Asana, Inc. ($ASAN)

[Audio Gap] second here, guys. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Matthew Bullock Bullock. I'm an application software analyst here at BofA. And Today, we're really lucky to have Aziz Megji, Asana, the Chief Financial Officer. So thank you so much for joining us.

Yes, thanks for having me. .

Awesome. So maybe just to get started, I want to start with a high-level question about where Asana sits in the Gentek technology stack. So you talk about Asana being the operating system for humans and agents. -- where do you envision the company longer term? And how do you differentiate against foundation models?

Yes, absolutely. It's great to be here. So -- we are -- Dan, Roger, repotting the company and really transition from human collaboration in CWM who are management to this operating symptom for human agent teams. And so what does that mean and where that sick? So as we think about that intelligence layer being the LLM and more agents are creative and some more work, it just creates the need for more coordination, execution governance and collaboration. And we really -- that's the layer we sit, right? On top of that, and elaborate intelligence layer to drive that coordination, which is going to become so important critical as the proliferation of agents and agents with humans and first party and third parties all come together. And so if you think about our approach there, it really stems from the historical architecture that has made us so successful in driving collaboration and productivity for human teams, the work graph. So this architectural layer that inherently is multiplayer, which is the context layer for how an organization is not only organized but the work that is executed within that organization, who's doing it, what, when, where, why, how, the governance layer that provides the right access and controls. And so that architecture and the persistent memory it drives is exactly what this coordination layer on top of the intelligence layer needs to drive productivity in an genic world. And we've approached that with 3 different products, AI Studio, AI teammates and our recent acquisition of Staci, I'm sure you'll unpack that. But that's that's where we sit. And actually, if you think about that layer of that positioning Anthropic, one of the world's most successful AI-first companies uses us as the coordination layer integrating cloud with Asana, back to the work graph to drive productivity for their workforce. And as they've grown, we've grown. So I think that's kind of validation of the need for this layer, and it's important of its role in the genetic enterprise.

That's fantastic. Maybe just help us think about as agents become more prevalent, how the fundamental value proposition of Asana changes? Given that the kind of the core foundation of the platform has been human-to-human coordination, as agents become more prevalent, how does that shift the value you create over time?

Yes. So as agents become more prevalent as they go deeper as they proliferate into different functions and tasks, again, it creates that need for that coordination, that governance that context, the persistent memory layer that we drive. So we view ourselves really as the rails which agentic work really takes place and the work graph being that center architecture that enables it. And so with our AI teammates, you can execute work in an agentic fashion. We have 20 out-of-the-box teammates, whether that you're launching a campaign where you're executing a research brief, whether within a different workflow, you want to use an agent to execute a task or move a process step from one step to another, those teammates really play a really valuable role in that coordination. We also have AI Studio, which is our workflow automation layer. So within the 4 walls of Asana being able to drive routing, data intake, quality control and process -- operational process improvement, AI Studio plays a really valuable role in that. And then we recently acquired STACK AI, which is kind of the -- puts it all together in allowing us to drive complex cross-system workflow automation and orchestration and then bring all that context back into the work graph or the work wrap back into STACK AI. And so we view that three-pronged approach to three different jobs to be done in the genic enterprise as now being that AI platform that we're building that's built on the work graph and this architecture that's worked so well for human-to-human teams that we believe is going to be the right architecture for human and agent teams.

Fantastic. And you've mentioned several of the new products. You're now officially a multiproduct company, which is fantastic. You've got AI Studio, teammates now rolling out more meaningfully this year. STACK AI, as you mentioned. How does the pricing and packaging model of the company have to evolve, given all these new AI products and the historical seat-based model?

Yes. So I think like many software companies were in the learning mode and the data aggregation and experimentation mode. So we have four different pricing models today. We have on our our agentic work management platform, which is our heritage work execution platform, a traditional seat-based model. AI Studio, which we came out with about a year ago is on a credit model. So you prepay for credits. And as you exhaust those credits, you buy more and top up. AI teammates is on a request or execution model. It comes with a certain number of executions. As you exhaust that, you top up and buy more. And now STACK AI, they're on a platform fee and a per builder or workflow model. So it's very consumption-oriented as you drive more workflows. That's their upsell and expansion path. So all of those pricing models are today what's within our base and how we sell. But we're learning. So within each of those models, there's variations, evolutions. We're experimenting with, okay, what if we take the AWM and give you a trial with this many studio credits or this many teammate requests? How does that change the upsell and expansion path or reduce the friction to adoption of our products? So you can see over time that the lines between platform or seat and consumption will blur. And the predominant mode of growth and expansion will be consumption or consumption like driving usage with outcomes that are creating. Right now, we're learning what's the best way to do package it because some of these things are fairly early. But we're getting good data and good signals. And I think we'll know a lot more as these quarters progress this year.

