Coveo Solutions Inc

TSX:CVO

Earnings Call Transcript 2025-Q2

[Operator]

Good afternoon. My name is Jerry, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Coveo Second Quarter Fiscal 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] After the speakers' remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Monday, November 4, 2024.

I'll now turn the line over to James Bowen, Head of Investor Relations. Mr. Bowen, you may begin your conference.

[James Bowen, executive]

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Coveo's second quarter fiscal 2025 financial results conference call and webcast. With me today are Louis Tetu, Coveo's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Brandon Nussey, Chief Financial Officer.

As a reminder that remarks made on today's call may be forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those regarding our plans, objectives, expected performance and our outlook for the third quarter and fiscal year 2025. These forward-looking statements are given as of today, and while we believe any statements we make are reasonable, they are based on current expectations, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied. Coveo disclaims to the greatest extent possible allowable under applicable law, any intent or obligation to update our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Further information on factors that could affect the company's financial results are included in filings with Canadian securities regulators, including in the Risk Factors section of the company's most recently filed Annual Information Form as well as the key factors affecting our performance in the company's most recently filed MD&A, both of which are available on our SEDAR+ profile and on ir.coveo.com.

Additionally, some of the financial measures and ratios discussed on this call are either non-IFRS measures or ratios or operating metrics used in our industry. A discussion on why we use these measures, ratios and metrics and, where applicable, a reconciliation schedule showing IFRS versus non-IFRS results are available in our press release and our MD&A issued today, which can be found on ir.coveo.com and our SEDAR+ profile. Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to financial figures made today are in U.S. dollars. Finally, presentation slides accompanying this conference call can be accessed on our IR website under the News and Events section.

I will now turn the call over to Louis to review the highlights of our second quarter before Brandon takes you through the financial details and our outlook for Q3 and fiscal 2025. We will then open the line for Q&A and we ask that you limit your questions to one at a time to maximize participation.

So with that, Louis?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased to share that Coveo's second quarter financial results have once again exceeded our guidance. We delivered SaaS subscription revenue of $31.2 million, cash flows from operations of $1.4 million and adjusted EBITDA improved to $1.5 million. These results demonstrate that Coveo is building momentum, but also that the applied AI market is inflecting to real concrete demand after almost 2 years of discovery, learning and experimentation. Our customers are some of the most sophisticated technology leaders and brands in the world. Their IT and AI teams are increasingly recognizing the unique value that Coveo offers in providing the key and necessary AI search software stack that powers generative AI for personalized and highly relevant digital experiences and also how that translates into tangible business and financial benefits.

We're fortunate to be in a market where the performance and precision of technology can be measured through A/B testing on digital experiences and Coveo is winning. As intricate knowledge and comprehension around AI and generative AI increases, enterprises now understand that our decade plus of perfecting AI search technology at large scale has become highly valuable to insert generative AI with the scale and precision that enterprises need in their digital experiences. This is true across customer service and knowledge experiences, workplace, websites and commerce. I want to first discuss the state of the market for applied AI and digital experiences and why Coveo is well positioned for growth.

Coveo's strategy is entirely anchored around the imperative for enterprises to bring AI at every point of experience, which we believe will unfold rapidly within the next 12 to 36 months. In our view, enterprises that do not adopt AI to deliver highly personalized, relevant and now thanks to generative AI conversational and advisory experiences within their commerce and knowledge experiences online, they will lose. This is because they will have to compete against those who will be adopters. The quantum leap in creating with AI remarkable digital experiences that drive superior performance is simply too high to ignore and compete against. We talk to our customers about the AI experience advantage and their need to gain that advantage is the catalyst for Coveo.

When ChatGPT first hit the market now 2 years ago, back in November '22, it also became a catalyst for AI in business. Generative AI was obviously a very novel and powerful technology. But even prior to that, most businesses outside of the tech sector had not fully embraced the importance of AI, particularly within digital experiences because most people did not yet understand its power and the paradigm shift. Yet paradoxically, companies like Netflix and Spotify have been using machine learning already for more than a decade to deliver your content experiences and so did Amazon and Wayfair for your shopping experiences.

Coveo has been involved since 2012 in the application of AI to personalize search, recommendations and digital experiences on large-scale enterprise data for over a dozen years. We were losing large language models in 2021 with key customers to combine passage extraction technology with semantics and relevance and deliver the level of content precision that large enterprises needed. When ChatGPT was released, we understood the importance of language models to create remarkable experiences, but also the importance of AI search underneath it for enterprise-grade security and precision. We think the market has now started to discover that. In our field, the technology required to meet enterprise-grade requirements and achieve significant ROI from AI is becoming increasingly clear. While large language models now play a critical role in digital experiences, they're often not sufficient on their own.

