Earnings Call Transcript - LPSN Q1 2023

Operator, Operator

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to LivePerson's First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. My name is John, and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to now turn the call over to Mr. Chad Cooper, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please continue.

Chad Cooper, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations

Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. On the call with me today are Rob LoCascio, LivePerson's Founder and CEO; and John Collins, Chief Financial Officer. Please note that during today's call, we will make forward-looking statements, which are predictions, projections and other statements about future results. These statements are based on our current expectations and assumptions as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially due to various factors, including those described in today's earnings press release and the comments made during this conference call and in 10-Ks, 10-Qs and other reports we file from time to time with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. Also during this call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures are included in today's earnings press release and the supplemental slides where applicable. Both the press release and supplemental slides, which include highlights of the quarter, are available on the Investor Relations section of LivePerson's website. Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that we are here today to talk about our first quarter of fiscal year 2023. As you may be aware, a shareholder has announced its intent to nominate candidates for election as directors at the company's '23 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. The company intends to file definitive proxy materials related to the 2023 annual meeting in due course. Stockholders of the company are strongly encouraged to read the company's definitive proxy statement, the accompanying proxy card and all other documents filed with the SEC carefully and in their entirety as they contain important information. Information regarding the identity of the company's participants and their direct or indirect interest by security holdings or otherwise, will be set forth in the definitive proxy statement and other materials filed by the company with the SEC. Stockholders may obtain copies of these documents for free through the company's website or through the SEC's website at sec.gov. We will not comment further on this matter on this call. We appreciate you keeping your questions focused on LivePerson's performance and results. And with that, I will turn the call over to Rob. Rob?