Fantastic. And I wanted to talk a little bit more about AI teammates because you've been very consistent about framing this as one of the most exciting opportunities for the company, the largest TAM, I believe, of the AI products. Maybe just help us think about how Asana thinks about the ideal customer profile for adopting AI teammates how does that journey or how do you envision that journey taking place for a lot of your customers?

Yes, absolutely. So Studio -- let me start with studios. Studio came out about a year ago. And where studio, we saw the most value is in existing customers who've built rules, built automation, they have more complex deployments of Asana. They populated the work graph pretty fully where they can drive the benefit of automating and supercharging workflows with Studio. And so that has a TAM. It's grown really nicely. It's a nice land-and-expand path. Teammates, we've seen a lot of success with penetrating those studio customers. And instead of having kind of human to agent handoffs within a stream of a workflow, having human agent, agent-to-agent handoffs. So the agent actually executing within the workflow as they were the human. That's really powerful for those studio customers are within the flow of a workflow. But we've also seen a lot of value in people using the teammates to execute, to coordinate, to reason to priority input to not only individuals but to teams. And what makes team it's really special is that they're inherently multiplayer. My teammate interacts with my team. My team provides prompts in questions and directions to the teammate. My teammate accesses the work graph in the contact -- content and context that I'm able to transfer us within Asana. And so it makes it super powerful. And developing that multiplayer architecture is really difficult. It's not something that you'll get with [ LLM labs ] or most other applications, being able to have truly a teammate that is for the team and for the organization. And so that's where we see a lot of value. So the entry point of teammates can be within a workflow. It can be outside of a workflow. It could help you populate and set up your work and your environment in Asana in the way that it's intended to be, which is super exciting. And for our PLG base, exciting opportunity because studio has applicability in but teammates has broad applicability in PLG. And that comes out in the second half, and we're really excited about the growth prospects that, that will drive in PLG.

And maybe just to pivot here, I wanted to talk about growth and some of the key metrics you guys have been putting up recently. Specifically, net revenue retention. very consistent progress there over the last several quarters. I believe this most recent quarter was a more meaningful step up, but we're still seeing kind of the reported trailing 12-month net revenue retention number stable. Can you maybe just help us think about the puts and takes of net revenue retention throughout the rest of this year? And what gives you confidence that you can get back to, let's say, 100%?

Yes. So we are encouraged by the trends on net revenue retention. So we've seen now 4 straight quarters of in-quarter improvement in NRR. And this past quarter, Q1 have the largest step-up or increase in net revenue retention versus those other 4 consecutive improvements. And it's both on expansion and retention. And what's really encouraging is actually, the largest share of the improvement this quarter was on expansion. And over the past 2 years, as NRR has trended down, the biggest catalyst for that degradation has been expansion. So seeing our AI products drive expansion within the base is really encouraging. And so far, it's mostly studio because teammates is is new, and STACK is extremely new. So layering those on and building those motions we feel confident that we'll further improve that expansion trend. So that's really been very encouraging and great to see. And if you look at our AI studio cohort of customers, we're not only seeing them expand with the AI products, but also with seats. So as they're seeing value from AI Studio, driving ASC deeper into their mission-critical workflows, they're expanding their footprint with Asana to drive more value for more teams with AI Studio. So we've seen great seat reach with those customers. Actually, that cohort, the AI Studio cohort has had the strongest NRR of any cohort in our base. And so that has also contributed the NR expansion. Now when can we see it back to 100? I wish you a crystal ball. But the trends are our friend there. Q2, we will lap our large customer churn we saw a year ago in Q2. So that's another catalyst for expansion. And then as we continue to build the motion with teammates and stack, those are important catalysts. And if you think about teammates, It's just been GA for a couple of months. It's not in the PLG base into the second half. And the flywheel on teammates is really get a customer to enter into a trial. That trial start to 60 days. They see the value of teammates within the trial. They start with a small land. They then exhaust their request within that land. They buy more credit packs then they add even more credit back because they want to bring it to more teams. And you see that flywheel build and build. And eventually, they've gotten those teams a lot more value. They're deeper in their workflows. They're seeing productivity gains and they want to expand seats. So we're very early in that flywheel because it's only been 2 months since it's been out. But as that builds in compounds, it should also have a benefit tenor expansion. And so getting over to 100% is the goal. I think it's a key unlock and a milestone moment for us. I think the trends are encouraging. We have some good catalysts coming out of Q2 with a large deal lapping off and then as the flywheel builds and we start seeding stack AI more into our base, those additional catalysts along the way through the year and into next.