Many of you might have heard the term RAG, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which is the required technology to make LLMs deliver at the necessary level of precision that enterprises need, what ultimately drives the ROI. The tough part of RAG is the R, finding and understanding the right set of content and data and through semantics and relevance capabilities, feeding the right context so that the large language model can output answers with higher precision and relevance. This is what Coveo can do across any enterprise content at large scale. This is a space we lead and it's highly valuable, very important and crucial for success. Enterprises have secure content everywhere in many forms and they deliver experiences through a high number of engagement applications on websites, in commerce, customer service and in the workplace.

Coveo can bring AI search personalization and generative answering together agnostic to content and can be inserted into any digital experience. And now thanks to our recently released Relevance-Augmented Passage Retrieval API, they can achieve this securely using the LLM and AI architecture of their choice. What Coveo does is not something that Copilots or agents do outside of their own content ecosystem in UX. We're hearing this now consistently from our customers, prospects, and as you've seen from other Coveo recent announcements in the past few days from the large platforms in the space that we partner with. This essential software stack necessary to ground an AI experience in accurate and relevant data built by Coveo over 15 years is both sophisticated and challenging to replicate.

In our December '22 quarter earnings call, subsequent to the launch of ChatGPT, we explained that we would work with our customers to combine AI search and generative AI to create the most remarkable experiences at large scale and that we would be last to hype and first to results. We were among the first companies to launch generative AI in full production at large scale with scores of the largest tech companies and brands in the world. And we also published the benefits measured such as double-digit contact center volume reduction, for example, all customer case studies, which you can find on our website.

As we mentioned in our last earnings call, it is our belief that the generative AI hype is now subsiding and that after a period of discovery, learning, experimentation and evaluation, enterprises are now far more proficient in AI and generative AI, have learned the requirements and intricacies for its application and can sort out who can deliver versus who cannot. They're increasingly beginning to adopt AI solutions in production, in particular, within the delivery of digital experiences, our area of expertise, but only from technology partners like Coveo that can demonstrate results superiority and measurable benefits.

While investors have flocked to the silicon and hyperscaler layers where foundation capacity is built and CapEx is deployed, the applied AI market where the high-value use cases will be created and not commoditized is bound to grow significantly. We believe Coveo will be part of that because the value and adoption of a technology such as ours is inevitable. As a result, we are now seeing buying behavior resuming and are pleased to see that translating into our own bookings momentum. We're seeing success with both new and existing customers alongside a pipeline that has continued to grow significantly. We're very proud that our second quarter was our best quarter for new logos in the past 2 years since the pre-GenAI disruption period. In addition, we grew the number of customers using our relevance augmented generative answering solution by 50% from where we were just 90 days ago.

We're encouraged by the progress we're seeing and are excited to build on this momentum. Leading-edge tech companies are investing and delivering generative experiences with Coveo. Customers like SAP, Concur, F5 Networks and other leading global technology corporations are seeing double-digit improvements in customer self-service, significant reduction in case submissions and contact center volume and the ability to leverage generative AI to drive real ROI in multiple other use cases, including workplace intelligence for leading financial services institutions and others.

In addition to generative AI within service and workplace knowledge experiences, the other exciting story at Coveo is our promising momentum in commerce. This growth is underscored by our partnership with SAP, which has played a key role in driving client engagement across the globe. Last Thursday, we also announced an exciting new global partnership in enterprise commerce with Shopify. As Shopify grows with a powerful offering for the Enterprise segment, Coveo was recognized by Shopify for its leading AI search, recommendations, personalization and generative experience technology for large-scale B2B and B2C merchants. We believe Coveo will be essential to support the scale and sophistication of those customers and we're thrilled to work with Shopify on this exciting and growing market opportunity.

In Q2, Dentsply, the world's largest manufacturer of professional dental products and technologies selected Coveo for their B2B e-commerce platform due to our ability to support the complexities of B2B, including product discovery, relevance and personalization, pricing complexity, inventory and many more. Our partnership with SAP positioned us as a trusted adviser solidifying our relationship with this client. A leading American food service distributor with approximately $24 billion in annual revenue selected Coveo's B2B commerce and generative AI due to our leading-edge solution and dedication to innovation. Coveo demonstrated how our technology is superior and uniquely suited to support the complexities of their B2B requirements.

