Kinaxis (TSX:KXS) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.
Benzinga APIs provide real-time access to earnings call transcripts and financial data. Visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ to learn more.
View the webcast at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/854228135
Summary
Kinaxis Inc. reported a 20% year-over-year increase in SaaS revenue and a 19% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for Q2 2026, reflecting strong demand for AI-enabled planning and orchestration solutions.
The company raised its full-year guidance for total revenue and SaaS revenue growth, now expecting total revenue between $625 million and $640 million, representing 14% to 17% growth, and SaaS revenue growth between 18% and 20%.
Kinaxis observed strong momentum in customer expansions, with a 70% year-over-year growth in ACV bookings from existing customers, driven by innovative capabilities in its Maestro platform like agentic AI and machine learning.
The company highlighted significant wins across various industries including consumer manufacturing, life sciences, and industrials, with notable clients like Lacoste, Gedeon Richter, and Rockwell Automation adopting its solutions.
Operational highlights included the introduction of a usage-based pricing structure and successful partner engagements that provided a record number of new deals.
Kinaxis is investing in forward-deployed engineering (FDE) capabilities to drive AI-driven supply chain transformation and expects this to expand into 2027.
The company maintained an adjusted EBITDA margin of 26% and expects to continue investing in product innovation and partner enablement to support long-term growth.
Management expressed confidence in handling potential implementation capacity challenges due to strong training and enablement investments within its partner ecosystem.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good morning and welcome to the Kinaxis Inc. fiscal second quarter 2026 results conference call. Currently, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today. I will now turn the call over to Victoria Hyde Dunn, Vice President of Investor Relations at Kinaxis Inc. Please go ahead.
Victoria Hyde Dunn, Vice President of Investor Relations
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the conference call. Joining me today are Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer; Herb Yeh, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer; and Peter Jaroskovich, Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis. Before we begin, we have a couple of reminders. We will be discussing our second quarter 2026 results, which we issued after the close of markets yesterday. The earnings press release and slide presentation are available on the Investor Relations website at investors.kinaxis.com.
Some of the information discussed on this call is based on information as of today, August 6, 2026, and contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those set out in such statements. For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please review the forward-looking statements disclosure in the earnings press release and in our SEDAR+ filings. Additionally, we will discuss IFRS results and non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA.
A reconciliation between adjusted EBITDA and the corresponding IFRS result is available in our earnings press release and MD&A, both of which can be found on the Investor Relations website and on SEDAR+. With that, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Razat.
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Thank you, Victoria, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Before I begin, I'd like to welcome Herb to his first earnings call with Kinaxis. Welcome, Herb. We also recently welcomed Kristen Russell as our Chief Marketing Officer. We're excited to have Herb and Kristen on board as we scale and build Kinaxis for the next phase of innovation and growth. I will start today's call with my observations on the quarter, then turn it over to Peter to discuss financial results and then to Herb to review guidance before the Q&A session.
As many of the world's largest enterprises turn to Kinaxis to manage growing demand, volatility and uncertainty. Second, our vision for operational orchestration and our continued investments in core Maestro capabilities reinforce our commitment to innovation and to supporting the world's most complex supply chains. Third, our second quarter performance builds on the strongest first half in Kinaxis history, and we are very pleased to raise our full-year guidance for total revenue and SaaS revenue growth.
Our continued commitment to product innovation, investments in growth initiatives, and focus on customer and partner success remain our North Star. Let me discuss these topics in more detail, beginning with second quarter results. SaaS revenue increased by 20% year over year. ARR grew by 19% year over year, an adjusted EBITDA margin of 26%, and is in line with our full-year guidance. Our strong performance reinforces our position as a trusted enterprise partner for the world's most complex supply chains, reflecting continued customer demand for AI-enabled planning and orchestration.
As organizations navigate an increasingly volatile and unpredictable operating environment, companies are facing multiple sources of disruption simultaneously. Trade and tariff uncertainty, geopolitical conflict, energy prices, sourcing challenges, and shifting customer demand are all happening at the same time. Given this fluid operating environment, organizations need an enterprise platform that can rapidly scenario plan and help them make better decisions across their concurrent supply chain.
We saw global scenario planning activity on our platform increase every month from April through July this year, with July up 30% year over year. We are seeing this momentum with customers as we unlock value within a $66 billion addressable market. It was another strong second quarter for new business in total, including business from new customers and expansions with existing customers. Our average deal size was almost double what we experienced in the second quarter last year.
