Coveo Solutions Inc. (CVO.TO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Coveo First Quarter Fiscal 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Thursday, July 31, 2025. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Adhir Kadve. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me to discuss Coveo's Fiscal First Quarter 2026 results are Laurent Simoneau, Coveo's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Louis Tetu, Coveo's Executive Chairman; and Brandon Nussey, 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 second fiscal quarter and full year fiscal 2026. These are forward-looking statements given as of July 31, 2025, 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 sedarplus.ca and 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 schedule showing IFRS results versus non-IFRS results are available in our press release and our MD&A issued today. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all references and financial figures made today are in U.S. dollars. Our presentation slides accompanying this conference call can be accessed on our IR website under the News and Events section. I will now turn the call over to Louis to review our platform and strategy, followed by Laurent, taking us through our operational and strategic highlights of our first quarter, and we will end off with Brandon taking you through the financial details and provide our outlook for Q2 and fiscal 2026. We will then open the line to your questions. With that, over to you, Louis.

Thank you, Adhir, and thanks to everyone joining us on the call. I'm happy to share our continued acceleration of growth once again this quarter. It comes down to the hard work we've been doing, pushing the boundaries of AI innovation alongside our customers since 2012 when we started in AI and seeing real measurable results and financial benefits. That, combined with the demand signals we saw from the market, all gave us confidence that we would see growth acceleration in fiscal 2026. This is what we have told investors over this past year, and that is exactly what we're delivering. After a 2-year period of experimentation following the launch of ChatGPT and now a widespread recognition of AI's importance, leaders are very anxious to get results from AI, and we continue to believe that Coveo is a market taker in applied AI. Laurent will share the details, but I want to say that I'm extremely proud of the results we posted and how we're on track to deliver on our promises of continued high growth, highly differentiated AI innovation that creates significant value for customers and combined with operational excellence, keeping us on track to hit our goals for the year. The first quarter really showed how much the market is recognizing the unique value, maturity and differentiation of Coveo. We brought on several major enterprise customers, complex organizations that needed a technology partner who would connect advanced AI to their own data and deliver real value at enterprise scale. This is a feat very few companies and technologies can deliver. Coveo's AI platform tackles some of the biggest enterprise challenges out there in digital. search, personalization, recommendations, content discovery, generative AI and now a very important space for AI experts named Agentic RAG. What sets Coveo apart is our ability to make enterprise AI work on secure enterprise data quickly with precision performance and scale and without measure. Our customers can tie improvements in business KPIs directly to Coveo's AI features, things like case deflection, contact center volume reduction, higher average order value, user engagement, conversion or worker proficiency and productivity. These Coveo adopters are amongst the most innovative and known brands across the world. You can see those stories on our website and look no further than our deepening partnerships with customers of firms like SAP, Amazon and Salesforce as a proof of this. Everything we build is centered around one single thing, relevance powered by AI. Relevance as the foundation of every point of interaction. That's how we deliver those secure, scalable, high-impact results that matter to your business. With generative AI, we're taking it a step further. Our platform keeps large language models grounded in fresh, secure enterprise knowledge and content, so the AI is more accurate, compliant and useful, not just making up stuff. At the core of it is our relevance augmented retrieval, our definition of RAG. This unique technology architecture, which we built over more than a decade working with large global enterprises, brings together different search methods, semantic vector, understands context and persons in real time. It means every user, every agent always gets the most contextually relevant up-to-date answers, recommendations, driving more revenue, lowering costs and augmenting productivity. Looking ahead, as businesses move into the world of Agentic AI, our platform gives intelligent agents everything they need to take the right action, securely, contextually aligned with what matters most to the business. Coveo helps with the intelligence these agents need to automate digital experiences grounded in current and secure enterprise data and keeping everything focused on clear business outcomes. In the end, Coveo acts like the connective tissue for the whole enterprise, the spinal intelligence and relevant stack that integrates all content and powering coherent points of experience across digital journeys, even for the most complex Agentic AI workflows. Development teams within large enterprises love this because our AI relevance platform is mature, fast and flexible. It works on any data, integrates headless into any app or any agent and agent orchestrator so they can launch these powerful, highly relevant experiences in a matter of weeks. Plus, we've got powerful tools built in, A/B testing, model transparency, tunability, analytics. So, teams can keep refining and improving results, all while saving time and lowering risk. And due to the multi-tenancy nature of our platform, each and every one of our customers gets ongoing evergreen innovation from us. So, I can't wait to see what we achieve next. Our market is really changing. To a degree, AI was a technology in search of problems. Now AI leaders look for results. And here we are delivering great results fast every time where others aren't. That's why we're confident about the future. With that, I'll pass it off to Laurent, who will further dive into some of the highlights from this quarter. Laurent?