We further saw success with commerce in Australia and New Zealand with our newly established ANZ team. Alongside SAP, we successfully onboarding a leading furniture and homewares retail client, which was sourced and closed in 4 months. Our superior AI merchandising technology, speed of engagement and ease of collaboration were pivotal in earning this customer's trust. In addition to our strong quarter on the sales side, I'm very encouraged by the continued investment and growing momentum with our key partners and alliance channels, an essential part of our go-to-market strategy. Large platforms and apps vendors are increasingly validating that Coveo is a necessary part of the preferred architecture and solution track in enterprise AI experience use cases.

During the second quarter, we announced an additional partnership with Salesforce to leverage the power of Coveo's data connectivity and relevance within Data Cloud. We've collaborated with Salesforce for over a decade. This additional strategic integration creates a powerful synergy for larger enterprises with multiple secure content sources and complexity and large-scale relevance needs. Combining Coveo with Salesforce Data Cloud allows them to improve customer satisfaction and reduce costs through more precision in complex service interactions. Salesforce's GM of Service Cloud has publicly stated that Coveo's extensive connectivity to content sources and its capability to add relevance to content is a key enabler for Salesforce enterprise customers with complex search requirements in service. Customers such as Dell, F5 Networks, Xero software have validated this after extensive testing. We are pleased with the progress here and excited to continue growing the partnership with Salesforce and drive improved bookings from our joint customers.

Also announced last week, Coveo has now joined Amazon's AWS ISV Accelerate Program, bringing our market-leading AI search, recommendations and generative experiences to AWS enterprise customers. AWS will work with us to connect the AWS sales organization and help co-sell and facilitate the delivery of our industry-leading AI and generative AI solutions to enterprise customers worldwide, also by providing access to simplified transactions within the AWS marketplace. And earlier in the quarter, we announced a strategic partnership with Optimizely, a leader in digital experience platforms for the enterprise. This partnership combines our AI search, generative answering and relevance capabilities with Optimizely's composable content management system to help businesses provide personalized, cost-effective and connected experiences. I believe the recognition from these industry-leading platforms is a further sign of validation of our leadership position in the applied AI landscape. And this is also recognized by our growing network of systems integrator partners globally.

I want to turn to innovation. We're pleased with our progress and achieved several very important innovations in the quarter to further our leadership position. We announced the launch of our new Relevance-Augmented Passage Retrieval API. For simplicity, think of this as bring your own LLM. This platform API allows customers to leverage everything that comes before the prompt, allowing organizations to connect their own large language models with Coveo's relevant and robust API retrieval and relevant software stack to seamlessly and securely ground their GenAI experiences in the entirety of their enterprise content and experiences. This solution will be attractive for customers who want to build their own infrastructure layer, unlocking a larger TAM and addressing a portion of the market we previously did not serve. The initial demand for this product is very promising and we're actively onboarding companies into our early access program and collaborating with them to shape the future of this offering.

We also released several important enhancements to our commerce capabilities surrounding our merchandising capabilities and AI-powered product discovery. With these enhancements, we believe we have built the most complete AI-powered commerce platform in the industry, bringing together the power of AI to every merchant and maximizing commerce outcomes. And finally, with our Relevance-Augmented Generative Answering solution, CRGA, we continue to extend our lead, delivering optimizations at an impressive pace. In addition to providing customers with greater flexibility around how their answers are delivered, we delivered important back-end improvements that helped improve answer rates by another 20% and brought even greater and unmatched accuracy to our customers' generative experiences.

To illustrate this, SAP Concur, the leading travel and expense management solutions provider for businesses, originally launched on CRGA and reported publicly that they were seeing an impressive 11% case deflection rate. After our new enhancements, SAP Concur is now seeing a 30% reduction in cases for 1,000 search sessions, resulting in an EUR 8 million reduction in cost to serve. It's customer successes like this that really make us proud.

Before we move into the details of our quarterly results, I'd like to take a moment to welcome Eric Lamarre to our Board of Directors, which we announced in September. Eric brings 30-plus years of experience at McKinsey as senior partner leading the digital practice and is the author of the book Rewired described as McKinsey's best seller guide to outcompeting in the age of digital and AI. Eric brings extensive experience in advising Fortune 500 companies around AI and digital transformation and we're thrilled to have Eric help us during this important phase of Coveo's growth journey and as we deliver value to our shareholders.