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Thanks, Chad. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2023 earnings call. LivePerson had a really good quarter, generating revenue of $108 million while narrowing our EBITDA loss to $1 million as we continue to execute on our profitability goals. Total revenue was at the high end of the range and adjusted EBITDA was well ahead of the guidance range. We continue progressing on the business initiatives, crucial for our next phase of growth, including a narrowed focus on our B2B core and rightsizing our expenses. We are reaffirming total revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance for the full year, and John will provide more detail on the financials shortly. For the company, our employees, and our customers, May 2 was the start of the next leg of our journey with the launch of our new generative AI products and platforms. The changes we implemented over the past 5 quarters, including removing non-core revenue and divesting our consumer business gives us a solid operating foundation to support our growth and focus on the opportunities we see from the core business. We've also completed the consolidation of certain go-to-market functions, which will meaningfully improve our P&L going forward. Our company is at an inflection point. And with the changes we have implemented, we are poised to accelerate profitable growth in the periods ahead. We have set our sights on becoming one of the largest and most effective enterprise AI companies as we have the advantage of being early entrants into AI 5 years ago. We believe that generative AI will significantly accelerate our existing traction in delivering high-quality automation and business outcomes to the enterprise. Most AI models are trained with tens of thousands of AI-generated conversations labeled by employees or freelancers. LivePerson hosts billions of conversations with our enterprises and consumer conversations with the input of 350,000 live experts on our platform, coupled with 250,000 API endpoints that enable not only engagements but also transactions; this approach is imperative to enable generative AI in the enterprise. Our generative AI advantages are rooted in our precision data set, with 350,000 customer service agents on our platform generating the quality data, our secured guardrails protecting our customers and their data, and integrations into our customers' back-end systems, which allows us to do transactions and outcomes. For those of you who joined our product launch event last week, you saw that LivePerson could customize and tailor responses to suit the situation and reflect the brand's voice, using the largest conversational data set and a very strong platform for handling the data. Additionally, the voice-based acquisition has been a key accelerant to driving the efficacy of our data and allowing it to be prepared to scale with the new AI large language models. LivePerson is a global leader in Conversational AI; 100 of the world's leading brands, including HSBC, Virgin Media, and Chipotle, use our Conversational Cloud. We power nearly 1 billion conversation interactions every month, providing a uniquely rich data set to build connections that reduce costs, increase revenue, and are anything but artificial. We use this data set and expertise to act as the assembler, ensuring that the responses are grounded and that the large language models only use these to generate high-quality responses. It can't be overstated how important it is that LivePerson can leverage the humans in the loop on our platform. Over 350,000 skilled humans are using the LivePerson platform, continually training and refining answers to provide the risk mitigation or guardrails necessary to help enterprises safely leverage generative AI. This ensures that all AI conversations are grounded in facts and relevant to our brands, helping us reduce what they call hallucinations. I really feel that one day, if we look at the asset value of the company, our data set alone has such tremendous value because of its uniqueness in providing high-quality outcomes. One of the most important aspects of our platform is that it combines high-quality conversations using large language models and AI actions that generate sales and service outcomes due to our deep integration with the back-end systems. Our Tenfold acquisition also supports these integrations as a key pillar. When we look at working with brands, I've been out with them recently, many of them talking about this; the biggest part they're looking for is the outcome of the action. What we're seeing in most things when it comes to large language models is that the conversation is natural, providing good responses, but we don't often see an outcome like a sale or service outcome. That's where we really shine. We have over 250,000 APIs integrated into our system today that provide those outcomes. So, as many of you watched on May 2, you may have also seen that we have plans to deliver AI in a different way, which we call an EIA framework. The E indicates our commitment to AI that is