Once again, we continue to see strong momentum with contracts with $1 million plus in average ACV, winning three times more than a year ago. Our pipeline conversion rates grew very well. Our partners are sourcing new opportunities and co-selling with us, having contributed a record number of new deals in the second quarter and providing pipeline for the second half of the year. Sales to existing customers have also accelerated. We set a new company record in ACV bookings for quarterly expansion from existing customers with over 70% year over year growth.
These customer expansions were driven by innovative new capabilities, including agentic AI, machine learning-based demand forecasting, advanced inventory optimization, enterprise scheduling, and other supply chain optimization use cases, all part of our Maestro platform. We're also seeing early traction with our Maestro Activity Unit usage-based pricing structure. All new proposals to customers and prospects now include MAUs. Beginning in July, select renewals started incorporating MAU pricing bundles.
We've been thoughtful in our phased approach to align pricing with the value we create for our customers. Now let me share some notable customer wins and use cases. In consumer manufacturing, Lacoste, one of the world's most iconic premium fashion and sportswear brands, selected Maestro to modernize production planning across its manufacturing operations, improving service levels, reducing lead times, and increasing operational agility. In life sciences, Gedeon Richter, one of Central and Eastern Europe's largest pharmaceutical companies, selected Maestro to replace fragmented planning processes with a single concurrent planning platform, improving visibility, collaboration, and decision-making across its global business. Decra, a global leader in veterinary pharmaceuticals and animal health, selected Maestro to modernize demand, supply, and inventory planning and, as part of its SAP S/4HANA transformation, creating a unified planning platform across its global operations. Sumura, a leading Japanese pharmaceutical company, has become a new customer, and Ecolab is expanding their footprint with Nalco Water in Europe.
In industrials, Rockwell Automation, a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation, has become a new customer, and we have a new Fortune 500 company for the machinery sector. We are seeing a significant uptick in needs driven by the surge in data center buildouts. Many customers across the high-tech value chain—including tooling, equipment, storage, semiconductor, power, and energy companies—use our Maestro solution already.
Ansaldo Energia, one of Europe's leading power generation equipment manufacturers, selected Maestro to modernize end-to-end planning across its complex manufacturing operations, supporting the growing demand for energy infrastructure, in part driven by AI and data center expansion. Turning to Connections North America, our flagship conference was a great success. We had record attendance from global customers, prospects, and strategic partners and received very positive feedback on our new operational orchestration vision.
This includes interoperable, composable, and extensible building blocks that can supplement Maestro and enable broader operational orchestration solutions, leveraging the latest in semantic architectures and agentic AI. Our partnership with Databricks for Data Fabric is live in Maestro, enabling outside-in signal ingestion and data cataloging. It ingests data from sources like social, sentiment, weather, and news feeds, combining it with structured enterprise data.
Since our launch at the end of last year, Maestro agents have progressed from starter trials to early adopters to paid customers. Approximately 10% of our installed customer base is on a paid or trial subscription. We have a significant opportunity to bring the power of the Maestro platform and AI agents to a much larger pool of customers. While still in early days, we've seen a broad range of use cases. For example, our Data Integrity Agent has helped identify and prioritize data quality issues.
The Inventory Access Analysis Agent compares two scenarios to identify the largest shifts. The Demand at Risk Analysis Agent can pinpoint late purchase orders that risk demand and revenue. Our forward-deployed engineering capabilities and ongoing platform investments will unlock new opportunities for Kinaxis. Kinaxis is moving beyond just being a system of record for planning and decisioning to becoming a continuous system of intelligence, action, and learning.
FDEs will work directly with customers to solve complex, unique, high-value business problems on our platform. We have a growing list of customers actively engaging with us on AI-driven supply chain transformation. We are beginning discovery with these customers to determine what the FDEs will build and the outcomes to be achieved. We expect these engagements to actively expand through the end of this year and into 2027. Looking ahead, we are very pleased with the strong year-to-date results and momentum.
Heading into the second half of the year, we are raising our guidance for full-year total revenue and SaaS revenue growth. We are building depth, scale, and performance into the foundation of planning and decision-making for Maestro and building a composable agentic AI platform to realize our vision for operational orchestration. Importantly, we are managing the business for long-term durable growth and profitability. As we shared at Connections, we are focused on five key strategic initiatives to drive long-term growth.
