Coveo Solutions (TSX:CVO) released fourth-quarter financial results and hosted an earnings call on Wednesday. Read the complete transcript below.
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Summary
CVO reported a record fourth quarter in new business bookings and posted $13.7 million in operating cash flow, maintaining breakeven levels while scaling revenue.
The company is focusing on generative AI solutions and strategic growth areas, emphasizing its differentiation and strong economics.
CVO sees growth opportunities in B2B commerce, generative AI, and large complex enterprises, with current strategic growth areas forming the majority of its ARR.
The fiscal 27 outlook reflects a cautious approach due to the timing uncertainty of large strategic opportunities, with expected SaaS subscription revenue growth between 10-13%.
CVO plans to reinvest in strategic growth areas, with a focus on larger, more complex enterprise deployments, while maintaining healthy gross margins despite increased AI-related costs.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Coveo Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Wednesday, May 27, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Adiro Kazay, Head of Investor Relations.
Adiro Kazay (Head of Investor Relations)
Please go ahead Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us. With me to discuss Coveo's fiscal fourth quarter and full year 2026 results are Laurent Simoneau, Coveo's co-founder and chief executive officer, Louis Tetou, Coveo's executive chairman and Gavin Amel, Coveo's chief financial officer. A reminder that some remarks made today will be forward looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those regarding our plans, objectives, expected performance and our outlook for the first fiscal quarter and full year fiscal 2027. These are forward looking statements given as of May 27, 2026 and while we believe any statements we make are reasonable, they are based on current expectations and assumptions which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied. Coveo disclaims 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 is included in the filings we make 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 section of the Company's Most recently filed MD&A, both of which are available on our SEDAR+ profile at SEDAR.ca or on ir.coveo.com Additionally, some of the financial measures and ratios discussed on this call are either non ifrs, measures, ratios or operating metrics used in our industry. A discussion on why we use these metrics and where applicable, reconciliation schedules showing ifrs versus Non IFRS results are available in our press release and our MDNA release today. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all references and financial figures made today are in US Dollars. Our presentation slide accompanying this conference call can be accessed on our IR website under the Financial Information section. I will now turn the call over to Louis to review our platform and strategy, followed by Laurent taking us through the operational and strategic highlights of our fourth quarter and we will end off with Kevin taking you through the financial details and providing our outlook for the first quarter and fiscal 2027. We will then open the line to your questions with that. Over to you Louis.
Louis Tetou (Executive Chairman)
Thanks everyone for joining us. Fiscal Q4 was a record fourth quarter in New business bookings performance and another quarter of new customers strength. So we're ending fiscal 26 with the best new business bookings year ever. We also posted $13.7 million of operating cash flow in the fourth quarter and maintained the breakeven levels we had guided for the year, all this while continuing to scale revenue. Laurent Karine will discuss the details. We attribute this performance to our focus on both our generative AI solutions and our go to market and strategic growth areas where our technology is highly differentiated and where the economics are very strong for both Coveo and our customers. I want to help investors understand our market dynamics, what we're hearing from customers and why we see growth in core markets in this new generative AI and agent era, AI is at the center of every enterprise technology conversation. But the market is still noisy. Customers are still figuring out the stack required, how they can deploy AI to create real, durable business value. We don't believe AI will simply replace enterprise applications, as perhaps the so called SaaS apocalypse suggests. Instead, we think AI will become a new operating layer across the enterprise data and that the strongest software platforms are integrating AI to make their applications more intelligent, more automated and more valuable. And this is where we believe Coveo is extremely well positioned and that this trend increases our value. We provide foundational technology that makes enterprise AI work accurately, securely and at scale across all enterprise data. The leading brands we deal with have realized the need for this, and there are three reasons. First, none of the AI works unless it understands your context. In the enterprise, that context lives in the company's broad data. Much of it is unstructured, distributed across systems and governed by complex permissions. Large language models do not intrinsically understand a company's products, inventories, customers, documents, conversations, contracts, processes or business rules. The second reason is that generative AI is powerful because it can stitch together information fragments from many sources and bring those in context, generate novel, useful answers or actions in real time. At large scale. AI models alone are probabilistic, but enterprises need to avoid hallucinations, enforce permissions and control trusted outcomes and accuracy. High precision AI outputs is the norm. The third reason is that many companies first tried to build these capabilities themselves, and they're reaching the same conclusion that enterprise AI success is not just about picking AI models. It's about data, relevance, security, governance and measurable business value. In fact, models are multiplying and agent pick evolves quickly. So preserving flexibility and interoperability is key. The ability of different artificial intelligence models, agents and systems to seamlessly work together across broad data so net net two things are necessary and coveo does both. First, reaching data everywhere it sits is key. If you can use search to bring it together for AI context, that's a good start. Then grounding AI models with high contextual relevance is also key. So tech that can figure out relevance is a second critical piece. For more than 15 years we've built our platform deploying successfully within thousands of use cases with customers globally, combining indexing, search, semantic vectorization, machine learning, deep learning, relevance control, personalization and now generative experiences AI applied in production and producing real business outcomes. Coveo has now evolved as the trusted relevance and context layer for enterprise AI and that context window is a very precious piece of the enterprise applied AI stack in digital. Without it it doesn't work and AI models alone do not provide that infrastructure and so it gives us confidence in coveo's long term position and value as enterprises move to AI deployment at scale. Here are some practical examples. In the quarter we signed significant deals with several new Fortune 1000 customers in the B2B industrial, manufacturing and distrib sectors. Last earnings we discussed the massive economics and competitive gains derived from our AI solutions across this B2B industrial sector. These large scale companies know a thing or two about AI. Many have strategic partnerships with the leading AI companies in the Magnificent Seven and access to all the models and commercial agents, OpenAI, Anthropic Agent Force, etc. Yet they use Coveo for their AI stack. Laurel will discuss the reasons, customer examples and the high ROI in more detail. Over the recent years, coveo navigated successfully through what we believe is the most profound transition ever in the tech industry from AI search in the pre generative AI era to now the GenAI and Agent Pick era. GenAI has redefined our market and almost every industry our company evolved as a result. First, our consolidated growth and net expansion metrics continue to reflect the broader evolution of our customer base. This includes certain more mature cohorts traditionally in service and workplace, for example with simpler search use cases.