Thank you, Louis. We're starting the year from a position of strength, delivering the strongest Q1 bookings performance in company history. Our SaaS subscription revenue grew to $34.2 million, exceeding our guidance and our core Coveo platform SaaS subscription revenue growth rate accelerated to 16% year-over-year. NER on our core Coveo platform continues its upward trajectory and expanded 100 basis points sequentially to 108%. New bookings were diversified across all use cases and regions and came from new and existing customers, including WatchGuard, National Bank of Canada, Conforama, Iberia, Hercules Sealing Products, Loto Quebec and many others. On to some highlights from the quarter, I'd like to underscore another strong performance from our generative AI solutions and a significant expansion transaction with SAP. We're seeing solid momentum here with organizations such as SAP, UKG, AMD and many others selecting Coveo this quarter. It is clear that we have a value proposition that is resonating in this dynamic market. We're leading in this space because the market requires more than just good search capabilities. Generative AI has unlocked a new era of personalized experiences that end users now expect a standard. However, the native capabilities of the platforms our customers use for commerce and knowledge use cases are oftentimes limited when managing the complexity of enterprise-level data straw. Coveo helps solve this. Our architecture leverages a retrieval or in the case of Coveo, a relevant augmented generation framework, also known as RAG that combines both lexical and semantic search to retrieve the most relevant content, which is then used to ground the LLMs response. This ensures superior accuracy, reduces health nation and provides traceable citation-backed outputs. Coveo's indexing layer allows for ingestion of structured and unstructured data across multiple systems, while its fine-grained security model ensures role-based and identity aware access control at query time. While we're extremely privileged to be working with such a diverse and forward-thinking group of customers, I want to take a moment and highlight one of them, SAP. We significantly expanded our relationship with SAP this quarter. It can't be understated. This was a landmark transaction that positions Coveo in my view, as one of SAP's key AI partners. We have been collaborating with SAP for several years. And most recently, we enabled the generative AI capabilities behind SAP Concur service portal globally. This initiative has delivered significant results, including over EUR 8 million in annual cost savings and a 31% reduction in support case volumes. Building on that success, we're now powering SAP's global customer support strategy with our generative search technology across multiple self-service properties. We anticipate that the annual cost savings will be a multiple of those achieved with Concur. This directly supports one of SAP's key strategic priorities, leveraging AI internally to drive operational efficiency and margin expansion. This expansion showcases the growing adoption of Coveo's platform as foundational layer in large-scale enterprise AI deployments. Moving on to commerce. Our AI-powered relevance is also leading to momentum in commerce. Our platform delivers measurable business results, including increased conversion, revenue and profitability. We achieved this at scale across both B2C and B2B commerce. It was another strong quarter in commerce. New business bookings grew by 60% year-over-year and representing one of the best quarters for new business in our history for this use case. Notable customer wins include S.Oliver Group, Sanmar and Airgas, each leveraging the Coveo platform to enhance and optimize their commerce experiences. I'm excited to highlight our S.Oliver win this quarter. S.Oliver is a leading European fashion retailer, and this partnership demonstrates a key milestone in our B2C growth. We closed the deal implemented and went live all within the same quarter. What makes this significant is that S.Oliver came to us after outgrowing a competitor search capabilities. They needed a partner who could deliver truly advanced product discovery that meets modern consumer expectations while preparing them for next-generation shopping experiences. Importantly, this implementation was delivered through our customers' internal resources and ecosystem. This scalable delivery model is exactly what we've been building toward and demonstrates both our platform's maturity and the growing ecosystem around it. S.Oliver represents the sophisticated B2C customers we're winning. S.Oliver is 6 brands, each with many locales and hundreds of thousands of SKUs per local. Companies like this use search and discovery as strategic differentiators, not just basic functionality. Finally, let me speak about our growing position in Agentic. Our agent ambitions are progressing nicely. We announced a host of enhancements to our capabilities for customers using Salesforce and AWS. You will recall that we were a launch partner with Salesforce Agentforce back in March. Coveo is available on the new agent exchange marketplace, providing Salesforce customers with the ability to access relevant, accurate and secure content from the broader enterprise and make it available inside Agentforce. We recently announced support for Agentforce3 with specific investments around MCP interoperability. It's early days, but I'm glad to report we already are seeing initial success, and I remain quite excited about our potential to continue to help organizations with their Agentforce rollouts. We've also announced that Coveo will be available on the AWS marketplace. Our RAG capabilities will enhance and enrich these agent experiences built using AWS Bedrock agents. Last quarter, we announced that we would be developing our Agentic RAG capabilities. Similar to what we did with CRGA, we're leveraging our customers as design partners in our efforts and it's coming along nicely. I want to note the recent industry move, which has highlighted the risks of relying too heavily on vertically integrated platforms, especially when orchestration and retrieval are tightly coupled. While it remains to be seen how this will ultimately play out, I want to remind everyone that in contrast, Coveo remains deliberately agnostic to the orchestration layer. We don't seek to own the UX or compete for end user attention. Instead, we focus on powering retrieval and relevance behind the scenes. This enables customers to build differentiated AI experiences wherever they need without fear of platform politics disrupting their workflows. To wrap up, I want to briefly reiterate the fiscal 2026 priorities we outlined back in May. Number one, drive growth with strong unit economics and a high recurring margin profile; number two, deliver meaningful innovation that creates real tangible value for our customers; and number three, maintain and enhance operational excellence with a clear focus on sales execution and customer success. We believe we are well on track across all 3 fronts, and this quarter lays a strong foundation for the year ahead. With that, I will turn it over to Brandon, who will walk you through the financial details. Brandon?