With that, I will now hand the call over to Brandon to discuss our Q2 financial performance and outlook in more detail. Brandon?

[Brandon Nussey, executive]

Thanks, Louis. I'll start with our current views of the big picture. For those who have been following us, we have shared our view that we expect fiscal '25 would be a year where our new bookings performance would improve from the levels seen in fiscal '24. We were encouraged by what we are seeing in pipeline activity and customer buying signals and we felt that the investments we had made in our GenAI solutions, our commerce AI technology, our international field teams and our go-to-market organization would begin to show returns. We communicated that we expected bookings momentum to build as the year progresses with the back half being stronger than the front half.

And as you heard from Louis, the second quarter was another quarter of validation in that regard, where we saw good breadth in bookings with strong new customer adds and ongoing good performance with our GenAI solutions in particular. As we look ahead to the back half of the year, we remain encouraged by our leading indicators and we're optimistic that this momentum will continue. At the same time, we're seeing, like many others in enterprise SaaS, some of our enterprise customers continuing to be budget sensitive in certain instances in conjunction with M&A activities and this is leading to lower NER rates than planned. While we have been able to overcome this given the positive bookings performance, it is serving to offset a portion of the uplift.

Encouragingly, in some of these instances, these efforts are being done to facilitate the initial purchase of other Coveo offerings such as our GenAI offerings. We continue to expect that the investments made to build out our account management organization will assist us in driving improved NER rates as we exit our year and that we will end the year with overall ARR growth rates that exceed the current levels. Taken together, we believe we'll end the fiscal year within the previously issued ranges for our annual guidance towards the lower to midpoint and we continue to expect to deliver approximately $10 million in operating cash flow.

So, let's get into the details. SaaS subscription revenue was $31.2 million, above the top end of our previously issued guidance. Once again, this quarter, we have broken out the contribution of Coveo's core platform and the platform we acquired from Qubit. As a reminder, our focus is on the Coveo core platform, which drove SaaS subscription revenue of $29.9 million, up 11% from a year ago. The ARR for the core Coveo platform slightly outgrew SaaS subscription revenue on the back of the encouraging new bookings discussed earlier. This was offset by a decline of 51% in SaaS revenue for the platform we acquired from Qubit. As previously communicated, we expect the remaining SaaS revenue for the Qubit platform will largely churn this year as we prioritize investments in our core and this is trending in line with our expectations.

Total revenue was $32.7 million, up 5% from a year ago. Total revenue was impacted by the Qubit churn and lower Professional Services revenue. As mentioned, our priority is driving Coveo core SaaS subscription revenue and we're increasingly prioritizing the opportunity we see with partners to deliver Professional Services. This will mean lower services growth rates as we look ahead, but we believe will lead to greater higher-margin subscription bookings as a result of a strengthened partner ecosystem.

Our second quarter new bookings improved from a year ago and were significantly higher than the prior year. We signed the most new logos since Q2 fiscal '23 and we saw continued momentum in our CRGA offering, which represented over 25% of new bookings in the quarter, continuing to track well against our plans for the year. While new bookings improved significantly in the quarter, we believe we can continue to achieve higher levels and our assumptions remain that we will see bookings momentum build as the year progresses through the combination of more customers finalizing their AI purchasing decisions and as more of our growth initiatives take hold.

NER, excluding the Qubit platform was 104% for the quarter, down from 106% in Q1 due mainly to the reasons I mentioned earlier. Gross margin for the quarter was 79%, up from 78% in the prior period and product gross margin was 82%, in line with the year ago. I continue to be pleased with the operating leverage we're seeing in the business model. And to that end, we delivered $1.5 million in adjusted EBITDA compared to $15,000 a year ago and well ahead of our guidance, positioning us for positive full year adjusted EBITDA.

Cash flow from operations were $1.4 million compared to $0.8 million in the prior period. Year-to-date, cash flows from operating activities were $4.5 million compared to $1.8 million a year ago and is tracking well against our guidance of approximately $10 million for fiscal '25. We do expect some seasonality related to working capital to create variability in our quarterly cash flow results. Coveo ended the quarter in a strong financial position with $128.2 million in cash and no debt. During the quarter, $36.6 million in cash was used to repurchase 6.5 million shares under our SIB and $3.6 million was used to retire approximately 810,000 shares pursuant to our NCIB. To date, we have deployed approximately $75 million to repurchase a total of 11.4 million shares.