First, continue investing in the core Maestro platform. Second, building an agentic framework for operational orchestration. Third, executing on our new FDE customer engagement motion. Fourth, doubling down on training and enablement of our growing partner ecosystem. Lastly, and most importantly, continuing to stay focused on customer success and delivering value. We believe AI is making our core strengths more valuable, not less, as the market shifts from experimentation to adoption.
Customers need trusted intelligence, explainable decisions, and measurable outcomes. That's exactly where Kinaxis is investing and where we're seeing growing demand from customers and continued business momentum. As I wrap up, thank you to my Kinaxis colleagues, our customers, partners, and shareholders for your support. Let me turn the call over to Peter.
Peter Jaroskovich (Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis)
Thank you, Razat. Let me start with our second quarter 2026 results compared to the prior year. Unless otherwise noted, all figures reported are in US dollars under IFRS. Starting with revenue, total revenue was $158.8 million, up 16%, driven by strong SaaS revenue and professional services revenue. Foreign exchange rates negatively impacted total revenue by approximately $900,000. SaaS revenue was $106.5 million, up approximately 20%. This represents 67% of total revenue, up from 65% a year ago.
Growth was driven by momentum from new customers, strong net expansion among existing customers, and healthy retention rates. Foreign exchange rates negatively impacted SaaS revenue by approximately $600,000. Subscription term license revenue was $5.7 million, up 13% and above expectations. This was driven by several expansion deals with existing on-premise customers. For the full year, we now expect subscription term license revenue to increase 85% year over year, with the bulk of the remaining revenue recognized in the fourth quarter.
This represents an improvement over our previous year-over-year revenue growth estimate of 60%. Professional services revenue was $42.1 million, up approximately 12% and ahead of expectations. This is due to higher-than-expected realized rates reflecting our premium services. Given our outperformance in the first half of the year, we now expect mid-single-digit annual growth for the full year, up from our prior low single-digit estimate. Additionally, as a direct result of our strategy to shift more implementation and support work to our systems integrator partners, we now expect lower professional services revenue in the second half of the year compared to the first half. This remains a positive development for Kinaxis, as our services partners are an important go-to-market channel and services are an attractive business for those partners. Maintenance and support revenue was $4.4 million, down 20% as expected due to on-premise to SaaS migrations. As we noted last quarter, we continue to see interest among on-premise customers looking to migrate to our SaaS offerings. These migrations provide us with the opportunity to modernize our customers and grow our SaaS business.
Since migrations are driven by timing and customer schedules, we now expect maintenance and support revenue to trend slightly lower in the second half of the year. Turning to remaining performance obligations, SaaS and total RPO balances and growth both remained robust. SaaS RPO was $940.3 million, up 19%, and total RPO grew to $983.4 million, up 18%. Highlighting the strength and visibility of our recurring business over the last three years, SaaS RPO has a cumulative average growth rate of 20% and total RPO has a CAGR of 19%.
Next, annual recurring revenue increased to $465.6 million, up 19%. ARR grew 21% year over year on a constant currency basis, excluding a negative impact of approximately $1 million from FX in the quarter. As Razat mentioned, ongoing strength in our $1 million-plus ACV contracts and net expansion with existing customers drove net new ARR growth of $75 million year over year and $19 million sequentially. Most of the customer growth came from enterprise or large enterprise customers, reflecting our upmarket focus.
Now I'd like to move on to our second quarter profitability metrics. Gross profit grew 19% to $104.4 million. We delivered a gross margin of 66%, up 1.6 percentage points. This was driven by higher professional services margin and a more favorable revenue mix as professional services as a percentage of total revenue declined. Our subscription software margin was 78%, down from 80% a year ago. This change is partially due to increased hosting costs as we migrate from private data centers to the cloud.
A quick update on this: we're exiting our private European data center by the end of 2026. Meanwhile, our North American data center migrations are underway and expected to be completed by the end of 2027. Once completed, Kinaxis will be able to realize the full benefits of cloud infrastructure. Professional services gross margin was 32%, up significantly compared to 23% a year ago, reflecting higher realized rates in the quarter. Operating expenses were consistent with expectations.
