Upwork Inc

NASDAQ:UPWK

Earnings Call Analysis

Upwork's Q2 2024 Sees Growth Amid Challenges

Upwork reported robust Q2 2024 results with a 15% year-over-year revenue increase to $193.1 million, driven by strong marketplace demand and revenue from ads and monetization products. The company achieved its highest GAAP net income ever at $22.2 million and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 21.1%. Despite a challenging macroeconomic environment, Upwork's cost discipline helped maintain margin targets. For Q3, projected revenue is $179 million to $184 million, with full-year 2024 revenue anticipated between $735 million and $745 million. Full-year adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $140 million to $150 million. The company continues investments in AI and innovation for long-term growth.

Strong Revenue Growth Despite Challenges

In the second quarter of 2024, Upwork reported a robust revenue of $193.1 million, reflecting a 15% year-on-year increase. This growth is attributed to several strategic pricing changes and the successful implementation of monetization products within their marketplace. Despite navigating a difficult macroeconomic landscape and witnessing some declines in client engagement, Upwork's ability to adapt and drive revenue growth showcases its operational resilience.

Record Profitability Showcases Business Strength

Upwork achieved a milestone by reporting its highest-ever GAAP net income of $22.2 million and an impressive adjusted EBITDA of $40.8 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 21.1%, significantly up from 8.5% a year prior. This demonstrated commitment to profitability, alongside effective cost management, speaks to the strength of Upwork's business model and operational efficiencies in a challenging environment.

Guidance Provides Cautious Outlook

For the third quarter of 2024, Upwork anticipates revenue between $179 million and $184 million, which aligns with a midpoint year-over-year growth rate of approximately 3%. The full-year revenue guidance has been adjusted downwards to a range of $735 million to $745 million, implying a growth rate of about 7% at the midpoint. Factors affecting this outlook include persistent macroeconomic challenges, particularly impacting smaller and medium-sized businesses, which have shown a retreat in engaging with Upwork’s platform.

Shift in Client Activity Influences Strategy

Upwork observed a deceleration in client-seeking work, with a 6% decline in this key leading indicator of new contract opportunities, prompting caution in future performance expectations. The shift towards acquiring smaller businesses is notable; however, these clients typically have lower spending characteristics, affecting overall revenue potential. Consequently, TUpwork is likely to continue its cost-efficient strategies while focusing on innovation and maintaining customer engagement.

Innovative Solutions Driving Long-Term Growth

The introduction of AI-powered tools like 'Uma', Upwork's AI work companion, and the Upwork Chat Pro feature have seen increased adoption, witnessing a 23% and 68% rise in user engagement, respectively. This focus on technological innovation positions Upwork strategically to meet the rising demand for AI-related freelance work, which alone saw a 67% year-over-year growth in the second quarter. These initiatives are critical levers for future revenue growth.

Expansion of Market Share and Take Rate Initiatives

Upwork's marketplace take rate reached a record 18%, indicating a 30 basis point improvement from the previous quarter. This increase in take rate is a sign of the company's ability to monetize its offerings effectively. Furthermore, the company has doubled its partner deals, reflecting its strategy to capture increased market share and drive client acquisition through innovative partnerships with leading companies like OpenAI.

Commitment to Sustainable Free Cash Flow

In the second quarter, Upwork generated a strong free cash flow of $33.5 million and returned an equivalent amount to shareholders through share repurchases. The company's focus on maintaining a high free cash flow yield, combined with a disciplined cost structure, ensures that it can weather economic uncertainties while continuing to invest in future growth.

Anticipated Headwinds but Resilient Position

Despite near-term headwinds arising from anti-circumvention initiatives affecting customer experience and platform quality, Upwork remains confident in its long-term growth trajectory. The company has reiterated its adjusted EBITDA guidance, expecting a range of $140 million to $150 million for the full year, reflecting a continuous commitment to balancing profitability with sustainable growth efforts.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Operator]

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Upwork Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jacob McQuown, Vice President to Deputy General Counsel. Please go ahead.

[Jacob McQuown, executive]

Thank you. Welcome to Upwork's discussion of its second quarter 2024 financial results. Joining me today are Hayden Brown, Upwork's President and Chief Executive Officer; and Erica Gessert, Upwork's Chief Financial Officer. Following management's prepared remarks, they will be happy to take your questions. But first, I'll review the safe harbor statement.

During this call, we may make statements related to our business that are forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. Forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, but rather are subject to a variety of risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Our actual results could differ materially from expectations reflected in any forward-looking statements. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our SEC filings available on the SEC website and our Investor Relations website as well as the risks and other important factors discussed in today's earnings press release. Additional information will also be set forth in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the 3 months ended September 30, 2024.

