lapse, our ability to reaccelerate growth improves. ARR below $50,000, generally considered commercial or SMB, is down to about 16% of our ARR. Interestingly, our gross retention has improved year-over-year in that area. We have restructured how we manage it from an account management perspective, which is paying off.

Thank you, everyone, for being on the Q4 2025 earnings call. We are very excited about the trajectory of Docebo Inc. A milestone ahead of us is called Docebo Inspire in April in sunny Miami, and we look forward to seeing you there. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.