I will now wrap by discussing our guidance. For the third quarter, we are expecting SaaS subscription revenue of between $31.8 million and $32.3 million, total revenue of between $33.4 million and $33.9 million and adjusted EBITDA of between $0.0 million to $1 million. As I mentioned, we are maintaining our annual guidance and expect to land towards the low end to midpoint of the following range. SaaS subscription revenue of between $126 million to $130 million, total revenue of between $133 million and $138 million and adjusted EBITDA of between $0.0 million and $4 million.

We continue to expect that our second half bookings performance will be stronger than the first half and that SaaS subscription revenue growth for the Coveo core platform will improve thereafter. As outlined last quarter, we expect Qubit SaaS subscription revenue to experience ongoing churn over the course of the year and continue to expect a revenue impact of approximately $4 million as a result when comparing fiscal '25 to fiscal '24. Please note, this guidance assumes an FX environment consistent with the average level seen in our second quarter.

In closing, we continue to make positive progress towards reaccelerating our growth. And while there's still work to be done, our team is encouraged by the results in our recent quarters.

And with that, operator, you may now open the line for questions.

[Operator]

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Richard Tse from National Bank Financial.

[Richard Tse, analyst]

I think earlier in the year, you had some changes in terms of leadership and you brought on a sort of a new CRO. Can you talk about the operating changes in the sales and marketing organization since that addition? And maybe give us some context in terms of how it's contributing to this accelerated pace of bookings in the second half.

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Richard, definitely, Louis, thanks for the question. Yes, we've made a number of additions to the leadership team here investing for growth. And one of them, as you pointed out, is the appointment of John Grosshans, our Chief Revenue Officer, in addition to a number of other appointments. In general, I think the way I would summarize it is the confluence of the inflection in market demand that we're seeing as companies, as we said and particularly, enterprises want to now operationalize AI. Combined with all the changes and everything we're implementing from a global scalability perspective, everything from sales methodologies that are more consistent and deploying better leadership across the regions. So, we appointed new Managing Director in EMEA, new director in the ANZ region and are continuing to upgrade the team and everything we're doing with enablement and better processes, if you combine that with a market that's inflecting, that's really what certainly brings a lot of confidence in terms of the reacceleration of bookings that as we reported, we're already seeing.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital Markets.

[Thanos Moschopoulos, analyst]

Louis, can you expand on the Shopify relationship and the opportunity you see there and how the go-to-market is going to work?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes. Sure, Thanos. Thanks for asking. We're very excited with the alliance with Shopify. I think everyone on this call understands the scale of Shopify. Shopify, as they announced, I'm not speaking on their behalf, as they announced 1.5 years ago, is investing fairly aggressively within the enterprise market. And obviously, this is a market that is different from the core Shopify and the Shopify Plus market, both in B2C and business-to-consumer as well as brand to consumer, but also in business-to-business commerce. And these are the types of customers that require the sophistication of a platform such as Coveo, search, recommendations, personalization and now the ability to use AI to maximize commerce outcomes, namely revenue per visit and margins per visit, for example, are some of the key requirements that large enterprises have.

And as we know, large enterprises have massive audiences and very diversified audiences and they have large and very complex catalogs, sometimes hundreds of thousands or millions of SKUs. And this is where a technology like Coveo is required. As a reminder, we've announced last quarter that in that space, Coveo was recognized as a leader in the space by Gartner. And so I think Shopify understands this market. There are some people at Shopify who know Coveo intimately and that the combination of Shopify and Coveo within the enterprise is a very good combination. So, we intend to roll out some joint co-sale motions in the market in our various theaters in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. And we're fairly confident about the success of Shopify in the enterprise space and certainly the contribution that Coveo will make to that success.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Paul Treiber from RBC Capital Markets.

[Paul Treiber, analyst]

The GenAI slide, the logo slide that you have is quite an impressive Slide 6, I think. Are all those customers in production? Is the time frame for them to move into production? Has that been shrinking? And then do you find that as you get more customers in various verticals that's helping your win and conversion rates in those verticals?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes, it's definitely helping. I think as we explained initially when generative AI came out, you've heard me saying people started writing phones on their iPhones on Saturday evening and translated that into, well, that's going to be a game changer, of course. But then once you want to deploy this within the enterprise, it's far more complicated. A, enterprises cannot hallucinate. And so you need a high degree of accuracy and precision, which in order to -- and so that's first of all. You need to work on current data. You need to work on secure data. And so these are things that -- these are problems that we're very accustomed to being in the search and relevance business. And so these customers, I think, have realized over time. And if you noticed, Paul, there are many of the leading technology and software companies across the world there in that client list.