And I wanted to ask 1 quick follow-up because you did mention the large customer churn last year in the second quarter. So that was -- I assume you mean the $100 million-plus TCV deal that you signed that was accompanied with a slight ACV downgrade that you were comfortable trading for greater long-term visibility. Is there any risk or opportunity associated with the 1-year anniversary of that deal signing coming up this year in the second quarter, whether that's upsell opportunity or down sell?

Yes, it's contracted for multiple years. So there is no risk on a downsell in that customer. But the seats that we have deployed, they continue to use more and more seats. -- there are seed expansion opportunities over time to upsell and expand with that customer. We deliberately designed the deal to not include CDO as we saw that as an expansion path. So over time, we see that as a lever to expand with the customer and teammates as well their beta customer of teammates, and we think that's an opportunity. So over time, we think there are opportunities to expand and grow that footprint, but no risks in the near term, it was a multiyear deal.

Got it. And maybe just to zoom out to dig deeper into the multiproduct strategy. As you become not just a traditional CWM vendor, but you're also now layering in agenda capabilities, more workflow tools has the buying persona shifted at all? Or do you expect it to shift over the next few years as the makeup of the product offering changes?

Yes. It's a huge opportunity for us to expand the buying persona and deploy this Agentic work management platform crossed departmentally. Because if you can expand from 1 department to 2 or 3 or 4 you're driving so much more power from the work graph and the coordination that will drive for human and agentic teams. And so as we think about what are the catalysts for that, we have been a very largely horizontal company for most of our existence. That large customer that you cited has been so successful with [ SAMA ] because they have this incredible builder culture, and they've built on top of this powerful horizontal canvas workflows and rules and the connections across department that are extremely diverse and global with the scale of a multi-hundred thousand person organization. For us, driving that departmental expansion and expanding it into new buying centers, we've been really strong in marketing, really strong inroads in operations and IT, strengthening our footprint there is really through teammates, studio and now stack AI, where we have 20 out-of-the-box teammates, Those teammates can look like ticketing agents, they can look like development, agile process development teammates that can look like vendor onboarding employee onboarding teammates. So they expand the reach of our platform to new buying centers, new personas, new ICPs, and that's super exciting. And then with STACK AI that gives us a whole new land strategy that doesn't have to be tied to Asana. We can now for the first time as a multiproduct company, land with a customer without having to sell [indiscernible] the OEM and then upsell and expand with the them later. And with teammates create the right connective tissue from cross-system workflow automation back into the work graph in Asana, which is a really powerful thing. And STACK appeals to many new buying centers, too. They're very strong in IT. Their target buyer is an IT or an operational buyer that is an emerging opportunity for us. There's a lot of synergies. So as we build our teammates, as we proliferate the out-of-box teammates, as we integrate and drive expansion with STACK AI, these are all catalysts to expand our TAM, expand our buying centers and drive adoption for us departmentally, which is a real value unlock for the work graph and the platform.

That's really helpful. Maybe just to pivot to -- away from the departmental focus, but more towards the vertical side. So obviously, technology has been a little bit more of a challenged vertical for Asana over the last several years, but we're starting to see some green shoots. You returned to positive growth for the first time, I believe, 8 quarters during the first quarter. Can you just help us think about the trajectory for the technology vertical for the rest of the year? And what you would say to investors that are concerned that incremental technology company layoffs or a risk to numbers or growth potential?