equal, enterprise-grade, and for everyone. Unlike what we talk about with OpenAI, we think EAI is much more focused on what our customers want in the enterprise. It takes the power of generative AI in large language models, assembling them with the right data set and training that allows us to deliver outcomes safely and responsibly. With the release of our voice AI platform, we can integrate all of that into voice platforms like Genesys, Amazon Connect, and Five9. This will help us accelerate what we set out to do 7 years ago. As you know, I fundamentally believe that traditional voice calls with agents were never the way of the future. Now we will accelerate those conversations to achieve automation at a very high rate. It's about a $60 billion TAM, and I envision that we can automate 80% of those conversations without needing human beings anymore to take those calls within the next 5 years. We are excited about the opportunities ahead. All the work we did in the last couple of months was focused on restructuring the business to concentrate on this significant opportunity. We put a lot of effort into that restructuring, and now we can direct 100% of our focus into growth, which is where we are today. Looking at the quarter, we signed 70 new deals, including 4 seven-figure deals, 50 expansions/renewals, and 20 new logo deals. We completed the restructuring of our go-to-market teams in Q1, putting a focus on obtaining more and higher-quality logos than we usually do, particularly in the mid-market and small business. We're shifting in that area because we see, with this new technology, we can do much more transformation. We are focused on that during the quarter, and it will continue in Q2. We signed a 4-year seven-figure deal with Europe's largest bank and financial services company. Our immediate goal with this brand is to plan a generative AI strategy that puts LivePerson at the core of everything, how they engage with their customers and employees as they serve 23 markets today. This is our second or third renewal with them, and even in the face of everything going on with generative AI, they want to utilize a platform that can generate outcomes safely and securely. I think this is a testament once again of how we fit into the market with this new shiny object and how we make it real for the enterprise. We signed a seven-figure renewal deal with one of the largest multinational telecommunications companies in the world. This brand increased customer adoption of messaging with comprehensive use of our AI suite: Conversation Builder, Conversational Assist, and proactive messaging. We're now addressing sales, care, retention complaints, and we're expanding our relationship with them as we develop using this new technology. We landed a seven-figure renewal deal with a multinational financial services company, the largest bank in Canada. This brand doubled its investment in LivePerson last spring, leveraging our automation services. Within 4 months, our automation already powers 35% of all their conversations, which is climbing daily as we optimize the operation with our dedicated automation team. Volume is critical for them, but the quality of the conversations is our focus daily. In that deal, we beat out Salesforce and Genesys and are pleased with what we're accomplishing with them on the deployment. Additionally, one of our large Fortune 500 health insurance providers set a global goal to shift 50% of their call volume to messaging to achieve further operational efficiencies, providing meaningful upside to our engagement with the client. We landed a seven-figure deal with a large health care service provider, beginning their journey with web messaging and moving quickly into IVR deflection and proactive messaging. Finally, a large retailer in the U.K. has embarked on a 5-year transformational plan with digital technology as a key component. Phase 1 focuses on deploying our technology for care, aimed at reducing contact center costs. Phase 2 involves removing a ticketing platform and transforming it into an asynchronous integration, leveraging large language models for a better consumer experience than traditional ticketing. The final restructuring in Q1 enables us to drive profitable growth at a scale that will match the current market demand for enterprise AI. Now that we have that restructuring behind us, we can focus all efforts on engaging the growth engines and bringing our new products and platforms to our brands. We are in a truly unique position regarding generative AI and integrating it into the enterprise due to our history with and trust from our customers. They've used these tools with us, and now they want to accelerate using these technologies to scale their operations, especially in the contact center. However, it's not just limited to that; there are many customers using us for HR and IT use cases. As we expand our platform, we will continue leveraging what we've learned in the contact center to target other business units. With that, let me now turn the call over to John, who will discuss the financial results. John?