Louis Tetou (Executive Chairman)
These cohorts tend to have a more moderate renewal and expansion profile. We continue to thoughtfully manage and support them while directing incremental investments towards larger, more strategic customers operating in complex digital environments. This is where coveo's relevance and AI capabilities are more differentiated. We seek to bridge those into our more advanced gen AI and Agent Pick solutions that Being said, our strategic growth areas tell a very positive story. Those are B2B commerce, Gen AI and large complex enterprises. Deploying COVEO across multiple use cases. This cohort forms the vast majority of coveo's overall ARR, almost all of our new logo acquisition focus in sales and all of our new customer bookings in fiscal 26 and those segments are growing fast with robust net expansion rates. I think this is an important message for investors. Coveo is not only participating in the GenAI transition, but we're performing strongly and taking share in the solutions and segments that matter most for our future growth.
Louis Tetou (Executive Chairman)
Winning in the new Generative AI and agent era and in the large enterprise B2B market segments. As the market continues to gain greater clarity and education, the team is focused on execution, conversion, visibility, solid customer economics and more and more proof points. The success in our strategic growth areas reinforces our conviction in our long term strategy and durable growth. This is where we invest. As we've discussed before, we also continue to see opportunities on home soil as both Canadian public sector and regulated industries seek to accelerate sovereign AI deployments.
Louis Tetou (Executive Chairman)
To that effect, we've announced an MOU with the Canadian government in the third quarter and now a strategic agreement with Bell AI Fabric in the fourth quarter. At this time, given the scope, geopolitics and unpredictable timing, we are not forecasting any revenue from this opportunity in our guidance. We, however, remain encouraged by the potential scale and long term opportunity this partnership could represent. I'll now turn it over to Laurent.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you Louis. First, I'm very proud of our team delivering this record fourth quarter of bookings as well as a year of record bookings performance in fiscal 26. These results were driven by continued strength in our core growth areas, particularly B2B commerce and generative AI. They also reflect growing conviction for new and existing customers that COVEO is uniquely positioned to solve complex enterprise AI search, discovery and personalization challenges at scale.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
This quarter, organizations including Palo Alto Networks, Unimax Tires, Ellucian Intuit, Deloitte Perficient and the Australian Taxation Office chose Coveo to power mission critical commerce, service and enterprise experiences. We see strength with B2B manufacturers and distributors where large parts catalogs, complex buyer journeys, fragmented content in technical service environments create exactly the challenges COVEO is built to address. For example, what happens when a mining machine, an aircraft engine or an MRI machine goes down? Our technology can consolidate product catalogs, documents, data and context from dozens of systems into AI so that the AI can orchestrate faster diagnostics, parts, engineering, manufacturing and contractual content. This intelligence translates into better uptime and in turn into tens of millions of dollars of revenue gains for these machines. This is not something you can do easily just firing up a set of AI models and it also requires vertical expertise.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
It is a difficult problem. Content is fragmented, access rights are complex, catalogs are large and dynamic and intent varies by user role journey. Entitlement and context differentiation is making this complexity usable by AI across both digital and gen tech experiences. Our differentiated technology enables B2B companies to industrialize generative AI capabilities of scale. We can demonstrate high ROI through fast pilots, phased ramps and deliver a flexible model that works both as a complete solution and a composable platform, all with amazing simplicity and cost efficiency. For the second consecutive quarter we landed the largest deal in Coveo's history, another seven figure annual subscription with a global 1000 industrial manufacturer. This customer operates a complex billion dollar B2B aftermarket parts and service business representing about a third of their revenue and their highest margin opportunities. Their customer experience was constrained by weak search relevance and an inability to interpret complex product models, technical configurations and parts fitment requirements.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
Coveo will power their B2B OEM AI parts discovery and recommendations experience, unifying complex catalog structures with broad technical content across systems into a single intelligent search recommendations and conversational experience. It applies our enterprise grade scalability and security with support from multiple AI models and even the customer's own LLM across millions of parts and more than 30 languages. The Conservative business case estimates hundreds of million dollars in incremental revenue over three years, driven by improved conversion and average order value, reduced manual maintenance and step change in SLA performance.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