In addition, reference will be made to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Information regarding non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, can be found in the press release that was issued this afternoon on our Investor Relations website at investors.upwork.com. Unless otherwise noted, reported figures are rounded in comparison to the second quarter of 2024 or to the second quarter of 2023. Free cash flow is a non-GAAP figure, and all other financial measures are GAAP unless added as non-GAAP.

Now I'll turn the call over to Hayden.

[Hayden Brown, executive]

Welcome, everyone, to Upwork's Second Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. Upwork's strong and durable business continues to deliver compelling growth characteristics on both the top and bottom lines. Our second quarter revenue reached $193.1 million, marking a 15% year-over-year increase. Our continued commitment to enhancing profitability was demonstrated by our highest ever quarter of GAAP net income at $22.2 million, while adjusted EBITDA was $40.8 million, a 21% adjusted EBITDA margin, up from 8.5% in the second quarter of last year. We delivered this revenue growth and outperformed our profitability goals while operating in a dynamic macroeconomic environment that has become more challenging for businesses, large and small.

This challenging environment showed through with softer top-of-funnel activity than expected in the second quarter. A leading indicator of the softness that we track internally is client-seeking work, which is a measure of the number of clients engaging in an action that leads to a new contract. In Q1, this number accelerated 11% quarter-over-quarter, while in Q2, this number decelerated 6% sequentially, with particular impact in May and June, along with a mix shift of active clients towards very small businesses. While we applaud the resiliency of smaller businesses outperforming other cohorts on our platform, small businesses' historical characteristics of lower spend per contract and fewer contracts per client lead us to have more caution about performance expectations for the remainder of the year. We believe it's prudent to assume that the changes in client activity due to macroeconomic conditions that we observed in Q2 will remain for the rest of 2024, and we have factored those changes into lowered 2024 full year revenue guidance, while reiterating our 2024 full year adjusted EBITDA guidance.

Upwork's profitable marketplace model and our continued disciplined execution provide us with a distinct competitive and financial advantage, which we are continuing to leverage. Our advanced technology platform and global 2-sided marketplace enable us to serve as the singular online destination to connect highly skilled freelance talent with clients in the full range of ways as they want to work. Our numbers also evidence our continued success in winning share from offline, analog, and digital hiring and staffing sources as we outperform broader market trends. Upwork benefits from the ongoing enduring secular shift towards a high-quality, cost-effective, flexible alternative to traditional full-time and contingent staffing approaches. We are in a position of continued strength, both on an absolute and relative basis with growing profitability and free cash flow dynamics that reflect the fundamental advantages of our business model.

Innovation for growth continues to be paramount for Upwork, positioning us for peak performance once the macro rebounds. We continue to invest in multiple revenue and GSV growth levers to maintain our position as an industry leader and translate that leadership position into top and bottom line growth, supported by continued healthy take rate expansion. These levers include: First, continuing to leverage Upwork's intrinsic ability to shape shift to wherever the market demand for skills is with the current focus on making Upwork the preeminent destination for AI talent and work; second, improving customer productivity, engagement and work outcomes in our products by infusing AI-powered features and user experiences built on Uma, Upwork's mindful AI; third, our continued expansion into our enterprise TAM through the right products, partnerships and integrations; fourth, acquiring new clients cost effectively in that scale by launching new distribution channels through partnerships; and fifth, continuing to drive marketplace quality, efficiency, and adoption of value-added services via our ads and monetization efforts. I'll touch on progress for each of these GSV and revenue-enhancing levers.

Based on a long track record of serving clients with access to the talent, it is always most relevant for the skills they need today. Clients are coming to us for professional, skilled, and knowledgeable and transforming their AI dreams into realities. From building and deploying Gen AI chat bots to training and tuning data and prompts for LLMs, to delivering marketing or back-office projects to integrate the latest AI-enabled capabilities, businesses are realizing the need to supplement their internal capabilities and know-how by looking externally to find talent and solutions that deliver on the promise of AI-driven productivity and innovation.

This is where Upwork has a tremendous structural advantage. Compared to studies that show only 15% of corporate employees have the AI-related skills and training they need, more than half of freelance professionals on Upwork are already familiar with and using AI tools to deliver high-quality outcomes. It's no surprise then that a recent report from our Upwork Research Institute found that nearly half, 48%, of C-suite executives have already brought in freelancers to get delayed AI-related projects back on track. Upwork is serving a range of businesses, including leading companies like Scale AI, with the expert talent they require for their AI initiatives, and we are evolving our offerings to meet this growing market demand. While GSV from AI-related work was up 67% year-over-year in Q2, what excites us most is the opportunity ahead for this business and our customers.