Thanks, Laurent. Fiscal '26 is off to a strong start. Building on 2 record-setting quarters in Q3 and Q4 of fiscal '25, we delivered the strongest Q1 bookings performance in the company's history. This performance has contributed to a reacceleration in reported revenue with Coveo core platform revenue growing 16% year-over-year. Consistent with our earlier guidance, the demand signals remain strong, reinforcing our confidence in continued revenue growth through the remainder of the fiscal year. This momentum is reflected in the Q2 and full year guidance we're sharing today and more on that shortly. To quickly summarize Q1, SaaS subscription revenue was $34.2 million, an increase of 12% year-over-year and ahead of our guidance. As always, our focus remains on the Coveo core platform, where we delivered $33.1 million in revenue, growing 16% year-over-year. Our ARR also showed this reacceleration with our ARR growth rate being slightly higher than our core SaaS revenue growth rate for the quarter. Currency movements had minimal influence this quarter with a positive impact of less than 1%. Revenue from the Qubit platform was $1 million in the quarter, down nearly 50% from last year. We have communicated end of life for the platform, and we continue to expect that remaining revenue will fully churn this year. Our total revenue was $35.5 million, increasing 10% year-over-year. Total revenue is impacted by ongoing Qubit churn and declining professional services revenue as we continue to leverage our partners to take on more of this work. Adjusted EBITDA loss was $1.9 million compared to a $1.7 million loss last year. Cash flows from operations were a strong $7.1 million in the quarter versus $3.0 million last year, and we ended the quarter with $128.5 million and no debt. During the quarter, approximately $2.7 million were used to purchase for cancellation approximately 511,000 shares pursuant to our NCIB. From the launch of our NCIB in July of 2024, we repurchased for cancellation the maximum 2.7 million shares for an aggregate consideration of $12.6 million. Looking deeper at bookings. In knowledge use cases, we see ongoing strong demand for our generative AI solutions, which represented approximately 50% of our bookings in the quarter. We have tripled our ARR contribution from this product from a year ago, and generative AI solutions now make up approximately 10% of our aggregate ARR. From a standing start less than 2 years ago, I'm quite pleased with the progress of this product. I continue to be encouraged by our near-perfect retention rates here and NER for this specific product continues to be greater than 150%. Commerce remains our fastest-growing use case and represented more than half of our new customer wins this quarter with ongoing success from our SAP partnership. This partnership is firmly hitting its stride, and we continue to be optimistic about the future opportunities here and for commerce in general. All told, I'm encouraged by our bookings performance and continue to see signals of ongoing momentum. Our net expansion rate for the quarter came in at 108% when excluding the Qubit-related churn. This was up 100 basis points sequentially and up from 106% a year ago. Our investments in our account management function are showing real results, and I'm pleased with the progress. As noted last quarter, we plan to reinvest our incremental cash flow this year to fuel future growth. Given the strong demand signals, ongoing go-to-market efficiency gains and combined with our healthy gross margins and strong customer retention, we believe these investments will be key to driving greater long-term profitability. Importantly, we plan to make these investments while maintaining positive operating cash flows of approximately $10 million this fiscal year. We've already made meaningful progress. In Q1, we increased our quota-carrying field organization by roughly 20%, and it is now approximately 80% larger than this time last year. We continue to believe this investment will pay off. A larger field presence amplifies our reach and impact across our active end markets. While it's still early to fully assess results given the typical multi-quarter ramp before these efforts convert into bookings, we remain confident, and we'll closely monitor performance. I'll end off with our guidance for Q2 and the fiscal year. Based on our Q1 results and the signals we are seeing, we are on track to return to 20% growth rates by the end of the fiscal year for our Coveo core. As always, ARR growth will lead reported revenue growth by a quarter or so. For Q2, we expect SaaS subscription revenue of between $35.3 million and $35.8 million and total revenue between $36.6 million to $37.1 million. For the fiscal year, we remain confident with our previously issued SaaS subscription revenue guidance of $141.5 million to $144.5 million and total revenue guidance of $147.5 million to $150.5 million, which would see us return to the growth rates I just mentioned. On adjusted EBITDA, for Q2, we are expecting adjusted EBITDA to be between negative $0.5 million to positive $0.5 million, and we expect to be approximately breakeven for the full fiscal year. We continue to expect to deliver approximately $10 million in operating cash flow for the year and note this will have some variability quarter-to-quarter with working capital fluctuations. In summary, we're off to a great start in 2026 and remain optimistic on the future. And with that, operator, you may now open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Thanos Moschopoulos from BMO Capital Markets.