Another new customer is a major H Vac manufacturer. They expect Coveo AI to deliver substantial ROI over the next three years, driven primarily by a projected lift in search session conversion, with additional gains from listing page performance and recommendations led increases in average order value. The pattern for both these customers is the same relevance and personalization precisely tuned to each customer's profile and behavior, guiding customers through the buying and product ownership journey while reducing customer effort and configuration overhead.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
Our R and D investments and innovation priorities are guided by customers and by a clear view of where enterprise software is going. Workflows are becoming more AI assisted, conversational and agent, creating a need for AI that is trusted, secure, permission, aware and grounded in the right enterprise data. Last quarter we launched our hosted MCP server to support interoperability between Coveo and the growing ecosystem of AI assistance and genetic frameworks. As enterprises adopt different AI experiences, Coveo's role is to provide a universal grounding layer so each experience can access the right enterprise content with the right context, permissions and relevance. We're also investing heavily in the convergence of enterprise use cases to create a unified intent driven experience. Commerce, service and other points of experience are becoming one connected journey. We rolled out Coveo search agents to select customers, adding conversational and reasoning capabilities across these points of experience.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
These agents help understand what a user is trying to accomplish, retrieve the most relevant information, recommend the best next action and present it in the appropriate format. Contextual Experiences Intent driven, unified and automated With AI, for example, a commerce conversation may begin with product recommendations and rich discovery, then evolve into education, side by side comparison or buying guidance. With ownership, the conversation shifts towards service. The same experience can surface the right knowledge, article or troubleshooting advice alongside relevant parts suggestions while maintaining context to further support interoperability. We are also making these contextual and intent driven experiences easily available to gentec and Personal assistants. This allows Coveo to extend beyond our own experiences and into the broader ecosystem of AI assistants and genting interfaces customers choose to use. Looking ahead to fiscal 27, we will remain intensely customer focused. To support that, we're transforming our customer organization around a new operating model designed to bring our teams even closer to customers and accelerate the path from customer need to product impact. This model creates a more coordinated lifecycle engine built around technology, architecture, outcomes and adoption. It brings together account management, forward deployed engineering, technical programs, professional services and support into unified customer motion. The goal is to provide customers with the trusted AI expertise, technical leadership and clarity they need across the whole journey. We serve some of the largest and most innovative enterprises in the world. Our goal is to partner with them deeply, combine their domain expertise with our technology expertise and uncover and deliver new solutions that solve real business problems at enterprise scale, always with high ROI economics insight. From a financial perspective, we will continue to scale the business in a disciplined and efficient way. Kellyn will provide more detail, but our focus remains on building a high margin recurring revenue business that generates positive cash flow and allocates capital toward the highest growth and highest return opportunities. We believe our business model is sound. We have a differentiated platform, a customer centric innovation machine and a large opportunity in front of us in our strategic growth area. As enterprises invest in AI driven search, discovery, knowledge and genetic experiences. The market, as we said earlier, is gaining clarity and we are right there as it inflects. Finally, I'm pleased to announce that we have hired a new Chief Sales Officer to lead our North American new customer team. This individual is a seasoned executive with more than 20 years of enterprise sales leadership experience, including executive roles at some of the largest software companies in the world. He is expected to join Coveo in June to wrap up I'm very excited about coveo's future. We're differentiated, we bring high value to customers, we have momentum in our strategic growth areas, a clear path forward and a significant opportunity ahead in fiscal 27 and beyond. And I want to thank our incredible team for their hard work throughout the year. I will now pass the line to Karin to review our financial details.