The tangible benefits for talent on our platform who are leaning into these opportunities are compelling. As just one example, freelance professionals, working on AI-related projects, earned 47% more per hour than those working on non-AI-related projects in Q2.

Our second ongoing growth lever is improving customer productivity and enhancing engagement through our own AI-powered product features. During the second quarter, we announced Uma, Upwork's mindful AI, to underpin key steps in the hiring and matching process and serve as an always-on indispensable work companion. Our vision for Uma is to transform the way work is done on Upwork by more seamlessly augmenting the power of people and AI working together. Although this product is still in its early days and has launched only in select use cases, we've seen demand growing with a 23% quarter-over-quarter increase in users interacting with Uma in Q2. Over time, we see Uma changing the game for customers, both making our platform easier to use and improving the quality of work outcomes.

We also continue to innovate our offering on behalf of our enterprise clients. The large enterprise market is not a monolith, but is comprised of multiple large subsegments, with clients that prioritize their needs differently. So we have been strategically addressing that diversity of business needs. This quarter, we successfully began testing a new bifurcation of our solutions for enterprise clients in which we have ring-fenced existing functionality and pricing in one offering and winnowed down a more limited set of functionality and alternative pricing to target a subset of enterprise buyers. During testing, this approach yields higher total conversion for our sales team with 46 combined enterprise deals closed in the quarter, 27 for the new offering and 19 for our traditional enterprise standard and compliance products. This dual-track approach is giving us good insights on how to move forward with modifications to our pricing and packaging to reaccelerate enterprise growth, and we will have further updates in the coming quarters.

During the second quarter, Labelbox, Builders FirstSource, and Guidepoint were among the new Enterprise Solutions clients we added. Further advancing our existing enterprise solutions partnerships, this month, we announced a new partnership with Beeline, one of the largest and most familiar BMS providers. We've also built on our MSP partnership with KellyOCG by enabling our first joint clients, including NASDAQ, to incorporate and access the high-quality talent pool we have on Upwork. These steps indicate our agility and further lay the foundation for unlocking this large market opportunity.

Historically, Upwork's primary method of acquiring and converting clients has been on our website and mobile apps, attracting them through word of mouth, SEO, and paid acquisition channels. With our broad partnership strategy, we see a new avenue for cost-effectively attracting and converting new clients at scale by embedding Upwork experts and innovative experiences for businesses in the third-party ecosystems wherein those prospective clients encounter the need for expertise in the real time.

Upwork is already home to huge communities of experts in everything from GoDaddy, WordPress and website development, to Shopify, e-commerce, and other e-commerce platforms, to social media management, project management, and a massive middle and long tail of knowledge work specialties. Our strategy is to light up these communities of experts inside third-party ecosystems to places where they can enable partners and their customers to succeed. The starting point in engagement does not need to be on Upwork for significant value to be created.

In the past quarter, we more than doubled our number of partner deals and May brought the highest monthly revenue derived from partnerships that we've seen to date. Today, partnerships combined contribution to our GSV is small, but it is growing. As we further accelerate this partner program over future quarters, we will reach orders of magnitude more businesses and prime position to leverage Upwork for their work needs.

Finally, a critical lever for us as we continue to lean in to building more value-added sources for customers that improve the overall quality and efficiency of the marketplace, while also expanding our take rate, are our ads and monetization features, including subscriptions. Q2 was a quarter of record experimentation velocity for us in this area, and we saw a notable success and updates to our pricing and packaging. In the marketplace, we added more connects and our AI-powered Upwork Chat Pro app to the Freelancer Plus subscription, while increasing our price point to one with the additional value we are delivering. These changes contribute to our highest take rate ever. 75% year-over-year revenue growth in asset monetization products and a 68% quarter-over-quarter increase in Upwork Chat Pro daily active users in Q2. Asset monetization products continue to be one of our fastest-growing revenue streams. This is another area where the progress made is significant and yet the runway ahead is even more promising.

UpWork is demonstrating our position to capture long-term growth from secular tailwinds, even while navigating a choppy environment in the near term, staying the course and executing unwaveringly on our profitability goals. We are excited to drive this business to tremendous scale, building on our formidable assets and momentum, continuing to invest in growth, and creating meaningful leverage increases every year towards our 35% 5-year adjusted EBITDA target. We are thrilled to be in a position to innovate work with and for our customers using our distinct differentiators of talent, technology, and know-how.

With that, I will turn it over to Erica to review our financials.