Adjusted EBITDA was up 23% to $41.4 million, reflecting strong revenue growth, healthy gross margins, and efficient operations. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 26%, up 1.3 percentage points, positioning us well to deliver on our full-year outlook. Profit was up 15% to $21.2 million, with an effective tax rate of 28.8% for the quarter. During the second quarter, we repurchased over 450,000 shares for approximately $47 million since the program started last November.
Through the end of the second quarter, we've repurchased 1.2 million shares for approximately $134 million. This reduced the total outstanding share count on a net basis by 2.9%. We will remain opportunistic in share repurchases for the remainder of the year. We ended the second quarter in a strong cash position. Cash flow from operating activities was $30.7 million, up 36%. Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were $310.7 million, down from $324.7 million at the end of last year.
Even with $108 million from share repurchases, free cash flow margin for the second quarter was 18%, up 3.8 percentage points year over year. Trailing 12-month free cash flow margin was 25%. The combination of higher revenue and reduced share count led to diluted earnings per share of $0.76, up 19% year over year. That sums up the Q2 review. For full-year modeling purposes, I would like to provide some additional details. First, we expect foreign exchange rates to remain a headwind for the rest of the year.
Given the strengthening of the US dollar against the euro, the British pound and the yen, for the full year, we estimate increased FX-related headwinds to total revenue between $4 million and $4.5 million and to SaaS revenue between $2.5 million and $3 million. Second, we expect full-year basic weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately 27.3 million shares and diluted weighted average shares outstanding to be approximately 27.7 million shares.
These share forecasts do not include the impact of any share repurchases that we may pursue in the future. Now let me turn the call over to Herb.
Herb Yeh, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer
Thank you, Peter. And thank you, Razat. As a new member of the Kinaxis team, I'm delighted to be here today. Before I address our guidance, I'd like to share why I joined Kinaxis. Supply chain planning and decision making is one of the most complex and mission-critical challenges facing global enterprises. Kinaxis has already built a market-leading platform, deep domain expertise, a strong culture and an exceptional team with a proven ability to create value for both customers and shareholders.
But what excites me the most is the opportunity ahead. AI has the potential to expand the scope of what we do, moving beyond planning into a much broader set of decisioning and orchestration opportunities that expands the value we can deliver to customers, increases our market opportunity and strengthens our ability to drive sustained long-term growth and shareholder returns. Now turning to guidance. As you heard from Razat and Peter, we delivered better-than-expected top-line results in the first and second quarter.
With this in mind, guidance for the full year ending December 31, 2026 is as follows. We now expect total revenue to be in the range of $625 million to $640 million. This represents approximately 14% to 17% year-over-year growth. We now expect SaaS revenue year-over-year growth to be in the range of 18% to 20%. This equates to a range of approximately $427 million to $434 million. We're reaffirming our previously issued adjusted EBITDA margin guidance of 25% to 26%.
With respect to our balance sheet, we will remain disciplined in capital allocation. We'll maintain a prudent cash and liquidity position to fund day-to-day operations and to navigate any macroeconomic or industry volatility. We will also make thoughtful, ROI-driven investments in product innovation and go-to-market initiatives that support strong organic growth while maintaining strong sales efficiency and attractive payback metrics. Any inorganic activity will remain tightly aligned with our product, technology and go-to-market roadmaps, delivering clear and actionable revenue synergies.
Finally, we will opportunistically return excess capital to shareholders through share repurchases. I expect 2026 to be a pivotal year for Kinaxis and I'm thrilled at the opportunity to be a part of the journey. Thank you to our global team for delivering another strong quarter. I look forward to meeting with analysts and shareholders in the weeks to come. Operator, we're now ready to take questions.
OPERATOR
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one question. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one. Again, we ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question from the line of Thanos Moscopoulos with BMO Capital Markets.
Your line is now open.
Thanos Moscopoulos, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets
Hi, good morning. Congrats on the strong quarter. And Herb, congrats on your local nexus. Can you provide some color on the nature of the pipeline and how it's evolved over the past quarter? It sounds like you're seeing broad-based strength across a number of verticals, but just anything in particular you'd call out in terms of pipeline composition and how that's evolved. And then secondly, just given the accelerating growth you're seeing, could implementation capacity become a potential bottleneck at some point, or do you see sufficient capacity in the partner ecosystem to handle further expansion?
Thank you.