So, the first answer to your question is because you have 3 questions, the first answer is no, the logos we showed are the customers that actually signed contracts and have moved into production after extensive testing. And I might say, comparisons as we announced in the past few quarters in experimentation and A/B testing against their own homegrown developments or other solutions in the market. And needless to say, those companies know exactly where these technologies are and have selected Coveo. We have dozens of other projects underway at various stages of experimentation with generative AI. And the answer to your other question is, of course, the process of deploying Coveo, the maturity of Coveo within generative AI, in particular, within knowledge areas, customer self-service and service at large scale and workplace applications has gotten much better. And so the speed at which we can demonstrate this is greater.

The market is also reacting extremely well to our API, what we call Relevance-Augmented Generative Passage extraction, sorry, API, which essentially provides all the Coveo stack to a company that wants to deploy and architect their own software using the -- using a large language model of their choice or a large language model that is trained on their data. But these companies still realize that they need the kind of retrieval and relevance that Coveo provides across large-scale secure data combined with semantic abilities and so on. And that's why they choose Coveo. So yes, it's faster. And the more we demonstrate results, obviously, it's obviously a spiral, positive spiral effect, of course, that helps us accelerate the bookings for that. So, we're very pleased with our competitive position and more importantly, with the value that we provide that is very unique in the application of generative AI within the knowledge space.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Adhir Kadve from Eight Capital.

[Adhir Kadve, analyst]

Louis, just kind of under the same train of thought of the last question. We've heard you say that the new tech companies are really adopting the product and that's a good validation given how technology forward those customers are. But how about outside of the high-tech vertical, some of the other verticals where you have strength in, how are those customers on their adoption cycle? Are you finding that they are kind of going more from dipping their toe into broader-based implementation? Just talk about that a little bit, if you don't mind.

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes, it's a very good question. They are, Adhir. What's happening, as we said, is in the past, since the launch of ChatGPT, pretty much I was not going to say all, but a majority of large enterprises have embarked into projects to build their own version of generative AI and try to apply generative AI in the areas of customer service and the workplace. And what happened is most of them have learned, in fact, that the -- what we call Retrieval-Augmented Generation, which is RAG, which is the technology that allows a company to control a large language model in order to deliver on current secure data, accurate information and answers. The R of RAG, as we said in the call, is really the tough part.

So, how do you feed the large language model and team and control the large language model so that the data that you're using is, a, accurate and current and secure, but b, is relevant to the user and what the user is asking or the task at hand. Last quarter, we announced companies like United Airlines going online with Coveo and that's after extensive testing. We're seeing now companies like US Foods, like Pfizer, like Royal Bank of Canada within the financial sector. So it's beyond tech. Obviously, the tech companies have always been the early adopters of Coveo. We deal with a lot of the leading tech companies. But right now, what we're seeing is an increased understanding across the board that a stack like the one Coveo has is essential to make generative AI work at scale for the types of problems that we solve, which, again, is not the same thing than what a Microsoft Copilot does, for example, or what agents do. We're in the digital experience across any content and across any UX. And that's ultimately what companies are looking for.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of David Kwan of TD Cowen.

[David Kwan, analyst]

Maybe I'll give Louis a bit of a break here and ask one for Brandon. So, thanks for the color on the NER, Brandon. Just in terms of the headwinds that you kind of talked about, you talked about the software, I think, enterprise software spend and on the M&A side. Can you quantify that? I suspect maybe the M&A is a little bit easier to go into, but I was hoping you could put some numbers around that. And then maybe when we could see the NER kind of get back to the 110% or even higher range?

[Brandon Nussey, executive]

Yes. I mean, look, I'll start by saying this isn't a pervasive issue. There's a few limited situations we've seen that we've had to deal with in the past 12 months in the current quarter, inclusive. Overall, logo retention, I'd say, remains more or less in line with where we've always seen it. We have had to deal with a handful of situations, one of which we mentioned on our last conference call, a financial services company that was undergoing a significant cost reduction exercise. We've dealt with a couple of M&A-related transactions in our customer base where the synergies assumed in those M&A transactions result in lost revenue for us. So, those aren't things we can necessarily predict nor control.