John Collins, CFO

Thank you, Rob. The first quarter of 2023 was a transformative one for LivePerson's financial profile and growth strategy. As we committed last quarter, we completed one of the largest restructuring events in the company's history, enabling us to enter the second quarter with a profitable run rate and a focused go-to-market strategy for accelerating growth within the B2B core. Significantly, our restructuring plan did not merely pare back our traditional enterprise sales model; instead, we eliminated redundancies across sales and customer success and combined those roles with product and engineering talent to ensure the needs of our customers could be efficiently met. By bringing customers closer to code, we reduced the meetings, ticketing, and scoping that were previously necessary. Additionally, we sharpened our focus on the B2B core by providing transparency into recurring revenue and winding down non-core business lines, including the divestment of Kasamba, which has been the business underlying our Consumer segment since 2007. We also strengthened the balance sheet by retiring at a significant discount, $157.5 million in principal amount of the $230 million in convertible notes maturing in the first quarter of 2024. As Rob discussed, our market is evolving rapidly, driven in part by the transformative capabilities of generative AI. The strategy and P&L changes that I just described have also enabled us to reallocate resources in this direction significantly, enhancing our broader platform and delivering better business outcomes for our customers immediately. With the generative AI products we launched last week, the rate at which we can automate the consumer experience and reduce costs for our brands in both voice and messaging channels is incredibly exciting. Turning to the first quarter and our results. In the first quarter, we generated revenue of $107.7 million, which was within our guidance range of $106 million to $109 million. However, as discussed last quarter and in Rob's remarks, we divested Kasamba, the business unit underlying the Consumer segment on March 20, which means we did not recognize a full quarter of revenue for Kasamba as anticipated in our prior guidance. Had we recognized the full quarter of Kasamba revenue, our total revenue in the first quarter would have been $109 million at the high end of our guidance range. Given the divestiture, we will discuss expectations for the year on a normalized basis, that is without the impact from Kasamba. Excluding revenue from Kasamba, we recognized $100.5 million, consistent with the high end of our normalized guidance range, which would have been $98.4 million to $100.4 million. B2B core recurring revenue was approximately 82% of total revenue in the first quarter, which aligns with the high end of our expectations. The improvement in revenue was primarily due to higher B2B core professional services and certain onetime contributions. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $1.3 million, which was better than our expected loss of $8 million to $6 million. In addition to higher B2B revenue, the overperformance in adjusted EBITDA was driven in part by the timing of expenses for sales and marketing and cloud migration, which we do expect to incur in future quarters. It was also driven partially by the solid execution of our restructuring plan. Before turning to our standard reporting segments for the first quarter, note that these segments still reflect declining revenue contributions from non-core business lines. With a B2B core revenue and expense trough in the first quarter, and our restructuring plan fully executed, we expect an inflection point in the second quarter with sequential improvement for the B2B core for the remainder of the year. Within total revenue for the first quarter, the B2B core recurring revenue component of hosted declined approximately 4% year-over-year, while revenue for the total B2B segment declined 17% year-over-year, and revenue from hosted software declined 25%. As discussed last quarter, the primary drivers of these declines are non-core business lines, including COVID-19 testing, gainshare labor, and pandemic-driven gainshare variable revenue. Professional services revenue grew 38% year-over-year, largely driven by the diagnostic projects for the joint venture we discussed last quarter. Finally, the Consumer segment declined 21%. Had we recognized a full quarter of revenue from Kasamba, revenue for the Consumer segment would have declined 6.8% year-over-year. Given the divestiture, we do not expect to report on the Consumer segment in future quarters. Again, we will discuss expectations for the year on a normalized basis without the impact from Kasamba in the first quarter. Note that a full reconciliation is provided in the press release. From a geographic perspective, U.S. revenue declined 21% year-over-year, while international revenue declined 9% year-over-year. The primary drivers for these declines were the non-core business lines that we are winding down. Net revenue retention was below our target range of 105% to 115%, due in part to our focus on restructuring in the first quarter and increased downsells in our SMB and MMB market segments. We expect sequential improvement in the second quarter and going forward. RPO decreased 18% year-over-year to $368 million, due primarily to the wind-down of non-core business lines, including professional services for the JV. Average revenue per customer was $665,000, up 3% year-over-year. Note that this metric is based on total revenue, so the sequential decline from last quarter is again attributable to the wind-down of non-core business lines, including gainshare labor and professional services for the JV. In terms of guidance, we achieved our expectations for the first quarter, and we remain on target for the year. Given our current visibility into the macro environment, we are reaffirming our full-year revenue guidance range. Inclusive of Kasamba revenue, the full-year guidance range is $394 million to $408 million, indicating a decline of 23% to 21% year-over-year. Note that this growth compares to a full year of Kasamba revenue last year. However, normalizing for Kasamba in both periods, removing its impact, our revenue guidance range is $387 million to $401 million, or a decline of 19% to 16% year-over-year. We expect B2B core recurring revenue to account for approximately 86% to 87% of total revenue for the full year. For the full year adjusted EBITDA, we reaffirm our previous guidance range of $15 million to $32 million. As a reminder, part of the overperformance in the first quarter was due to the timing of certain expenses that we expect to recognize later in the year. It is not necessary to normalize our adjusted EBITDA range for the impact of Kasamba since no material contribution was originally expected. As for the second quarter, our guidance range for revenue is $95 million to $99 million, indicating a decline of 23% to 20% year-over-year. The recurring revenue component of total revenue in the second quarter is expected to be approximately 87%, implying a 2% positive growth sequentially from the first quarter. The sequential decline in total revenue from the first quarter is primarily due to professional services revenue for the JV, which is not expected to continue, in addition to lower gainshare labor revenue. Our guidance range for adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter is $3 million to $7 million, representing a margin of 3% to 7%. With the restructuring behind us, we’ve reached an inflection point in the second quarter and expect sequential improvement in profitability for the remainder of the year. Finally, WildHealth's growth rate in the first quarter was consistent with the expectations we set last quarter for its core revenue to double for the full year 2023. Before taking questions, I'd like to emphasize several key themes: solid execution of the restructuring plan we discussed last quarter has enabled us to reach an inflection point for B2B core revenue and profitability. After troughing in the first quarter, we expect profitable growth in the second quarter and sequential improvement going forward. Our line of sight to profitable growth is a function of three primary factors: first, a narrowed focus on our B2B core, coupled with rapidly growing enterprise demand for AI-driven transformation; second, a more efficient and capable sales and marketing organization, integrated with product and engineering support to deliver hands-on AI expertise to our customers; and third, generative AI enhancements across the platform, including in both voice and messaging channels, with the necessary guardrails and back-end integrations to provide better business outcomes for the enterprise today. With that, operator, I'll pass it back to you for questions.