Congrats on the accelerating momentum in the business. With respect to the sales hires, just remind us, is most of your hiring for this year, has that already happened? Is it very much front-end loaded? Or are there still open positions that you plan to fill through the course of the year?

Thanos, thanks for the comments. Yes, it is more heavily tilted towards the front half of the year. Of course, we'll continue to build as we see results and as we continue to see confidence. But yes, they are more tilted to the beginning of the year.

Great. And regarding SAP, great news, obviously, with respect to their expansion. In terms of SAP as a channel, clearly, you called out some wins there, but maybe some more color in terms of how that's been growing and progressing and the traction you're seeing on that front?

Thanos, this is Laurent here. So, from a commerce perspective, SAP is a great partner to us, and we're seeing success together. Now obviously, we can potentially do more with SAP, and there's -- they are a player into the Agentic space, and we are looking forward for future collaboration with them.

Okay. And what about the opportunity on the service side with SAP.

Yes. I think what we mentioned on the call about SAP is they're using us as SAP the customer for multiple use cases. And SAP Concur, as you remember, was -- has been using Coveo for a while now and documented great, we believe, great results in terms of case of lection and cost avoidance over a year. Now we're moving to their global customer experience, which will -- we anticipate will be a multiple of that, right? So, SAP, of course, has Agentic ambitions. We -- you can assume that we're discussing how we'll get there with them. And what we're doing with SAP as a customer, obviously provides a good foundation for that.

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

Touching on SAP, the partnership a little bit more here. Can you talk about maybe the size and the composition of the team that you've got dedicated to the SAP partnership? And how do you see the size of this team here growing in the coming quarters and years?