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks for the question, Thanos. Yes, our pipeline continues to trend very positively as we look ahead in the future quarters. You know, we look at the forwarding-quarter pipeline very frequently. We're executing on several campaigns to continue to add to the pipeline. What we're finding is that customers are definitely seeing a sense of urgency in their prioritization for supply chain planning, decisioning, you know, investments. We are seeing a significant surge in demand across the high-tech value chain, just given what's happening with particularly the data center buildout.
We're also seeing increasing interest in the aerospace and defense industry that is seeing surging demand with fairly limited capacity and a very complex bill of materials. We're also seeing changing dynamics in the product portfolios of our consumer products and consumer manufacturing customers as well. So really we're seeing increasing demand in a lot of different industry verticals and we're executing on those campaigns. In terms of your question around the implementation capacity, look, this is something that's really important for us.
And coming into this year, just to remind everyone, we doubled down on our investments in training and enablement, right. And that was all geared towards further building out the trained and the skilled talent pool across our platform, across our partner ecosystem. That is a very strategic priority for us, and we're continuing to do that, of course. In addition to that, we have our own professional services team that supplements what our partners do for us.
And we're continuing to scale the overall partner ecosystem with talented and skilled resources across the Kinaxis platform.
Thanos Moscopoulos, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets
That's great. I'll hop off the line. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of Kevin Krishnaratni with Scotiabank. Your line is now open.
Richard, Analyst
Hey, good morning. Congrats on a strong quarter. This is Richard on for Kevin. Just a quick question on Maestro agents. So you noted that it's installed in 10% of the customer base. So how do you see that evolving over the next several quarters and year end? And do you have any targets on that?
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, look, Maestro agents are getting a lot of good traction within our customer base, both through trials and paid customers now. And we have a sort of a dual approach. There we've embedded Maestro agents within our platform, within the Maestro platform itself. And there we have developed agent skills that are packaged agents that now are getting good usage. In addition to that, we've got Maestro Agent Studio, which provides a composable approach to really being able to compose agents based on different use cases that our customers have, while it has access to all the data and resources across Maestro.
So that's really leading to all kinds of permutations and combinations of use cases. And as our engagement model with our customers grows around agents, we are seeing all kinds of creative agents being designed and developed and composed within Maestro. Now, beyond Maestro, we've also been investing in our orchestration platform, where we have an extensible data fabric, we have an extensible semantic and ontology layer, and we have the same composable agent infrastructure that can stitch together agents across different outcome threads or outcome flows.
And that's also going to lead to further transformation in the ways of working for our customers and create even further value. So while it's early days for us, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest and a lot of traction. Of course, this form is a very important part of our innovation roadmap as well.
Richard, Analyst
Sounds good.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Your next question from the line of Paul Treiber with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Paul Treiber, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets
Thanks very much and good morning. A question for Herb. Just, you know, just given your background, your strategic advisory background, you know, how do you see yourself, your skill set, contributing uniquely to what Kinaxis has had in the past?
Herb Yeh, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah, thank you, Paul. It's a great question. The way I would think about it is this. I will partner certainly very closely and obviously with the entire management team, resort product, go to market to identify what are the areas of potential inorganic activity that could accelerate what is already a part of the plan, the strategy of the company and then to tie it together with the financial outcomes and to shareholder value. So I think of it all in the context of my comments around capital allocation.
The company has already year to date returned more than the free cash flow that they generated in the first half of the year. We'll continue to evaluate what we do with the balance sheet cash, all with a lens towards value creation and sustainable growth. Does that help?
Paul Treiber, Analyst at RBC Capital Markets
Okay. Yes, it does. Thanks. Thanks for taking the question.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of Mike Stevens with National Bank Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Mike Stevens, Analyst at National Bank Capital Markets
Hi, good morning, this is Mike on for Doug Taylor. Congrats on a very strong quarter here. Just wondering on the EBITDA margin guide, you know, the back half does imply, you know, a bit of a step down. Just wondering the drivers behind that. Is that kind of continuing investment in R and D, is that, you know, a bit of a conservatism here or just any color around that?
Herb Yeh, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah, I think there are two things. One is if you look at the first quarter, EBITDA margins were obviously higher than I'll call quote unquote normal because we did have a strong STL revenue recognition in that quarter. Okay. The second thing is given the very strong go to market momentum that we have as well as the receptivity from our customers on what we are doing with agents in Maestro as well as the operational orchestration platform that Razat spoke about earlier, we want to continue to capture that momentum and that opportunity and make sure that we are investing behind that appropriately to capture the market opportunity and the sustainable growth opportunity. So for that reason we're maintaining the EBITDA margin guidance for the full year.