Yes. So that's right. First time in 8 quarters where we returned to growth, and that's after last quarter, Q4, where we returned to a kind of neutral like 0% growth. And so it's encouraging to see, and that improvement is really largely driven by adoption of our AI products and then seat expansion. Tech companies were early adopters of Asana and this vision of driving hire, stronger collaboration through work and better hygiene through work and better process and productivity as a result. They are also early adopters of AI and AI automation tools have that same vision and outcome that they're intended to drive. And so if you think about our 100,000 plus AI studio customers, which we called out, we had 8 in Q4 and that doubled in Q1, about half of those are tech because they were earliest cohort there amongst the biggest fans of Asana, they're very well adopted, and AIC -- it was a natural evolution for them. So that has driven the improvement. In terms of how we factor that in going forward, our guidance reflects more Q3 trends than it does Q4 or Q1. Conservative prudence. We understand that tech layoffs are becoming more prevalent. It's something we've been living with, by the way, for a couple of years. So as our NRR has come down, it's mostly because of our tech cohort not expanding and reducing seats because most of our churn and downgrade has become from seat reduction, not logo churn or pricing. And so it's something we've been living with. Part of the reason we've only factored in modest improvement in NRR into our guide despite these new products and these AI tailwinds is because of that pressure persisting and understanding that. we feel better about our ability to mitigate it than we did 2 years ago. We were a single product company with packaging really as our only lever in those conversations. Now we have a studio, AI teammates stack AI, and we're seeing success of within renewal conversations where someone has leaf people, and they want to reduce their footprint saying, "Hey, for the remaining footprint, why don't you adopt these teammates" and this is the value that they'll drive for that remaining footprint or studio and now stack AI. So we have more mitigates that are not seat-based, but we've accounted for potential pressure in the way that we've guided and how we factored in tech growth from here on out and NR improvement. If they do better, it's upside, but we've been prudent in how we factor that in. And we're not seeing trends that materially diverge from the trends we've seen over the past couple of years. Like the outliers of the blocks and others who have done very large percentage of their total workforce reductions is not what we're seeing. We're seeing the continuation of like mid-single digits, high single digits, low, less than teens type actions, which we've been dealing with for a couple of years and now dealing with more mitigation levers to offset that pressure.

Makes a ton of sense. And maybe just to go back to -- you mentioned Antropic a few times today. That's, to me, a really exciting customer journey and opportunity. They've clearly expanded their contract value, but also expanded the number of products they've used over the last 6 to 9 months. So maybe just help us think about how that journey has progressed. And what makes a company like Anthropic want to use the Asana work graph and the broader platform. still meaningfully?

Yes. So Anthropic has grown with Asana as they've grown with the company. We've had multiple expansions with them, especially over the past 18 months. They became a studio customer mid last year and then the teammates customer early this year. And we're excited about that relationship. It's not only a customer relationship, but we have a very strong kind of product collaboration relationship and now increasingly a distribution relationship. So we were a keynote speaker at their Code -- with Claude conference. We have a really strong MCP integration that our customers use where within the cloud prompt interface, you can launch a project or task back into Asana pretty seamlessly. And actually, a large swath of the Anthropic users and employees are using that cloud connector and kind of using the intelligence layer that is Claude and then bringing it back into Asana, which is the coordination or OS layer. And so how Anthropic uses the platform really for us is kind of another piece of validation of the value this OS layer or coordination layer can drive on top of the LLM or intelligence layer. They see that they increasingly use those connectors. And also the third kind of prong of our relationship is more increasingly a distribution relationship, right? We are within their marketplaces through AEO and how we show up at the LLM is very strong. And so we're building that piece as well. So we believe this is another kind of data point on the validation of the importance of the OS or coordination layer on top of that intelligence layer as agents drive more work, drive more complexity, drive tasks the task move quicker through workflows, it just increases the need for the elements that make Asana special that are enabled through our work graph. Really, really helpful.

Maybe just to pivot here to the STACK AI acquisition, not a super acquisitive company Asana in the past. So maybe walk us through the rationale for the deal I know you've talked about it accelerating the road map by about a year, and the technology itself seems pretty exciting. So help us think about that? And how should we, as investors evaluate the return on that investment, whether it's from growth, win rates, I would love to hear you speak about that.

Yes, absolutely. So we're super excited about bringing the STACK AI platforming team into the Sana family. It just closed think like 4 days ago. And the genesis of as we had heard in some of our proceeds on AI studio that the customers have been using this really interesting thing called [ Seco ], they loved it, right? And they're like, "what is this thing? And why aren't they willing to switch from it?" And then you do a little bit of research and Dan, our CEO, now CPO Arnab, kind of looked into it and said, "Hey, this is really interesting. The drag-and-drop interface is really, really simple and intuitive to use." It's really easy to hook up systems. And there's 100-plus integrations, the [ RAG ] layer is really strong, like this is really hardened from a back end and compliance and sets that they have. Their customer list looks awesome. Like let's dig in a little bit more. So when we got to know them, we did kind of this proof of concept in our marketing department, where we identified our SCO process using teammates to bring things back in the work graph where we kind of coordinated across 5 different marketing systems and like the power of the intelligence and the input and the productivity that drove was really like exciting. And like one-off and Dan said and said like, we should bring this to our customers and then you go through the buy versus build and partner kind of a valuation and to bring this in the fold to accelerate our roadmap by a year in this rapidly changing genetic enterprise landscape, it just made too much sense like waiting a year to develop these capabilities versus having them now just made a lot of sense. And our customers, the next evolution of ASG, are these capabilities. We believe we have a lot of demand in the customer base for this and can cross-sell it and drive acceleration. And so as we think about it's about accelerating growth and improving NRR. We factored that into our guidance. We believe probably next year will have more of a material impact on growth than this year as we integrate it as we drive the right cross-selling motion of we enable our field and as we get those customer validation of Asana kind of work at plus teams with a AI, it should compound. But we're super excited. The founders, Tony and Bernard are like 2 of the smartest people I've met in this AI world after Justin and are now part of the family and are going to be driving this and driving the integration and driving the scaling of this within Asana. So we would haven't been an acquisitive company. It's our first acquisition in 17 years. And you have a high bar. But like it's just -- the synergies were there, just culturally customer-wise and product-wise, I made some some move, and I think we were pretty disciplined about how we structured that from a capital allocation standpoint as well.