David, look, we've got dedicated partner managers and folks that spend a lot of time walking the halls of SAP and strengthening the overall relationship there. That's a small team. Their job is to uncover opportunities and make sure Coveo is front of mind wherever they can. We don't have a dedicated field organization, in other words, a dedicated sales team per se. SAP is just an important alliance partner. And as we map out our territories and the markets we're going after, we do that collaboratively with SAP's field to see where they can be helpful. But there's not dedicated salespeople per se. It's just our overall reps inside of commerce that leverage the SAP relationship.

And maybe, David, if I can add, this is Laurent here. Our platform is agnostic, as you know, it's pretty generic. So, we have a light team on the product side and tech side for a native integration with SAP, allowing us to be an endorsed partner with SAP, which is a very high category -- the highest category of partnership with them. So, it's a great investment for us basically.

Thanks for the additional color there Laurent and also, Brandon. So, I guess would it be fair to say that SAP is really kind of the #1 partner opportunity for you guys over the next couple of years? And how do you see that, the comparisons with say, Salesforce or Shopify or AWS?

We have evolved over the years to become really agnostic and really supporting those multiple platforms, those multiple players out there. So, SAP is a great partner to us, such as is AWS, and we're also seeing good movement with Salesforce agent force right now. So -- but really, we're positioning ourselves as an agnostic platform to support all of these players. And there are more, of course, potentially where we can bring a lot of value to it.

I just want to say they cover different markets. Let's remind ourselves, as we talked about on previous calls, that SAP really from -- as measured in gross merchandise values, SAP remains one of the most, if not the most important e-commerce platform across the world. They have about 3,500 customers, but they're basically all the large enterprises. They occupy that particular segment. And our endorsed relationship means that we're one of the few apps in the world where SAP -- the SAP sales team gets full quota credit and full commission on the gross dollar just like their own app. So, it's quite a privileged relationship, obviously, and it took a lot of work to get there. But that's in that specific space. As you know, our partnership with Salesforce is now Salesforce has launched Agentforce and Agent Exchange, which is kind of an extension of App Exchange, and we're one of the early launch partners there. If you go on Agent Exchange, you'll find Coveo, and we serve a specific set of functionality more on the knowledge side and for Agent to AI in large-scale complex knowledge content environment. So, they're different -- sometimes complementary, but different markets and different market motions for us, just to clarify.

No, that's great, Louis. Appreciate that. And just the last question. You obviously are trying to push more of your professional service work to your implementation partners. Just given how you've got, it seems like a pretty healthy pipeline of opportunities and strong bookings. Do you feel comfortable with the bandwidth of your implementation partners in terms of being able to execute on that?

Yes, good question. We're definitely building it, continuing to build it, and we're very happy with some global partnerships that we have with large system integrators. And in fact, if you look at our service revenue, which is 4% of our overall revenue, a lot of this -- the majority of this is working in partnership and with the SI partners and helping them grow, obviously, in the context of large-scale deployments of Coveo. So, we continue to expand that. But so far -- and we've beefed up the team that deals -- we brought some new senior executives and have beefed up the team that deals with the recruitment and the enablement and the ongoing collaboration with large SIs, both in EMEA, AP and North America.

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

A question on the net expansion rate at your generative AI customers, greater than 150% is really solid. Can you speak to the breadth of what you've been seeing at customers? Is it that 150% typically -- is it fairly typical? Or does it tend to be skewed to some customers or some customers seeing it more so than others? And then also, can you speak to the fundamental drivers of it? Is it query volume? Is it expansion in scope? Is there something else that's driving that?

Paul, this is Laurent here. The short answer is all of the above. So, we're seeing more consumption. It works. It's measured through accuracy, through case of selection, for example, to conversion in terms of service. And then, well, these customers will want to do more, right? They will want to add more languages. They will want to add more experiences, more use cases. And now what we're starting to see also is internal use cases that are moving to customer-facing into highly regulated industries. So, we're quite excited about this, and it's a testament of the accuracy and the precision of what we're doing here. So again, it's growing from multiple dimensions.