Mike Stevens, Analyst at National Bank Capital Markets
Okay, no, that's pretty helpful, thank you. And then just another one around the enterprise, it seems like ARR is being lifted quite noticeably by the enterprise motion in the last couple of quarters. Just wondering, any early learnings on that, you know, with regards to sales cycles and what this strength is reflecting and whether you think that this could be sustainable in the quarters ahead.
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, look, you know, our enterprise motion continues to gain a lot of momentum and ground. As you know, we've been significantly transforming our go to market motion, our sales organization, our demand gen plans and how we're executing on those, both in terms of sales cycles, but also in terms of, you know, delivering successfully to customers. One of the things that was very noticeable in Q2 was the tremendous traction we had with existing customers.
You know, as we've added additional capabilities to our platform, our cross selling motion and our expansion opportunity is becoming very prominent and that's very encouraging. At the same time, in terms of net new logo wins, we are continuing to see opportunities both with customers that are looking to put foundational end to end planning and decisioning capabilities in place, but also future proofing that transformation with a platform that can really bring them into the agentic era.
That's where the capabilities we've developed are strong, single, unified Maestro platform combined with all the agentic capabilities and the operational orchestration footprint that we're leaning in with is becoming a very strong differentiator. So our win rates were very high in Q2 and the first half. Our pipeline conversion rates are higher than ever before and we're not stopping at that, we're just starting and I expect that we'll continue to improve and execute globally.
Mike Stevens, Analyst at National Bank Capital Markets
Okay, really appreciate the insights.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of Stephanie Price with CIBC. Your line is now open.
Sam Schmidt, Analyst at CIBC Capital Markets
Hi there, it's Sam Schmidt on for Stephanie Price. Can you talk through puts and takes to the increased revenue guide as well as your confidence and visibility into the back half? More specifically, the SaaS growth in the first half was strong versus the guide. How should we think about SaaS growth in half two?
Herb Yeh, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer
Yeah, yeah, thank you for that question. So if you look at the SaaS growth that was delivered in the first half, you're obviously also aware of the RPO that is available for the back half of the year. What the guidance reflects is that as well as our lens into renewals, as well as the strong backlog and pipeline that we have expected to be realized in the second half of the year. So we feel very, very good about renewals and current pipeline and backlog.
What the guide reflects, however, is we think it's prudent to keep in mind FX volatility as well as the overall macro volatility that we're all experiencing through the full year. So that's the reason for the SaaS guide with respect to the full year. Peter mentioned our expectation around services. Services will be slightly down from the first half of the year, but we're not expecting anything major changes in terms of our subscription term license that's been realized in the first half and we're not expecting any meaningful change in terms of the maintenance and support revenue either.
So when you take all of that together, that's how we thought about the total revenue guide for the full year.
Sam Schmidt, Analyst at CIBC Capital Markets
That's helpful, thank you. And then one more for me on the partnership strategy. How should we think about partnerships with companies like Databricks and Nvidia contributing to growth as well as growth from traditional SI partners? And then I'll pass the line. Thank you.
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thank you for that question. You know, we've got some important technology partnerships, definitely with Databricks and Nvidia, but also with Google in all three of those cases. You know, we. A lot of our partnership is anchored around doing joint research, engineering and product development. Our engineering team is working with the, the Nvidia's, Google's and Databricks engineering team very closely because we're embedding those capabilities into our Maestro and operational orchestration platform.
So that's really exciting. We do see an opportunity for us to improve on furthering these partnerships in terms of the joint go to market motion. And that's something we're going to be working on later this year going into 2027 as well.
Sam Schmidt, Analyst at CIBC Capital Markets
That's helpful, thanks.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of Lachlan Brown with Rothschild and Co Redburn. Your line is now open.
Lachlan Brown, Analyst at Rothschild & Co Redburn
Hi, Razat, Peter. Herb, congrats on the CFO position. On your forward-deployed engineers, what early success are these teams having with accelerating those trial-to-paid conversion rates for Maestro agents? And just looking ahead, how should we think about the FDE utilisation rate and the net impact on gross margins as you continue to scale that team into 2027?