Daniel Wang, Analyst

This is actually Dan on for Siti. Can you just provide some additional color on the magnitude of the expense timing impact in Q1 and perhaps what that relates to?

John Collins, CFO

Yes. The restructuring event that occurred in the first quarter was the largest over the course of the last 12 months. As you may know, we've been rationalizing our cost structure since we entered 2022, which culminated in the first quarter. The key areas of consolidation and expense reduction were in our go-to-market organization and, in part, our technology organization as it relates to areas of the platform that we no longer need to support. The respective run rate for us in the second quarter, again as a result of that restructuring, flipped us from a loss to gain going forward.

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Yes. I mean...

John Collins, CFO

I think broadly, go ahead, Rob.

Robert LoCascio, CEO

No, go ahead, John.

John Collins, CFO

Broadly, the restructuring allowed us to rightsize the organization, and we have come away with a more efficient sales and marketing organization, coupled with our product and engineering resources that allow us to be more responsive to the demand of our base today. As we look forward, we'll hire according to the rate at which we continue to build pipe and respond to demand. We're well positioned today to be responsive.

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Yes. We also, because of the nature of where the business is and our focus on the acceleration of AI, obviously, we did messaging five years ago, we added the automation, but now it's all AI, and I can elaborate on what that really means for us as a company. We did a heavy restructuring around customer success and created a new org called LP1, led by product and engineering. In the past, we had more relationship managers; our customers want experts around AI and automation. We did this big restructuring and removed many of those pieces. Then, we took product heads that are really key to the company, and now they're running customer-facing operations, paired with client partners who are instrumental in driving revenue. I think we're going to achieve much better results in driving usage on the platform. Essentially, if you want to show up as an AI company, you need to show up with product and engineering folks rather than the traditional customer success personnel.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

I wanted to ask how you are considering capital allocation for the remainder of the 2024 convertible notes and the longer-term notes you have.

John Collins, CFO

Sure. Again, we retired about $73 million of the 2024 notes. As we discussed in the prepared remarks, we expect to continue to accelerate profitability going forward and be cash flow positive exiting the year. So the balance of cash that we expect to end the year with will be more than adequate to both satisfy the remaining $73 million in notes and of course, have ample operating capital to run the business. Do you have a follow-up?

Jeff Van Rhee, Analyst

So a couple of questions for me. I guess, Rob, one of the questions I get quite often. I know you're focusing more on the core businesses and trying to get away from distractions, and one of the businesses that I think most people I speak with don't find a tight fit with is WildHealth. So when you look at that business, different end users, different sales models, etc. I didn't hear a lot in the prepared script here this quarter, but just talk about your thinking and how that remains a core product, given the differences between that and, say, the core messaging B2B customer care offering.

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Yes. I mean, we have a large group of health care companies in our core. If you go back to what that is, it's a platform play. As a matter of fact, they're working on some larger deals with health care providers to utilize that platform to drive scale in health care outcomes. It has always been considered that if you want to enter health care, a lot of expertise is needed in that area, especially concerning regulation and similar factors, but they built a substantial platform. Now we've incorporated all the large language models, so we can scale how a doctor or a health care coach can service customers at a different scale than normal. For us, it's obviously growing very large. Health care and AI, if you look at any other company out there on the tech side, they usually have an investment in health care, almost all of them. It is important as an investment. I believe we'll see some significant returns with that product in the future, but it should be seen as a vertical play today. I think later on this year, we'll be able to provide some perspective on doing deals with these larger health care providers, which will give shareholders a clearer sense of how it fits into our overall strategy.

Jeff Van Rhee, Analyst

Okay. And then on the core business around the core B2B, understanding you're really leaning in on the AI side. But until that takes hold, and as I look at the Q1 performance, can you talk about the competitive landscape for the core B2B messaging offering? You were early to get there with automations. It seems like the AI/automation rates were relatively flat this quarter. That, for a while, felt like you had a clear sort of best-in-class platform. But the momentum on the booking side, revenue growth, I think you said the NRR was below the 105% to 115% this quarter. Can you just talk more in detail about what's going on with that? Are you winning your share? Are you just not getting it in enough deals? Why is that business not growing more?