And outside of the small handful of situations, we would have had NER rates more or less in line with where we had been tracking. So look, the good news is we've been able to sell through it. We've got a new account management team in place. It still early for them to be really moving the needle on NERs, but we're confident in that direction. And I'll just say that, as I said in the prepared remarks for now that we do expect to see these start to improve by the end of the fiscal year. And we'll keep working on it to make sure that we get back to our targeted levels of 110% to 115%.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Doug Taylor from Canaccord Genuity Group.

[Doug Taylor, analyst]

I'm going to ask a follow-on question to that because it's great to hear about the strengthening customer behavior and the bookings trends. So, in understanding that with the bottom half of the guidance outlook you provided, I guess what I'd like to know is, do you need the enterprise software budgetary environment that you referenced as the offset here? Does that need to improve from here to get the reacceleration that you're messaging? Or are you at the point now where the demand profile here is going to overpower that kind of regardless? And any help there would be useful.

[Brandon Nussey, executive]

Yes. I'll start, Louis, and maybe you can add and just echo some of our earlier comments. I do think this is not a pervasive issue. It's an isolated set of things that we've had to deal with. The good news is bookings more than offset and we'll remain in the guided range. As we look ahead, we expect bookings momentum to continue. We expect NER by the end of the year to start to improve again. So all told, I think what you should be hearing from us is we expect improved ARR growth rates, certainly as we exit the year and into the back half of the year, and then that should set us up well to have a great fiscal '26, all things being equal.

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes, Doug, I think I like your question because it's clearly the latter. It's definitely the demand inflection here. And as Brandon mentioned, this is not a pervasive issue on the -- companies are close to their budgets and tight budgets and the spending and budget sensitive. But overall, definitely what fuels and will fuel, in our view, the growth is definitely the demand side that we're seeing as companies now are really moving into operationalizing AI. And it's going to be interesting also, just maybe an aside comment in the financial markets because what we've seen is investors essentially flocking to I would say the obvious part of AI, which is essentially the infrastructure, the silicon, the GPUs and NVIDIA and the rest and obviously, the hyperscalers and what we call now the Magnificent 7s or Magnificent 9s, depending on how we look at it.

The reality of it is we actually see that customers -- the value will be created by the layer on top of that, which is applied AI. And Coveo is a part of that. If anything, the layer underneath will get commoditized, but there's going to be a lot of value created as we're starting to demonstrate and we shared today on the call with the application of AI to operationalize AI on real data to create real business benefits, whether it's revenue increase or cost reductions that are quite impressive. And that's where we are. And customers -- as customers are seeing the results, nobody ever wants to be first. But once you have a few and you're creating a trend as Coveo is, it's obviously making -- refueling that growth. And I think that's really what we're seeing.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda from Bank of America.

[George McGreehan, analyst]

Louis and Brandon, it's George McGreehan on for Koji. I kind of wanted to ask kind of just as a refresher on you guys' outlook for capital allocation. Could you kind of maybe talk through today where you see opportunities and where you might rank them, different areas like internal growth investments, M&A and other routes, buybacks to deploy cash?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes. I think we see opportunities to grow organically right now. And I think as we see both the market sort of landing and also like it or not, our stock situation, being recoupled with reality, I would say, I think that's going to bode well for M&A. But if you think organically, I think right now, we're definitely investing for growth, George, and beefing up and expanding our go-to-market organization, our enablement organization, investing a lot also with partners. You've seen us obviously, land a very -- an important number of very significant alliances. We talked about Shopify earlier, but I cannot understate the importance of the AWS relationship that we've announced last week also, where AWS sellers, in fact, are incented to help us sell to large enterprises.

So, those are all channels that we invest in. And also with each of these ecosystems comes a whole ecosystem of systems integrators from the big ones that we know, obviously, like the Accentures and Deloittes and E&Y and et cetera, to some more focused systems integrators in areas such as electronic commerce and customer service and workplace applications and so on. And so this is also an area of investment where Coveo wants to expand its reach through systems integrators and further alliances. So, these are key areas of investment. Obviously, we're a technology company. We continue to invest. We believe we've only scratched the surface in terms of the opportunity for our platform and the innovation in our platform within digital experiences.

So, continued investments in innovation that we do with our customers, investments in organic go-to-market organization, expanding that across our main theaters, which today are North America, EMEA and ANZ and investments in expanding our relationships with systems integrators and new alliances and supporting those. So, we've got a lot of opportunity and levers for growth on right now. And that's where we'll be -- you're going to see us invest more and more.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Suthan Sukumar from Stifel.