Karin
Thank you Laura. From a financial perspective, fiscal 26 reflected continued progress in several of our strategic growth areas alongside disciplined execution. We said we would focus on accelerating Coveo's core platform growth, improving bookings performance, scaling Commerce Engine AI and maintaining financial discipline. We made meaningful progress against Those objectives with 15% Coveo core platform SaaS revenue growth, our strongest full year new business bookings performance to date, continued momentum in commerce and GenAI, and positive cash flow now let me walk you through our fourth quarter and post fiscal year results that subscription revenue of 35.9 million, an increase of 10% with the full depreciation of the Qvid platform. All SaaS subscription revenue during the quarter came from the Coveo core platform which increased 14% full year. SaaS subscription revenue was 142.5 million, growing 13% with the Coveo core platform growing 15%. Total revenue was 37.4 million in the quarter, an increase of 9%. Full year total revenue was 148.3 million, an increase of 11%. Gross margin for the quarter and full year was 78% and product gross margin was 80% in the quarter and 81% for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA was 0.8 million in the quarter and negative 0.8 million for the full year. In line with guidance, cash flow from operating activities was $13.7 million in the quarter, aided by positive collections. For the full year we generated $10.5 million in operating cash flows compared to $11.1 million in the prior year. NER on the Coveo Core platform, which excludes the impact of our depreciation of qubit, was 103%. We continue to be active on our buyback program, purchasing for cancellation approximately 1.9 million shares at a weighted average price of Canadian $6.08 per share for a total consideration of $8.4 million during the quarter. For the full year we repurchased approximately 4.4 million shares at a weighted average price of Canadian $6.83 per share for a total consideration of $22 million. We maintain a strong financial position with approximately $102 million in cash and no debt. Let me now touch on a few of the strategic areas that continue to drive performance throughout the quarter in fiscal 26 commerce is the primary driver of our growth this quarter, representing approximately 60% of total new business bookings, remaining our fastest growing segment. We were pleased by the momentum in B2B commerce we where we're seeing increasing demand for large manufacturers and distributors. B2B commerce was a standout this quarter which recurred new logo addition and strong new business bookings performance. Turning to Generative AI adoption continued to expand across both customer expansion and new logo acquisition where urgent AI capabilities remain an important differentiator and growth driver. As we noted previously, these solutions are proving to be both highly sticky and an effective entry point for broader adoption. We see strong expansion trends for these solutions within the install base, with net expansion rate for generative AI SKUs remaining above 150%. We also made meaningful progress with new customers adoption this year, nearly doubling our GenAI customer count year over year. As a result, GenAI solutions now represent 13% of our total annual recurring revenue. You've heard us speak before about customers using coveo across multiple use cases. When that happens, we typically see stronger extension dynamics and greater customer stickiness as Coveo becomes increasingly embedded as a strategic platform within the enterprise. During the fourth quarter we saw continued momentum in customers expanding their use of coveo into additional use cases. We believe there is a growing need for enterprise grade platforms acting as foundational layers across increasingly interconnected commerce, service, website and knowledge experiences. As these environments continue to converge, coveo is well positioned to help enterprises deliver more unified and intelligent digital journeys. Beyond new logo acquisition, we see expansion trends across several of our strategic customer cohorts. Last quarter we highlighted that our top 20 customers generated a three year net expansion rate of approximately 150%, demonstrating the long term expansion potential of Strategic Coveo's deployment and the stickiness of our platform in multi use cases scenarios. Since then, we continue to grow the number of customers over 1 million of AR, further reinforcing the strategic role Coveo is playing within large enterprises. More broadly, across our strategic customers cohorts, namely Commerce, gen AI and multi use case customers, we see robust net expansion rates. At the same time, some of our more mature customers cohorts expand and renew at a more modest pace than what we're seeing across our strategic growth areas. This reinforces our focus on larger, more strategic enterprise deployments with multi use case potential where customer outcomes and long term expansion dynamics remain the strongest. Moving on to guidance, we continue to see healthy customer adoption and expansion across the strategic growth areas we've highlighted. Our fiscal 27 outlook also reflects a balanced view of the broader operating environment, measured expansion dynamics within portions of the more mature install base and the timing uncertainty associated with large strategic opportunities in our pipeline. While these large enterprise deployment opportunities remain difficult to precisely forecast given their size and complexity, we continue to progress and depending on timing, could contribute incrementally to revenue growth in the fiscal year. As such, for the first quarter we expect Q1 SaaS subscription revenue to be between 37.1 and 37.6 million, representing approximately 12 to 13% growth for the Coveo Core Platform and Q1 total revenue to be between $38.2 million and $38.7 million. And for the full year we expect SaaS subscription revenue to be Between 154 and $158 million, representing approximately 10 to 13% growth for the Coveo core platform and total revenue to be between 160 and $164 million. Regarding profitability, we remain disciplined in how we manage our spend and are focused on operating efficiently, balancing improved profitability with continued investment in the business to support future growth. As such, we expect adjusted EBITDA in Q1 to be between negative 1.5 and negative 0.5 million, reflecting the seasonally higher costs we typically incur in the first quarter. For the fiscal year, we expect adjusted EBITDA between 2 million and 7 million, and we expect to generate operating cash flow of more than 10 million for the full fiscal year. In conclusion, we're pleased with our fiscal 26 execution, including recurring new business bookings, performance, continued progress in Commerce and GenAI, and disciplined financial execution. While our fiscal 27 outlook reflects appropriate caution in the current environment, we believe Coveo is well positioned as enterprises increasingly look for AI platforms capable of supporting complex and converging digital experiences. With that operator, you can now open the line for questions.