[Erica Gessert, executive]

Thanks, Hayden. As Hayden outlined, we're excited about the strength of our business model, the opportunities ahead for Upwork, and our ability to generate durable, profitable growth in a tough macro. Our model is highly profitable, with gross margins over 77% in the second quarter, expanding adjusted EBITDA margins and increasing free cash flow. We are steadfast in our goal to reach 35% adjusted EBITDA margin in the next 5 years, while increasing our operating leverage every year along the way.

Now I'll review a few highlights from our most recent results. Revenue grew 15% year-over-year to $193.1 million in the second quarter and was driven in part by the flat fee pricing structure we started last year as well as sustained momentum from our ads and monetization products. Marketplace revenue was $166.8 million and grew 17% year-over-year. In our enterprise business, total enterprise revenue remained flat at $26.3 million in Q2. Within our Enterprise Solutions products, customer spend and behavior remained consistent with Q1 trends, and with the current high interest rate environment, which is impacting corporate spending. Managed services revenue showed strength in the quarter, growing on a year-over-year basis, reflecting increasing demand for work product delivery and the signing of 6 new managed services MSAs in the past few quarters.

While Q1 of this year saw strengthening top-of-funnel activity on Upwork, in Q2, we saw a softening of these trends as well as a mix shift to very small businesses, which affects our average contract size. This activity is a flow-through from broader macroeconomic trends. As a result, Upwork's GSV declined 2.7% and GSV per active client declined 5% year-over-year. In spite of these temporal macro-related challenges, we're pleased with our ongoing ability to perform better than many traditional staffing, temp services, and job board companies due to our differentiated tech-enabled marketplace business model. Even with these pressures, active clients were up 6% year-over-year to $868,000 with both new acquisition and retention benefiting us on a year-over-year basis.

Our marketplace take rate was at an all-time high of 18% in Q2, up 30 basis points from Q1. We are confident we have additional capacity to grow our take rate, and our approach to this is focused on pricing to value. We continue to test and experiment with a wide variety of monetization strategies on the platform, and these tests are supporting our belief that we have significant opportunities to increase our take rate in the future. As we do this, we will always balance the opportunities we see to monetize the unique platform experiences we enable with marketplace health and growth.

In Q2, we saw sustained momentum from our ads and monetization products, with Freelancer Plus subscriptions growing 28% year-over-year, contributing to what continues to be our highest growth revenue stream.

Non-GAAP gross margin continued to improve, both on a year-over-year and sequential basis to 77.6%. Non-GAAP operating expense was $112.2 million in the second quarter, representing 58% of revenue compared to $115.7 million, or 69% of revenue, in the prior year as we continue to successfully reduce operating costs. For the second quarter, non-GAAP R&D expense was $44 million, increasing 21% year-over-year as we continue to accelerate our pace of innovation and invest in technology. We expect R&D to be higher in absolute dollars year-over-year, but decline as a percentage of revenue throughout 2024. Non-GAAP sales and marketing expense of $43.9 million declined 22% year-over-year, and we expect to maintain a similar level of spend as a percentage of revenue for the remainder of the year. Our provision for transaction losses, or PFTL, remains low at $1.8 million for Q2, approximately 1% of total revenue.

Adjusted EBITDA was $40.8 million in the second quarter, representing adjusted EBITDA margin of 21.1%. Our profitable business model generated our highest quarter of GAAP net income ever and continued to generate GAAP earnings per share growth, which includes the impact of stock-based compensation. For the second quarter of 2024, GAAP net income was $22.2 million and fully diluted GAAP earnings per share was $0.17. Free cash flow for the second quarter was $33.5 million, the result of the high free cash flow yield inherent in our business model. We also returned $33.1 million to shareholders through share repurchases, representing nearly 100% of the free cash flow generated during the second quarter. Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were approximately $497.7 million at the end of the second quarter.

Turning to guidance. We are providing a more tempered revenue outlook for the remainder of the year based on the data points we have seen since May and no expectations of improvement to the current macro environment. By maintaining our adjusted EBITDA guidance for the year, we are increasing our margin outlook. This is due to the strong focus on cost discipline across our business. Our ability to produce growing margins in this environment gives us confidence in our long-term adjusted EBITDA margin goal. We believe our balanced focus on growth and profitability and growing margins with a high free cash flow yield will produce strong shareholder returns over time.

For the third quarter of 2024, we expect to produce revenue in the range of $179 million to $184 million, representing 3% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. For adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter, we are guiding to a range of $36 million to $39 million, which represents an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20% at the midpoint. For the full year 2024, we anticipate revenue between $735 million to $745 million, representing 7% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Contemplated in our revenue guidance are some near-term headwinds from anti-circumvention initiatives, which we expect will help to improve customer experience and platform quality while stimulating long-term growth of our marketplace. We expect our take rate for the rest of the year to remain stable with what we saw in Q2.