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Hey Lachlan, thanks for the question. Look, we launched the FDE motion at our Connections event in early June this year and as we'd announced earlier, we hired Manik Sharma, you know, who has a significant amount of experience in our domain and, and through his experience at Palantir and Celonis in really executing and mobilizing an FDE motion. What we've been busy with is really organizing FDE pods in North America, Europe and in India. And we've been hiring the right skill sets to really populate the capacity we have for FDEs.
And in parallel, we've started engaging with a lot of customers. When we launched this at Connections in early June, we saw we received a lot of customer interest because in many situations our customers are looking for the next wave of productivity and efficiency and in a lot of cases they have pain points and they have outcome aspirations, but they don't necessarily know. A lot of our customers don't know exactly what features and functions and capabilities they need.
And that's where the FDE motion is very critical for us. Us is engaging with these customers in co building with them what the features and function capabilities are, leveraging our Maestro platform, leveraging our operational orchestration extensible platform and utilizing agents where appropriate. And so we are now engaging with several customers globally. We have interest from customers across North America, Europe and in India especially. And later this year we'll also be taking it to other partners parts of Asia Pacific.
So I'm very encouraged with the customer reception and engagement. And definitely like we said in the back half of this year and going into 2027 we see ourselves really executing very well towards this motion in terms of the impact on gross margin. I'd let Herb comment on that.
Herb Yeh, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Strategy Officer
Great, thank you Razat. So just to clarify, reiterate first, there is not baked into our 2026 guidance and expectation any impact from the new FDE motion. Okay. As Razat mentioned, we expect these engagements to actively expand through the end of this year and into 2027. We're working very closely with our customers. We're reviewing the accounting treatment, but we expect that revenue generated from the FDE motion will be mostly recognized ratably.
And then the second point around margin is that we're aiming to have the gross margins typical of SaaS for this bundled solution offering.
Lachlan Brown, Analyst at Rothschild & Co Redburn
That's very clear. Thanks for the detail. I'll pass the line on that.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of John Xiao with TD Cowan. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
John Xiao, Analyst at TD Cowen
Good morning guys and thanks for taking my question. I also have one related to FDE. At your conference, I believe that you said the current FDE team is relatively small across three pods. So could you maybe talk about the
UNKNOWN Analyst
Kind of trajectory of headcount addition? How long does it take to fully ramp up those new hires?
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks for the question. So since the conference in early June we've been ramping up the internal team and very pleased to say that we've added resources across North America, Europe and India. In addition to that we've started discussions. We also received a lot of interest from our partner ecosystem. So our strategy is to definitely have an in-house capacity for FDE execution. But we'll be scaling this up by leveraging, you know, well-defined and well-identified partners that have the right skills for co-building.
And just to remind you of the skills needed for the FDEs, it's a combination of, you know, process and solution architects with supply chain domain knowledge, data engineers and data scientists. Because a lot of our use cases underpin algorithmic capabilities from deep optimization, machine learning and generative AI. Our strategy is to have our internal in-house team, but also scale aggressively with very targeted and focused partners as well.
UNKNOWN Analyst
That's great color. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of Mark Chappelle with Loop Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
Mark Chappelle, Analyst at Loop Capital Markets
Hi, thank you for taking my questions and a nice job on the quarter. A couple questions around your AI agents. First, in terms of the agents, you know, is the entire sales team selling your AI agents today or is it just a select part of the sales team? And then secondly, you know, nearly every major supply chain planning vendor is now offering AI agents around their platform. So I was wondering if you just talk a little bit more about how you differentiate your agents from those of, say, your competitors.
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, sure. Thanks for the question. So look, the first question, definitely our entire sales team is incentivized to take these agentic capabilities to market both with existing customers and with net new logos, right? So there's no special separate quota-carrying sales team. Of course, we've got experts who are business consultants and FDE engineers who play a very important role in these sales pursuit cycles to make sure that the customers are able to get a detailed understanding of our agentic capabilities as part of their evaluation processes.
And I'm really happy to say that, you know, even in Q2, some of the largest wins we had had a bundle of agents as part of the deal structure, right? And they were very important parts of the criteria in them selecting Kinaxis. So that's on the first question. On the second question, in terms of our differentiators, you know, there's three things I would say, right? Firstly, for agents within Maestro, I mean again, we have natively developed the agentic infrastructure by building agent skills, building the Maestro Agent Studio to have access to all the data and resources within Maestro with a semantic and ontology context.