That's great. We have three minutes here left. So I wanted to make sure I gave the audience a chance to ask some questions. If you guys do have a question, feel free to raise your hand, and we'll pass you the microphone. All right. Maybe I'll just keep going here. So I wanted to ask about 100 kg customer additions because I think broadly, we got a ton of positive feedback on the 1Q results. But the 1 primary point of pushback was the flat 1000s customer addition. So if you could help us think about that, the trajectory going forward, I think that would be very helpful.

Yes. So I think first, we define the 100,000 customer cohort based on revenue. So having less days in the quarter, actually it impacts the definition. All of our KPIs that we disclosed are based on revenue. And so there was some distortion. If you actually looked at like the ARR of the 100,000 customers and the quarter Group. So that's something we're talking about internally, should we refer it back to an AR metric. Is it the quarter-over-quarter comparisons are difficult when there's less days or more days in the quarter versus we look at the comparable year-over-year, which grew 12% off a tough comp where that comp was growing 20%. But that being said, within the 100,000 cohort, we are seeing strong expansion. So those 100,000 customers on an average size are growing. And part of that is the success we're seeing in penetrating AI studio and 100,000 plus deployments of ASD. This is 100,000 of the AI Studio SKU, not influenced or attributed. And those 100,000 are often being added to 100,000-plus seat ARR customers. So we're seeing that cohort grow in size. We're also seeing strength in that like mid-market cohort, which is a real strength for AI studio and teammates of the 25 to 99,000. But the real accelerator of that cohort growing is landing with larger deal sizes and expanding through these AI consumption-first products like studio teammates and now stack AI and then having that kind of drag along seeds over time as more people in an organization want to get access to these capabilities. SP1 And maybe just to wrap up, we've got about a minute left here. Oh, we have a question?

Thanks for the presentation. When you're looking at STACK AI and you said most of that revenue growth will happen a year from now, what could you do as a company to accelerate that or pull that forward or any levers you could do to accelerate that?

It's like you have Dan, you've looked at Dan, that's what he pushes ground every day. So the levers are enabling and getting this to our field as fast as possible, right? And so you start kind of small with small cohorts because you need to learn, and you don't want to like distract the field too early before you've got the right enable and the right sales plays and the right reference customers, but it's really getting the enablement of our field. And driving the right sales place to lead with STACK AI where it makes sense to leave the second because I think it will open doors that aren't open right now because right now you're leading with CWM, that's a defined TAM, a [ Denim ] customer base. that opens it up. And also the approaching that with [ Persona's ] ICPs and verticals, like we've been very successful with our vertical team, financial services, health care, education, now increasingly state and local and Fed, they are extremely successful in regulated industries because the regulated industries are highly complex processes that are being automated. So getting that into our diverse team and getting faster. But it's really around enablement and creating the right sales pace and getting that quick and investing resourcing into SCA, a part of the dilution commentary that we made on one point in -- on one point in Q2 and one point in the second half. It's also what we factored into our plan in terms of investments to augment and accelerate that. Now we have to build pipe, and there's a sales cycle and all that, which does why it factors in more prominently on revenue in '28.

Well, we're out of time here. So I wanted to thank you again as ease for doing this and participating.

Yes, absolutely Yes, absolutely Yes, absolutely. [Audio Gap] plug on June 8, we'll have a webinar. We have our webinar. We have our webinar. We have our big customer event called the work innovation of or myself kind of play back the highlights for investors what are what we shared with what we've been up to on the product road map and development side. And I think it will just reinforce some of the themes we're talking about today in earnings last week.

Fantastic . Thanks so much. Thank you forward to it.