As a result of our ongoing cost discipline and the strength of our model, we expect full year adjusted EBITDA to be within a range of $140 million to $150 million, increasing our adjusted EBITDA margin outlook. As a reminder, GSV and revenue growth, and consequently adjusted EBITDA margins, are affected in the fourth quarter of this year by the fact that there are fewer Sundays in the quarter this year versus last year. Because of the timing each week when our clients are billed, the number of Sundays in any set period affects our revenue and GSV recognition in that period. Excluding the structural impact, our GSV growth rate for the year would be approximately 1 point higher. We expect full year 2024 non-GAAP diluted EPS to be between $0.90 and $0.94, up from our guidance last quarter of $0.88 to $0.92. For the full year, weighted average shares outstanding will decline to a range of $139 million to $143 million, down from our previous guidance last quarter of $140 million to $144 million.

Our profitable marketplace enables us to achieve durable profitable growth in the near and long term. We can increase profitability and free cash flow while continuing to invest in innovative solutions that will unlock new S-curves of growth for Upwork. Regardless of the macro environment, we will continue innovating and strengthening our position as a market leader, while producing steady and significant operating margin and free cash flow on an ongoing basis.

As always, I want to close by thanking our incredible team at Upwork for their contributions this quarter and their unparalleled creativity, focus and pace of execution. I am proud to be a part of this great team.

With that, we would be happy to take your questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Andrew Boone of JMP Securities.

[Andrew Boone, analyst]

Hayden, in your prepared remarks, you talked about the health of the platform in terms of balancing take rate initiatives and monetization products. Can you just speak to that in terms of how you are viewing things like Connects and pushing more monetization on to freelancers as well as also making sure that there is plenty of liquidity for the platform as well as supporting more first-time freelancers?

[Hayden Brown, executive]

Thanks, Andrew. I'd say the work we've done so far has been incredibly successful and provides the blueprint for how we want to continue driving in balancing the factors that you're outlining, because we are laser-focused on expanding take rate while making these initiatives accretive from a marketplace health and quality perspective. What we look at here is things like Connects and subscriptions and value-added services that we're enhancing the platform with really are ways for us to improve signal quality in the marketplace for us to also give talent and clients more control over when, where, and how they want to engage and to be featured or propose themselves with more priority for work, things like that. And so really, these are features and functionality in a large part or are in service of our marketplace health goals. And monetization is, in some cases, just a byproduct of how these work most effectively and really can be capitalized on for customers and for us.

Stepping back and looking more broadly at the ads and monetization opportunity we have, we know that given where we are today and when we compare our opportunity to other 2-sided marketplace businesses, there is a lot of run room here. And we also know specifically about features and functionality, whether it's in value-added services or further enhancements to subscriptions that there's a long road map here that we can execute on. So we feel great about the opportunity to continue to expand and build on what we've done and really continue to expand take rate in a way that is really valuable and healthy for the marketplace and for customers.

[Andrew Boone, analyst]

That's helpful. And then I wanted to ask about partner deals. Hayden, as you roll out more of these deals, can you talk about what's been successful and how that paints the picture for where you guys want to pursue additional deals going forward?

[Hayden Brown, executive]

We view the partnership opportunity as very large, and there's certainly a lot of ways to look at this. OpenAI was our launch partner for this bigger program and really provided the starting point for the momentum that we've been building in that now we have. I'd say what success looks like for us is really using this partnership muscle that we've been building over the last few quarters to build this highly scalable, very cost-effective, new way for us to bring client demand to our talent. And the unlock for us is that we don't need all of these clients to come and know about our brand or register and start with an account on Upwork for them to find success and for them to find our talent.

So we're really turning our model around and bringing our talent out into the ecosystem through these partners and leveraging some of these marquee partnerships like the OpenAI one to generate what has become a very successful and fast-moving funnel here of partners who are coming to us and saying, "Hey, can we get in on some of this action?" Because these partners have ecosystems of clients and customers who themselves have needs that these partners have not always had a good way to service. So this is what's contributed to May being the highest monthly revenue partnership month we've seen to date and the fact that in the past quarter, we doubled the number of partner deals and are still building from there.

So it is still early in the opportunity, but we do see that this could be a very exciting trajectory around client acquisition and a different model for us to go forward.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Bernie McTernan of Needham & Company.