OPERATOR
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press a star followed by the number two. One moment please, for your first question. And your first question comes from the line of Tanis Mostravellos with PMO Capital Markets.
Tanis Mostravellos
Please go ahead Hi, good afternoon. Can you expand on the go to market changes that you Laurent, alluded to in your prepared remarks? You know, is that really about kind of leveraging FD's upfront earlier in the process, recognizing that it's a complex technical sale or what's the dynamic there that you're envisaging? Thanks.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
Hi Tanis. And thank you for the question. So and we mentioned that in our prepared remarks we are seeing more and more large enterprise wide multi use cases, transactions and customers and with with more AI, with more generative AI part of those deals, we feel that we need greater strategic collaboration where our customers and our partners bringing account management fd. So forward-deployed engineers and also technical programs under one single umbrella. So coordinating all of that to first of all accelerate the deployment, the success of the project, help address some challenges in the future, if any, and grow into new opportunities is really the objective here. And this is not, this is not a new model. The, the most AI advanced, the most AI-first companies I should say are using that model, that FD model with a lot of success. So we are accelerating that.
Tanis Mostravellos
And I didn't hear you specifically call out service. So you talked about multi use cases and B2B Commerce. Should our takeaway be that you're deemphasizing pure play service opportunities in favor of opportunities where service is a component of a broader use case like with B2B Commerce.
Louis Tetou (Executive Chairman)
Hey Tanis. Louis speaking. What we're seeing as Laurent mentioned, and if you look in the numbers we reported over the past few quarters, basically almost every quarter, seven figure transactions. So what's really happening, and I'll start with that and dig into service. What's really happening is that the Coveo conversation is becoming much more strategic, a much larger one. And we gave examples with the B2B examples that Laurent mentioned in the industrial sector. So what's going on really is that these customers no longer look at service in an isolated way or at commerce in an isolated way. These large manufacturers, equipment companies, distributors, energy companies, you know, through because of the power of Coveo AI and when we show it to them, the ability to consolidate the experience and unify it and drive the experience automatically with AI through the intent. So as you go online for instance, and interact with a company, depending on your context, depending on what you're asking, we will branch. You're looking for parts, you're looking to compare, you're looking for education, you're looking for part fitment, you're looking for troubleshooting or logging a case or symptoms and diagnostic. So we're really seeing that convergence right now. The historic cohorts, pre Genais, as you know, quite a number of them, you know, were, you know, Coveo was before that, you know, four or eight years ago. You know, we have a lot of, you know, those customers that were using Coveo only for, you know, service knowledge. The bigger one of those, we talked about SAP earlier this year, you know, indexing 43 sources and Coveo helping to dodge, you know, 1.6 million calls. Those remain, you know, Coveo remains a critical infrastructure for those types of environment in the lower end market, you know, smaller customers, simpler use cases, no complexity, etc. These companies are still trying to figure out, you know, whether, whether a model, a simple model can just answer their questions and all of that. It's no longer our market. We've evolved from that in go to market. We're really into large complex enterprises, industrial distribution, B2B, commerce, tackling those bigger problems. So the net, net, pardon me for the long question, but for everyone on the call is we're no longer seeing the world as service versus commerce versus websites and et cetera. Coveo was involved in much larger enterprise situations right now, which to us is greatness. Appreciate the clarification. Thanks. I'll pass the line. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thanos.
OPERATOR
The next question comes from the line of Doug Taylor with National Bank Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Doug Taylor
Yeah, thanks. Good evening. Perhaps a related question to Thanos is you stated in your prepared remarks that you've got these more mature cohorts in service and workplace that have lower expansion potential or profile, you know, and then you've got these growth areas and that's now the majority of the ARR. And perhaps I could ask you maybe to wrap some numbers or ranges around the relative mix of your current ARR base from those two cohorts. I think it would really help us understand better and more quantifiably the trends underpinning the overall growth picture and when we can expect Coveo as a whole is going to see its growth better approximate the excitement that you're describing for your strategic growth areas. Yeah, no, very good question, Doug. And obviously that's the right question to ask when you look at the overall numbers and try to understand the mix. As you know, currently we don't report by segment, so we'll see about that. But today we report overall what we did say and is qualified accurately is, you know, the ARR in our strategic growth areas is the majority of our ARR today. And that Cohort is two things. Number one is growing significantly faster than the company average is obviously. Those are obviously the segments where Coveo is, I would say is designed for, I would say the gen AI and the agentic era as opposed to the pre Gen AI world. So we, the net, the headline here is we'd rather be a company that's designed for the future era than the past pregen AI era. And I think that's an important message, as we said, and also very positive NER metrics there. The other portion which is the minority of our air, you know, as we said very clearly, we're retaining them at a much more modest pace. It's lower net expansion rate and they're still the larger of those customers, you know, were very engaged in converting them to, you know, more significant AI capabilities and etc. Because by nature they're more complex, they need to reach more content and etc. You know, the other ones, the smaller ones are the ones that are still, frankly the jury is still out, they're still figuring out what to do and etc. But we expect, given we're putting 100% of our go to market efforts on what we call our strategic growth areas when we do the math and we can't report any segment yet and any timing of that, but you know, we're obviously, you know, going to outgrow, you know, the modest pace of the minority of the ARR. Pardon me for, you know, I think you understand the mix here. And so overall, you know, while the average growth and we're prudent with the average guidance, as you can tell, because we're dealing with large transactions and, and the timing of this transition. But the net net is we're quite exciting with the growth metrics which I would frankly qualify as significantly greater than the company averages in those strategic growth areas. Okay. And then as we map that to the NER as a company that you've reported some slight compression there and you know, I guess I gotta ask, you know, is there perhaps some gross churn in some of those, say, non core areas that's beyond, you know, what we would have expected with Salesforce. Is that at work here? Can you speak to the renewal activity, you know, in some of those areas?