Robert LoCascio, CEO

I think it comes down to our focus. If I could go back and change things, the things our customers got us into, we unwound, and the restructurings we did to become profitable. It required tremendous focus to eliminate the expenses we took out within 12 months to get here, and the team did a fantastic job at that, which wasn't easy. The focus now is to return to growth again. We're still signing large logos and significant banks and all that data. We've signed renewals with some of the largest banks in the world, even in the midst of generative AI, and that's because they trust us. We need to demonstrate to the world that we'll get back to growth. However, we must not overlook the efforts we took last year to restructure the business. The upcoming quarters will judge our ability to execute and grow the company. I believe we're in the right place, and we still have the gold standard of that platform. Adding in all that technology we just launched, which is generative AI, will assist us in growth. That is our primary focus now. We're finished with all restructuring; that's in our past.

John Collins, CFO

Just to add to the NRR comment, while we're below the range, the primary reason for that was increased attrition down market in small business and mid-market segments, in particular, as we restructured and focused on the demands of our enterprise, as well as made it through the distraction of the restructuring. We believe that the down market will be better served by the enhanced product usability and self-service capabilities that you may have seen we launched last week. So we see potential benefits there as we move down market. Within the core of enterprise, it remains strong.

Jeff Van Rhee, Analyst

Given that the scale really lies in the enterprises, would you expect the automation rates, the percentage of messages being automated, to increase? How should we think about that number going forward?

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Yes, that's going to be the big thing. There's no more bot building. As of last week, we don't have to build bots anymore. The ability to automate conversations, especially the long tail is now possible. I think I mentioned before, we looked at all the airlines we have when we started using the large language models to analyze conversations that occurred with agents. Surprisingly, there are many inquiries about bringing an iguana on a plane. You would never build a bot around that intent, but on our platform, we can assist with it now because it essentially analyzes the data set. The automation rate is going to increase significantly. Additionally, the actions we can perform on the platform: the automations are only as good as the actions they can take. We already have all these integrations, so improvements should occur at a very high rate. Especially on the voice side, I want to finish what we set out to do, which is eradicate traditional voice with our voice AI launch; that is our focus right now.

John Collins, CFO

Yes, in general, those are relatively minor. The largest contribution for the first quarter was primarily from the core B2B professional services sector that saw an uptick. In terms of one-time items, there were some catch-ups typical of large enterprise deals that we also recognized in the quarter.

Zachary Cummins, Analyst

John, could you talk a little bit more about the adjusted EBITDA upside here in Q1? It sounds like there were perhaps some costs that were delayed relative to when you were previously expecting?

John Collins, CFO

Sure. Zach, in the first quarter, we had previously expected more marketing expense, for example, which ended up not being necessary for a variety of reasons and we fully expect to deploy that later in the year. That's a significant component. Then, as we continue what is a complex migration to the cloud, there are expenses that we expect to hit later in the year as well that did not occur in the first quarter. So those are the two primary drivers.

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Yes. Our platform has two components: Knowledge AI and large language models that generate outcomes. We can now input PDF documents and other knowledge-based data, which has been improved for our models. This allows us to instantly prepare data, like employee handbooks, for processing. To make generative AI effective, we need advanced tools because raw data might not be formatted correctly for the models. We have developed a process for the model to interpret this data, enabling various use cases, and several large customers are already using it for automation. The transition from a Conversational AI company to an AI-focused one is vital, as highlighted in last week's event. In about eight weeks, we will launch a new interface that allows anyone in the organization to query the conversational data we have collected. For instance, a marketing employee could ask why customers are unhappy with a product or which marketing campaign is most effective for a specific product. The growing interest from customers to input additional data, potentially including Medallia surveys, enhances our position in enterprise AI. This capability could be applied in HR or IT help desks. While we remain committed to improving customer engagement, the significance of data input and the ability to effectively employ the platform for various uses is equally important. This is our current ability, and it represents an exciting facet of our strategy that differentiates us from our competitors.