[Bernard McTernan, analyst]

Great. Just a couple for me. And maybe we know the answer just based on the guide, but I just wanted to clarify. If the trends that you saw in June continued into July and August on -- at the bookings level, and then the guidance for take rate to be flat sequentially or for the remainder of the year relative to 2Q, is that just thinking about in this kind of top line bookings environment is not right to be leaning in a monetization, or is there anything else we should be thinking of? And then sorry, one last clarification, just the 100-basis point impact to GMV growth given the one last Sunday in the fourth quarter, is that for the full year or just the fourth quarter thinking about the year-over-year growth?

[Erica Gessert, executive]

Yes. Sure, Bernie. So in terms of the -- back on the line there. In terms of the trends that we saw on top-of-funnel, first and foremost, we actually saw very strong top-of-funnel demand signals in Q1, and we really saw that that starting to turn in kind of mid-May and then into June and July. We did see those trends get slightly worse in June and July. And so this is really what we're basing our guidance on. We fully contemplated this impact in our guidance and in fact, are now contemplating no improvement to these trends going forward. So in that way, I think we feel like we've fully derisked our guidance for the year.

On your question in terms of the take rate trends, yes, I mean, I think we're just being prudent, again, kind of anticipating the trends that we're seeing and just looking at top-of-funnel trends, both on kind of the demand side as well as this mix shift and expecting that we'll see a little bit lighter usage in some of the ads products as well.

And then on the Sunday effect question, yes, that's -- the 1 point impact is for the full year.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Maria Ripps of Canaccord.

[Maria Ripps, analyst]

Great. First, sort of understanding that you're breathing in a tough macro environment, can you maybe just talk about your ability to sustain your EBITDA guidance? And as we look at your P&L, sort of what are some areas that you can optimize here in the near term without sort of impacting future growth as the environment improves? And then I have a quick follow-up.

[Erica Gessert, executive]

Yes. Just in terms of maintaining the adjusted EBITDA guidance, I mean, look, this is an inherently profitable business, and we've made a tremendous amount of progress with the cost discipline muscle that we've implemented as a business. We're obviously continually making progress both on the gross margin line as well as on the OpEx line. And so we feel really, really confident that we can continue to do so. We're at 77.5% gross margin now. And we do still have some continued optimization that we can do that we're working on, on rates with hosting costs, other things like that. And then just as a reminder to everyone, we're continuing to invest in growth. Our R&D expense was up 21% year-over-year in Q2, and we are very, very focused on investing in the growth levers that will grow GSV into the future.

So we think we know we can do both. We can continue to optimize in areas that are kind of lower ROI spend for us, optimized on the G&A line and other places, and produce that growing operating margin while investing in growth.

[Maria Ripps, analyst]

Got it. That's very helpful. And then secondly, could you maybe talk about any recent developments as it relates to AI tools and functionality? And I know you highlighted a few in the press release. And is there any way to sort of quantify the impact of AI on your overall business?

[Hayden Brown, executive]

Sure, Maria. In terms of the AI tools and functionality, I'd say we're very pleased with how the features and functionality we're launching, including things like our Uma, AI work companion, as well as Upwork Chat Pro, which is an AI-enabled feature for freelancers in particular, to leverage that throughout the work journey on Upwork, these are all getting very strong adoption and continue to be advancing even though they're still in their early stages. We've seen a 23% increase between Q1 and Q2 in users interacting with Uma. We also saw a 68% increase in freelancers using Upwork Chat Pro on a daily basis. So these are kind of positive signals that this is an effective strategy for us that is going to continue to enhance the experience and our metrics and really is giving us confidence in the road map that we're executing.

In terms of AI impact on the overall business, here's one way to think about ring-fencing the negative impact, which I think we get a lot of questions about. As the world is undergoing an AI transition, and inevitably on that journey, some of the old ways of working will get left behind. The segment of jobs in our marketplace that are less complex and hypothetically, most easily disrupted over time by AI, are jobs and Upwork with less than $300 of spend, which comprised just under 5% of our GSV today. To be clear, we are not yet seeing a broad-based AI impact overall in this small job segment.

Now if you look within the small job segment, the current impact from AI is much more limited and is most visible in a couple of categories. Writing and translation is obviously where it's most evident, and that's just as we've expected and seen over multiple quarters now. In writing and translation and elsewhere, we continue to see, at this point, a positive AI-driven mix shift away from simple, very low effectiveness jobs, to complex, more valuable, higher paying work. And this transition has started in the past. In the past quarter, we saw hours per contract in writing, we saw spend per contract in translation, all increasing because of the new work that's emerging for editors and translators who are actually working with and supplementing the outputs delivered by AI.

So these factors are really a testament to the AI-related opportunity that we expect to benefit from by offering the human expertise that is so valued across all of our categories in the marketplace as humans are working with AI tools in the ecosystem. And what we see is AI augmenting humans much more so than replacing them.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Josh Chan of UBS.