Karin
Yes. Thanks Doug, for your question. You know, the underlying drivers. Sorry. Are pretty consistent to what you've heard from us earlier this year and tonight with Louis, you know, we got a few isolated churn events this year and then more importantly a significant one with Salesforce in Q2. Additionally, you know, we have we have strong expansion across our strategic accounts like in our growth areas. We're very excited about that. And yes, what we just talked about around some more mature cohort of course influences that. But more importantly, Doug, I think when we look at fiscal 26 something we're really happy is that the new logo acquisition, so what we call internally land bookings, you know, as we get those new customers on board. Maybe you're not as familiar with our detailed math on ner, but as a reminder, we don't include those whatsoever in that metric. So as we have a greater bookings coming from new logo acquisition, of course then that may have an impact on NER in the end, that would be how I would address your question. Hope this answers it.
Doug Taylor
Yeah, I mean that helps. One last one for me while I've got you, Karine. The guidance implies a pretty steep rebound in the ebitda in the second half of the year after Q1, which understandably seasonally and I just want to unpack a bit. You've been signaling through most of last year an intent to reinvest and to some degree that is happening still. But is there something about the market you're seeing which is causing you to perhaps take your foot off the gas? Do you feel you've got the spend profile you need now to deliver against the growth opportunities and we should expect more of the, the economics of your growth should trickle down from here.
Karin
Listen Doug, this is a really good question. Thanks for asking, thanks for pointing out, I mean Q1 is highly seasonal in terms of spend, go to market, namely and so on. So of course that will pick up over the next three quarters. Having said that, we've been, I think always saying and talking about prioritizing growth over profitability. We still believe this is an important assumption. What we care about, Doug, is we look at, you know, strong customer economics. When we think about the money we put at play to get a customer that will drive higher margin, recurring revenue, long term stickiness and so on. When we look at that this would drive investment thesis here. So having said that, we want to be operating efficiently and we constantly, we constantly revisit that as we go on. Thank you. I'll pass the line. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, Doug.
OPERATOR
And the next question comes from the line. Paul Treiber with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Paul Treiber
Well, thanks very much and good afternoon. A question in regards to the change in the go to market strategy really to focus on larger, more strategic customers. When you look back over the last year, do you see higher sales efficiency on larger customers versus the smaller ones. And then looking forward over the coming year, if you're putting more dollars, sales dollars to focus on larger customers, do you expect that will drive stronger bookings growth? Well, I think yes, that's certainly the objective. But yes, you know, when, when what we're seeing the as you know the economics of a company like ours is, is you know, we run a certain, we incur a certain expense to acquire a customer and then that customer brings obviously an annual contract, you know, subscription plus some, some degree of services but not that much and you know, mostly subscription and then, and then grows over time and it's really kind of a land and expand model and at a very high margin. We're obviously very enthused by the fact that our deal size is going up. We have a growing number of large enterprise wins which obviously plays very positively. Paul, on the economics we've always been and historically up till today disciplined as you know, with our P and L and we continue to be. But as we see the market opening and really inflecting and we see the metrics of acquisition with these large accounts, we would expect that these economics will get better and better. Mind you, at the same time, as we see those wins, I think you can expect us to, you know, to the last question about the EBITDA to continue to reinvest. And in that we're seeing this market maturing right now. We're seeing companies making real decisions, we're seeing them compelled to deliver results and come back, as we said in the prepared remarks to companies like Coveo and Coveyo in particular to execute on that. And so the answer to your question is all of these signals are trending in the right direction for better and better and better unit economics. That's helpful. And then just trying to tie together, connect some of the dots of the last couple questions just on churn and you mentioned bookings, you anticipate bookings to continue to be strong. How do we think about with the 27 SaaS guidance? You look at the numbers, the growth rate seems a little bit slower versus 26. How do you sort of bridge between that? Like what's, what's sort of the disconnect between bookings growth and SaaS growth? Yeah, very good question. And look, I understand, you know, the, everybody on the calls is certainly asking the right question because it's the right question today. The high level answer is we're taking a prudent approach in our guidance until the timing becomes, becomes visible, particularly of larger transactions and of course we have as you know, exceptional, potentially exceptional transactions that we're not, you know, including in the guidance because, just because we don't understand the timing of those. And we talked about some of those in the prepared remarks. But you know, you're right that you know, it, you know, we, when you look at, you have to look, you have to do the math. And I understand we're not breaking it down by segment again for you guys just because we, we haven't yet. You have to do, to do the math on a blended basis. And that would probably be, you know, the best explanation we can give you. Karin, perhaps you can give a little more, little more color on that, on that one versus the other.