[Suthan Sukumar, analyst]

For my question, I wanted to touch on the partner channel. Can you provide an update on the SAP contribution to bookings this quarter and how that pipeline has been evolving sequentially? And then just more broadly, you've talked about increasing the mix of business from partners. What are some targets that you have in view over the near to medium term?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes, I can't comment specifically on the targets that we have. Those are the usual suspects, which are the systems integrators. But the way this works at a high level is we establish what I would say, preferred relationships with global platform vendors that essentially are what we call systems of engagement where enterprises use to deliver these digital experiences. So in commerce, we work with SAP. We work with Shopify. We work with Salesforce Commerce and Service, we work with Salesforce quite a lot. And we attach to websites delivered by Adobe and Optimizely and others. We're technically agnostic, but from a go-to-market perspective, we make these experiences richer, better now generative, obviously, and large enterprises want that.

So, whenever we work with a Shopify or with an SAP and et cetera, there are a set of systems integrators, as I just explained, that work with them. And these systems integrators really, if I can use simple terms, they're the family doctors and the whisper masters of large enterprises. They are the go-to consulting firms that cater to large enterprises to essentially help build the architecture that's required for digital transformation. And so we become part of that preferred architecture. And so this is really the main area of investment. This is sort of the go-to-market investment model that Coveo has had, which has slowed down a little bit during -- well, first, during the pandemic and then a bit of the economic downturn after that. And then obviously, as ChatGPT went out, as we explained, there was a bit of confusion in all of that.

Now these companies are more than advising their customers. They are really moving to execute on real projects and so on. And we're certainly -- we certainly want to make sure that Coveo is front and center to these projects. So that's really the way to think about the investment that we're making and we intend to expand that quite a lot and we're investing to do that. So as it relates specifically -- so Brandon, as it relates specifically to SAP, we continue to experience great success and momentum with SAP in its own market. And they're not -- they're really -- we're really well positioned with SAP, obviously, as an endorsed SAP solution, which means that their sellers actually get full commission and quota relief for selling our solution, which is a great position to be in. And we continue to expand that channel as well as the pipeline associated with that.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Taylor McGinnis of UBS.

[Taylor McGinnis, analyst]

So, if I look at the AI customers, you have a pretty impressive list and deals that you would think could eventually become a driver of new billings contribution a lot higher than 25%. So, can you just provide an update on what you're seeing in terms of initial land, deal sizes and how you expect those to scale over time? And if I may, just one follow-up, Brandon. I know you're guiding to the low to middle range of the guide. But I guess, why not lower the high end? Is there something that you're seeing in the business that's giving you the comfort that you could see that potential upside? And what might that be?

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Maybe I'll start with the first part, and I'll let Brandon answer the second part. So, in terms of -- I think right on, I think these -- Taylor, what -- so if you think about legacy Coveo, essentially the main unit of measure, there are some nuances, but the main unit of measure of pricing and consumption pre-generative AI was the queries -- the query volume essentially on these sites, on these experiences globally. With the introduction of generative AI, we introduced a new and additional metric, which is GQPM, so generative QPMs, -- needless to say -- and these generative queries generate a different cost structure for the company. We're very pleased to say that we have mastered that cost structure. You haven't seen despite a fairly impressive volume on the generative side, consuming large language models and so on, you haven't seen our margin contraction here on the product side. So -- but it's still a different model.

There is no question that we're seeing some good adoption and that we're seeing the potential for expand. The model and the strategy we took, Taylor, was really kind of a land and expand. The deal sizes in generative are substantial. They're in the 6 figures on the land side and so on. And we certainly see an opportunity for growth there. As it relates to the guidance, I'll let Brandon address that and explain why we're not changing the range here.

[Brandon Nussey, executive]

Yes. Lots of -- there's lots going on at the business, Taylor. So -- but to your question, we gave our expectation that we expect to be at the low to midpoint, but lots going on in the business that could potentially have an outsized impact. But our expectation as we sit here today is low to mid.

[Operator]

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn over the call to Louis Tetu for final closing remarks.

[Louis Tetu, executive]

Yes. Well, thank you all for joining us today, and we certainly look forward to providing us with another update as we report our fiscal Q3 reports -- results, pardon me. And with that, operator, you can go ahead and close the call.

[Operator]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.