[Joshua Chan, analyst]

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the trajectory that you saw through Q2. Was it kind of like a onetime step-down in May or June and then kind of flat from there, or was it like a slow easing? And then I guess, just to clarify on your guidance, I guess, does that imply a flat lining from current levels, or does it imply kind of continuing slowing as you talk about maintaining the current trends?

[Erica Gessert, executive]

Yes. So maybe to take a step back and talk about kind of the transition from Q1 to Q2, we saw a really promising top-of-funnel demand signals in Q1, our client-seeking work metric, which is a leading indicator for us on overall demand on the platform and growth on the platform was up 11% in Q1. And that trend really started to reverse around mid-May, and then we saw a declining trend into June and July. And so -- and again, I -- we saw a couple of factors here. We saw overall demand signals decline. And then we also saw a mix shift to -- we saw strong growth from very small businesses and lower demand from larger customers, which is really understandable given the high interest rate environment that we're operating in.

Since smaller businesses tend to have lower spend characteristics overall, this mix shift impacts our GSV per active, which is what's making us more cautious about the outlook for the rest of the year.

[Joshua Chan, analyst]

Thanks for the color. And then in terms of your expense management, very impressive in this environment, when demand eventually returns, will you need to undergo like a period of added spend, or how are you thinking about that trajectory as demand eventually bottoms and gets better?

[Erica Gessert, executive]

Yes, sure. I mean we're very, very proud of the cost discipline that we've implemented. I think we're doing a great job at it, and I'm really proud of the team here for working so hard. We are very committed to continuing to grow operating leverage as we continue down this path. And even as demand returns, I think we'll be very moderated in the way that we invest. We've built a very, very good, for example, performance marketing engine, with very kind of clear parameters in terms of yield and ROI, and we'll continue to invest that way as we go forward. So I don't necessarily see the need to ratchet up significantly our spend as demand returns, but we'll assess it as we go.

[Operator]

Our next question comes from Matt Farrell of Piper Sandler.

[Matthew Farrell, analyst]

I'd love to understand a little bit more about the bifurcation of the enterprise pricing strategy. What kind of went into that? You obviously hit on some early results, but how should we be thinking about that helping to drive an acceleration in the enterprise business over the next couple of quarters?

[Hayden Brown, executive]

Sure, Matt. Our view on this is the enterprise TAM is so attractive, and we're really positioned well to work aggressively to keep unlocking it. With the pilot we ran in the last quarter, you're right, we saw some promising signals, and we're still in testing and really using the learnings from those signals to inform where we go next from here. I'd say because of where we are with that work, the insights have been really strong, but we're not yet expecting the same level of performance every quarter in terms of the type of new logo conversion that we saw in the last quarter carrying forward. But we do think it's critical in this environment and every environment to remain really agile in unlocking the market opportunity. And that's really what we're focused on doing, because we see opportunities both to increase conversion and expand the number of logos in the enterprise space that we have as well as unlock share of wallet. And that's where we're focused.

So it's -- I think it's too soon to say more specific than that, but that is actually where we're laser focused, and the results, I think, are showing that from the agility.

[Matthew Farrell, analyst]

And then kind of following up on some of the questions on the full year guide. Based on my math, it assumes a pretty significant deceleration in GSV as you move through the rest of the year. I guess, how does the macro, both on the small and the enterprise customers, different? How is it different than previous cycles of slowing? It seems like it's much more intense this time around than it has been in the past, but would love just any more clarity on spending patterns and the assumptions that are embedded in GSV.

[Erica Gessert, executive]

Maybe I'll start and Hayden, you feel free to add on. So a couple of things here. Like I said, the guidance is based on essentially bringing forward the kind of lower trends that we saw exiting Q2 and even into Q3 for the rest of the year. So that's what we're basing it on. It's kind of the June and July trends, and we really wanted to make sure that we were not anticipating any improvement to the macro from what we've been seeing in the last couple of months. And so like I said, to that effect, we do think we've effectively derisked the back half of the year.

Just in terms of how macro is impacting kind of spending on the platform, I would say, look, writ large, high interest rates impact demand on the large and medium business customer spend, inflation impacts demand on the small business and consumer side. And these both impact GSV and they have compounding effects, right, over time. And I think we've been able to weather the storm really well for the past few years as we've been going through this, and now we're starting to see some of those compounding effects, I think, really affects on the demand on the platform. But we've been able to grow revenue in this environment due to some of the investments we've made in high-growth categories and our ads and monetization strategy, and we do anticipate that some of those things will also get share with benefits in 2025 and beyond.

[Operator]

And our next question comes from Marvin Fong of BTIG.