Louis Tetou (Executive Chairman)
Yeah, and as I said, Paul, on the call, I mean, there's three main drivers on the guidance here. We talked about those large opportunities. Look, we're super excited about those opportunities, active in our pipeline. Timing could make a difference there. But just felt it was responsible from my perspective to take a prudent stance here. Then on the second, we've talked about the more mature cohorts. Right. Those dynamics are also at play in our guidance. And finally, I think in the current environment as well, world is active and so on. So it's all of that together that drove what you're seeing for fiscal 27.
Paul Treiber
Okay, thanks for that. Just lastly, just on gross margins, the air costs having an impact on gross margins or do you see gross margins, product gross margins remaining stable here?
Karin
Yeah, thanks. Good question. This is clearly something we monitor very closely, Paula. Of course, there were a lot of uncertainty when Genai started around that. And we have a cloud ops team that is really highly efficient and driven by optimization all the time. So while we see some buckets where, you know, cost could be, you know, a little more heavier, on the other side, we continue to be highly optimized and efficient, as you can see on our reported adjusted growth margin. So, you know, it's very healthy there. Okay, thanks for taking the questions. And I might add that the structure of our platform is such that we're agnostic to models. So we create actually which is, which is an advantage right now that customers are realizing. We create optionality. So as a reminder, you know, coveo as a. Think about coveo as a platform that's obviously agnostic to data, agnostic to models, agnostic to apps, and agnostic to agents. And so we create optionality so customers don't have to lock themselves up in one model versus another. And increasingly there are now hundreds of models on the market and you can a b test them and so on. So that's another consideration which is important because you're enabling that cost optimization through the use of various alternatives here just to qualify that part. So we're not, right now we're not seeing at all that our margins will go down as a result of higher expenses. Although the consumption of Coveo is increasing actually at a pace that probably outpaces the company right now, which is also good because we can absorb that.
OPERATOR
Thank you. And the next question comes from the line of David Kwan with Tuticow and please go ahead.
David Kwan
Thank you. Question about the guidance. It seems to imply that there's a solid quarter over quarter pickup in new SaaS revenue for Q1, but also seems to imply a slower pace in terms of new SaaS revenue for the balance of the year. What's driving that is that just given the strong bookings we've seen in recent quarters boosting the Q1, but the impact that Corinne kind of outlined as relates to, you know, the macro, the increased deal complexity that kind of driving this slower growth over the balance of the year.
Karin
Yeah, thanks for your question, David. As you said, the timing of opportunities matter here. So that definitely to take into consideration our approach in the outlook is simply to remain as appropriately balanced as possible given the size complexity and timing, as we've said. And then, you know, the seasonality around bookings and around renewal dynamics also is taken into consideration. As you know, you know, seasonally H1 is usually not as strong as H2. It's been like that for the last, I don't know, even probably before my time 10 years ago. So this is also into consideration in the growth rate that you're seeing.
David Kwan
All right, thanks Corinne. David. Sorry, sorry. I just want to add one thing. I forgot something. Remember, AR growth and gap will follow sometimes not necessarily the same trend. So what you're seeing from a gap would be slightly different from an AR perspective. No. Great, that's helpful. And tying into Paul's question on the margins, are you adjusting your pricing right now just given the increased token prices that we're seeing? And have you seen a material impact to the gross margins over the last couple of quarters?