Christopher Madison, Analyst

This is Chris on for Arjun. The first one for me, I wanted to get your view on the evolution of the competitive landscape going forward with generative AI becoming more prevalent. How do you see LivePerson's competitive advantage evolving, particularly focusing on making interactions with businesses through chat and natural language more accessible than ever?

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Yes. If you assess how it plays out over the next couple of months and years, what the enterprise is looking for right now is safety and security. They want to start using this technology tomorrow, but they need it on platforms that comply with data sovereignty and security regulations. We've provided that. Therefore, for us, it's a matter of one click to guarantee that using these models is done while adhering to enterprise principles, especially concerning data. The second aspect is what an enterprise AI company will look like in the future. I believe an important evolution could include desktops throughout the organization utilizing this technology to generate business outcomes; to judge who could win this race, consider who possesses the best data set to generate a business outcome. We have access to one of the best data sets. Organizations work to understand customers better. A unique power lies in asking customers questions about what they want from us, and we feel that this is a unique advantage. Other companies, such as Salesforce, using their CRM data, have considerable volume there, but in conversational data similar to what we provide, they are limited. The voice companies out there may be the most susceptible to change, as much of their voice data remains untranscribed. Language models may be commoditized, but we will have our own solutions coming soon. Brands may create their models based on their data sets. Therefore, the competitive advantage over the next five years may depend on access to valuable data sets and outcomes. It could lead to eventual M&A activity focused on acquiring better data sets for optimal business outcomes. That’s how I perceive it unfolding.

John Collins, CFO

Yes, Chris, I want to underscore a key point that Rob made. Today, enterprises spend billions on agents to manage voice calls; often, the intent of consumers remains in the long tail, which cannot be easily automated on older technology. That situation is no longer valid, as our platform is already heavily integrated with brands' back-end systems, enabling us to deploy generative AI to drive business outcomes today, transforming the cost structures for service centers and supporting sales as well. Our positioning at this moment, along with our data assets, as Rob mentioned, our integrations, and the processes we've been refining for years to help brands reduce contact center costs, makes us advantageous right now. We've already deployed these capabilities as of last week.

Robert LoCascio, CEO

Yes. Short-term gains are obvious. We're enabling agents to be more efficient, allowing them not to need to type anymore. It’s the safest way to deploy this tech, which we’re releasing on the platform now. Any customer can utilize it. Additionally, conversation summarization, a task usually done manually, now happens automatically. We already possess this technology, but with enhancements from large language models, it becomes more effective. Next, automating conversations fully will be the next phase. Some easy opportunities exist. The most significant gain I foresee is this concept of our platform that we call 'for business,' providing organizations a way to ask questions about their data. This safe function will enable real-time question and answer interactions, allowing marketers to effectively understand how to improve their work. The ultimate aim is to automate the contact center up to 80%, transitioning to a model where only 20% of communication requires human intervention. Our platform puts us in a strong position to expand use in HR and other areas, which represents a significant opportunity for us. I started the company in '95 and invented Chat in '97. The vision has always been around conversational interfaces powering commerce, care, and beyond. This moment feels pivotal. We're all figuring this out. I wish we had avoided all the restructuring; it creates noise and uncertainty, but we've come through. A handful of companies globally can genuinely say they can deliver this technology to brands. I wish we hadn’t faced restructuring noise; it could’ve told a cleaner story, but we’re ready now. We have one of the best products in existence and an exceptional platform. Our focus is on two fronts: completing our original mission of eliminating the 800 number and enhancing this capability with our voice AI products, and expanding the application of our data set into areas like marketing, sales, and even HR. That is our central priority. The large language models and generative AI only enhance our potential. We are aiming to become the largest enterprise AI company globally. Thank you for your support; I’m excited about the upcoming quarters and our return to growth.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation, and have a great day.