[Marvin Fong, analyst]

So I guess just to kind of maybe round out the whole discussion about the state of the world. Anything you could add in terms of categories or even geography areas that might be trending particularly weak or maybe even relatively stronger relative to kind of the overall marketplace? And then I have a follow-up.

[Hayden Brown, executive]

Marvin, what we're seeing is from a category standpoint, the tech industry broadly in the macro at large is being hit harder from a job openings perspective. So we are seeing that, that is flowing through to some extent in terms of demand for tech jobs on our own platform being a bit weaker. And that's consistent with the macro trends. We also know that, that impact, however, is not totally uniform. There are some subcategories within our own tech category on our platform that are performing better. So it's a bit uneven, but that's, I'd say, one theme.

The bright spots in terms of categories definitely are the strength in AI-related work. That grew 67% year-over-year. And we're seeing emerging growth in subcategories even within these AI impacted like slices of the business like rating and translation, whereas even as automation is happening, new growth shoots are popping up.

So that's the category story. To the question of geos or other segments, I'd say we saw U.S., Germany, and U.K. as a bit more impacted than other countries globally in terms of client demand. And again, I think that's indicative of kind of what's going on broadly in those economies.

[Marvin Fong, analyst]

Yes. Okay. Perfect. That makes total sense. And I did want to also follow up on the bifurcated enterprise. So I'm just curious exactly what is it about -- or, how should we sort of think about the less -- the lower feature version? I mean, what is it that makes it more palatable? Is it some of maybe the upfront cost, or is it a take rate being lower? What exactly is it that's going to draw these more on the fence kind of enterprises?

And then just part B of that question, is there any risk in your mind that some of your existing enterprise customers that are on the full-feature version that they might opt for the less full-feature version?

[Hayden Brown, executive]

Yes. I understand the concern. I can tell you there's no risk of cannibalization here. What we are doing is really leveraging the art of getting the packaging, the pricing, the whole structure absolutely right to meet the different subsegments that exist within enterprise. And previously, we had more or less like one offering to target with, and now we have more tools in our toolkit. And again, we're not -- this was one first iteration at this, really aimed at optimizing landing these new customers and expanding their share of wallet, which is something that we want to be absolutely best-in-class at. So we learned a bunch of things. I would say we're not compromising margins or take rate or kind of the effectiveness of our overall business and its profitability. But we are determined to nail how we get these packages and pricing absolutely right on losses market.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from John Byun of Jefferies.

[Sang-Jin Byun, analyst]

This is John Byun behalf of Brent Thill. On the macro and GSV growth, I mean, what sort of actions could you take, or what could help resume the growth there? I mean, will it require a low interest rate or some other either external or specific factors to you?

And then on the EBITDA margin further expansion, I think in the past, you've mentioned that there was still room to optimizing R&D. Wondering how you still view that. If not, then where are there still big pockets we can optimize more between the different OpEx lines?

[Hayden Brown, executive]

John, we don't have to wait for a better macro to return for our GSV investments to pay off. We expect the levers we're investing in now based on the early stages they're in now to have impact in 2025, even if a challenging macro persists. And certainly, they will perform better when the macro improves. So our growth will come from enterprise initiatives, including the pricing and packaging work, which unlocks logos and wallet share as well as amplification from the VMS and MSP program. The AI and Uma-powered performance improvements we're making on our platform, from partnership efforts that drive new client acquisition at scale, from the scaling of AI talent and work-related GSV in our marketplace, which is growing at a rapid pace. These efforts are all in their early execution this year, and we never expected them to have a significant 2024 impact. In 2025, they will be beneficial. And they will also be enhanced by the asset monetization work, which will be an additional tailwind, as well as anti-circumvention efforts, which will be favorable next year on GSV and revenue.

So we feel great about our portfolio of opportunities and the ongoing strong execution we have behind every single one of them.

[Erica Gessert, executive]

And I'll just answer on the adjusted EBITDA margin expansion question. Yes, we absolutely do have more optimization to go in the R&D line. We are continuing to grow that line. And I think you can expect that we are going to continue to invest on -- in innovation on the platform. We think that, that ongoing innovation and investment in technology are the ways to grow this business. And so you will see that line continue to grow some on a year-over-year basis, but not nearly to the extent that it has in the past. So we've been growing over 20% of the year for the past few years in R&D. And we're taking a really surgical approach. We're going kind of project by project and looking through and cutting back where we're not seeing the ROI profile that we want along the time horizons that we want. And again, we also have optimizations that we can take in continuing to improve on our gross margin line. And then I think there's definitely a way to go in G&A as well.

[Operator]

That concludes Upwork's Second Quarter 2024 earnings call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.