Karin
Hi David. So short answer is we're keeping our gross margin at a very healthy level. It's a mix of discipline on our part, but also optimization from a customer part where we offer them the opportunity to use the model that is the most efficient for what they want to accomplish first. And sometimes we make this own selection on our own, depending on the use Cases and depending on various circumstances. And of course, yes, we adjust pricing when it's appropriate and when we feel that the value we create is linked to certain models that may be more expensive. And is that built into your contract, if I may qualify here, to Laurent's point? We control that essentially is how I would summarize that we have the levers to control the margins here. So we're very confident with the margins going forward on this one because customers understand that there's a price depending on the models and what they want to achieve. So we can absolutely transfer that cost and maintain our margins. Okay. Okay. So that there's something baked into your contracts that allows you to adjust prices or as it relates to what the prevailing token prices are. No, our contracts are. Well, to be accurate. No, it's not. Well, we have provisions for price increase in the contract and so on. But, you know, if you want to activate a certain model in the future that will perform certain types, you know, we saw it with CRGA when we launched, you know, initially, the initial, you know, versions of relevance generative answering. Because before we got into Agent Tick and all of that, and we were able to charge incrementally for that. And so if our platform is built in such a way that if we want to activate in the future something that would provide some, you know, much higher level reasoning abilities or whatever, we would absolutely be in a position to charge customers for it. And technically, what it means, David, is we charge typically an entitlement of queries and also an entitlement of generative queries. So complex use cases may require more generative queries. And if they get above their entitlement, then we have the conversation to provide more.
David Kwan
Oh, that's helpful, thanks. On a related note, can you see what gross margins you're assuming for the 27 guidance? Is that similar to what we saw in 26 or.
Karin
Yes, you can assume similar gross margin, David.
David Kwan
Okay, great, thanks.
OPERATOR
And the next question comes from Blind Koji Ikoto with BFA Securities. Please go ahead.
George McBree
Hi, this is, this is George McBree and Officer Koji Ikeda. I appreciate, you know, you guys taking the time today as we think about NER kind of, and how it's contemplated in the guide directionally, is it kind of down from conservatism around mature cohorts or is it kind of like up stable from maybe faster growth, more strategic newer cohorts kicking in and their renewals through the year?
Karin
So of course. You got it, George. Those two dynamics will be impacting our ner as you said, I do not provide guide on ner. To be clear though, however directionally what I want to tell you is that, you know, the NER we're seeing on the strategic cohorts we've mentioned, like multi use case customers, commerce customers, customers, Genai customers, it's really healthy and as you probably heard from Louis, is significantly higher than what we're seeing in the reported ner. Now having said that, the dynamic around more mature cohort also have to be taken into consideration here.
Louis Tetou (Executive Chairman)
That makes sense. Thank you. And maybe just one on kind of these large strategic deals and the go to market focus there, you know, as the go to market motion around these large strategic deals continues to, you know, learn and improve. Like how are these conversations trending? And you know, maybe if you guys could touch on too as it pertains to shifting resources maybe from more mature to the faster growing strategic opportunities, what signals would it take for you guys to maybe shift even more aggressively resources go to market resources towards these more strategic opportunities that you have in the market. Thank you. I'll start with that. George. The way to think about the company right now is there is obviously the pregen AI cohort, the search cohort that you know, we have an account management team that actually works hard actually to look at those accounts and make sure that we get them into the agentic and the generative AI world and so on. And you know, that dynamic is still unfolding as these companies are sort of discovering what to do and etc. You know, this market, you know, everybody was talking about AI, but everybody online needs to realize that, you know, customers were a bit on a holding pattern and experiment and all that. And we've talked about that in previous quarters. The reality is if you look outside of that account management team, all of our effort, if you think about go to market in terms of marketing, in terms of, you know, lead generation, where we, where the company is, where the company is selling and etc. 100% is within the strategic growth areas for the reasons we mentioned above. The metrics are outstanding, the deals are big, the growth is high, the NER is high and you know, it ticks all the marks. And so it's, I don't know if we talk about an evolution of the go to market or really what is today, but it's really where in 2026 and as we reported in 2026, all of our new logos came from those from there. And again we announced, you know, record deals, quarter after quarter, seven figure deals, you know, which had never happened for new logos in the history of the company before. So obviously we're all in. We're all in on that and growing that. On the last part of your question, we're managing that gradually. We're reinvesting. The more we win, the more we will reinvest and the more the market is opening up. There are many catalysts right now, companies, and it's no different than our narrative in the past quarters. We're just more and more certain of that is companies now can no longer wait. They have to deploy AI period, otherwise they'll compete against it and they can no longer experiment. They've tried, many failed. So those are huge tailwinds for those markets. And again, the economics, when Laurent spoke on the phone about one example that we signed in the quarter with this large industrial Fortune 100 company, you're talking about hundreds of millions of ROI that is demonstrated. And so, you know, this is, this is the game that we've always wanted to play. This is the game that we started playing, you know, more and more. And we're going to continue to invest in, you know, 100%. So basically, we're all in on these strategic growth areas, which are B2B, B2B commerce, industrial distribution and large scale complex enterprises is really where we're all in. Thank you very much. Yep,
OPERATOR
thank you. And this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn it back to Laurent Simone for closing remarks.
Laurent Simoneau (Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you. So I want to thank all of our shareholders for their continued support and look forward to updating you on our progress in fiscal 27 Q1. Thank you.
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