So we are uniquely positioned to leverage all the power of Maestro in terms of access to data because we have a system of record for planning as well as leveraging all the architectural differentiation we have within Maestro with versioning that leads to world-class scenario planning and concurrency representation. And our agents are able to leverage all of those capabilities. That's the first part. The second part is these agents, in many use cases, are leveraging decisioning algorithms which are also part of the planning engines and the models we have within Maestro, right?
So think of decisions that are made across demand predictions, supply plans, production plans, inventory — all of those leverage algorithmic decisioning algorithms that we have to enable those decisions, again, that are part of Maestro, that get instantiated through agentic capabilities. And then the last thing I will say that's differentiated for us is just our deep understanding of the physics of the supply chain that we reflect in our underlying end-to-end supply chain network model.
So understanding all the constraints, all the policies, all the interdependencies of the end-to-end supply chain that the agents then can really be able to traverse to make meaningful, intelligent decisions, but also, you know, sensible and, you know, executable decisions and operationalizing those decisions as well in a way that can really function in the operational environment of our customers. Hopefully that helps you with the understanding.
Mark Chappelle, Analyst at Loop Capital Markets
It does. Thank you. That's all for me.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of Sutan Sukumar with Stifel. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Essay, Analyst at Stifel (on behalf of Sutan Sukumar)
Hey, good morning guys. This is Essay speaking on behalf of Sutan. Just a question on AI adoption. The 10% adoption rate was very encouraging. So my question is on new deals, what has the AI attachment been and what changed with regards to AI requirements in new prospect competition?
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it was a little difficult to hear you, but I think your question was related to AI adoption and the attach rates in new deals with AI capabilities. I think that's what your question was. So look, let me first start by saying everyone has a different definition of what AI means. And I've always held the belief that we've been AI native from our very inception. So we've been leveraging predictive and prescriptive AI from the very start here at Kinaxis in enabling all kinds of planning and decisioning use cases.
Those AI capabilities were enabled by advanced machine learning models, deep optimization algorithms, heuristics algorithms. So those are 100% of everything we do. So all deals include those capabilities. More recently, of course, we've been adding the generative and agentic capabilities to our AI roster. And I'll tell you, almost every major net new logo that we're signing is involving some bundle of agents because we're seeing growing interest in customers not just trying to deploy a legacy planning approach, but to really modernize their ways of working.
And in doing so, they're leveraging agents and, in many cases, some of the net new logos that we're winning, we're replacing old legacy solutions from many years ago. And so it's really encouraging from my perspective to see the adoption happening and the attach rates are really growing in terms of our agentic capabilities as part of all net new deals.
OPERATOR
Your next question from the line of Martin Toner with ATB Cormark, your line is now open.
Martin Toner, Analyst at ATB Cormark
Thanks for taking my question. My only question is around the AI supply chain. Is it meaningful within your pipeline? You mentioned that in the prepared remarks.
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, look again, it depends on what you mean by AI. It's a sort of a. It's interesting because a lot of our agents are really responding to sagacious sort of elements of the supply chain that are complex, that are needle-in-the-haystack kind of problems. And in unraveling those decisions, we've been using AI from the very inception. I think if your question is more around agentic capabilities, our pipeline for agents is growing, growing both within our existing customers as well as net new logos.
Like I mentioned, the attach rate on the net new logos is really growing very rapidly and almost every customer is evaluating those capabilities if they're a net new logo for us. And then also as we are getting the FDE motion mobilized and really helping our customers realize the outcomes and helping our customers extend beyond planning and decisioning into broader orchestration use cases, we can only do those with a strong leverage of AI, right.
So AI is very core to our capability and is, frankly, a big reason why you're seeing the continued momentum and acceleration in our growth path.
Martin Toner, Analyst at ATB Cormark
That's great. Thanks. That's all for me.
OPERATOR
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to CEO Razat Gaurav for closing remarks.
Razat Gaurav, Chief Executive Officer
Thank you for the questions. We reported a strong second quarter and feel great about our trajectory for the second half of the year. Thank you to our employees, customers, partners and shareholders. Have a great rest of the day. Thank you so much.
OPERATOR
This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.
Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.
Login to comment