You have a lot of great customer references, more and more of them coming out over time. Can you speak to the -- how win rates have been tracking, specifically for Gen AI? And then also, who have you been primarily competing against? And has that changed over time?

Yes. So, win rates about GenAI on Gen AI have been -- we -- of course, we don't report on win rates specifically on GenAI. But what I can say from a process perspective is typically customers will do a proof of concept -- very quick proof of concept to validate if it works. And we're quite happy typically about the results, and it helps accelerate the transaction.

And then just lastly, just on GenAI, like as a percent of bookings, it looked like there was a large jump to 50% of bookings from 25% last quarter. Why is there such a large increase in 1 quarter? Is that just due to some large deals? Or you just see it sustained at this rate going forward?

Yes. I don't know if it will sustain at this rate, but I'd just say if you go back to some of the comments that Louis and Laurent put in the prepared remarks, I think we've just got a market that's getting more and more comfortable deploying Gen AI. And of course, the more customer success stories we put out there, the more comfortable it is. So, we're seeing whether customers coming in the door for commerce, coming in for service, existing customers as they go through renewal processes. There's just a lot more comfort from our ability to convey value and position it well and customer willingness to buy and adopt.

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

Congrats on an impressive quarter here. I wanted to double-click on the Agentic AI opportunity. I mean, you guys are obviously seeing good validation here with your partners, Salesforce, Amazon and potentially SAP. Can you talk a little bit about the strategy here more broadly with respect to GenAI? Just wondering, are you guys targeting Agentic AI deal specifically? Or is that really just a natural expansion of the customer journey with GenAI? And what are the monetization implications when you move from a GenAI to Agentic AI use cases?

Thank you. That's a great question. So, the way we see the market evolving is that there will be multiple touch points, multiple points of experience per se within large customers, including Agentic, including a copilot-like experience. Our job is to be behind those experiences, to be the final layer of relevance, if you want, connecting all of this information and content within the enterprise, make sense of it, personalize it and make it available across those different point of experiences. So, what Agentic brings is really diversification of experiences, new way to go into that -- to get to that information. We believe that we are the best and our customers believe we're the best at leveraging that information within the Agentic framework. And from that, the Agentic workflow will have the ability to take better decisions, take more accurate actions and so on because they have access to all of this information powered by Coveo from a relevant standpoint. And there's consistency across those touch points of experiences, which is critically important for our customers.

Suthan, I'd like to add -- this is Louis. I'd like to add that if you -- think of it this way, if you think about Agentic AI, what's really happening here is you've got a digital worker at the other end as opposed to a human really at a high level, executing on tasks and typically driven by workflows. And that's why we call those Agentic orchestrators. We believe at Coveo that agents will proliferate that every app will have agents. If you think today about Agentforce, it's a good example. If you think about ServiceNow, if you think about SAP Joule, if you think about what Adobe is doing but also many apps. So, agents will proliferate, but they do need an infrastructure underneath to ground these agents into data and relevance, whether, again, it's a human asking a question to the Coveo infrastructure or an agent and using the results of that question to feed the next question during the agent orchestration process, this is what we're here for. And so, the early results for -- of Coveo working, for instance, to help enhance Agentforce at Salesforce are quite successful. And we already have customers starting to adopt that. And so, I hope this clarifies really the way to think about it.

That's helpful. I also want to touch on, obviously, the go-to-market traction. We've seen now a number of quarters of just consistent performance. And it feels like it's a combination of both a strong and increasingly stronger demand backdrop, but also improving sales execution. So, given the recent CRO hire, can you talk a little bit about what's been working on the go-to-market front for you guys? What's left to optimize further? And where do you see opportunity to invest in further?

Yes. Great question. Look, it's -- think of it as a combination of the 2 events and the compounded effect of 2 things. As we've said, if you go back to prior earnings calls and et cetera, we strongly believe and we've seen that since the launch of ChatGPT AI, there's been a lot of talk about AI and et cetera, but there was a lot of confusion also. AI was a bit of a technology, as we said, in search of problems. And the market has been experimenting, and we've seen a lot of maturity gain in terms of the understanding of customers. And with that, greater demand -- greater understanding, for instance, of the importance of search and relevance technology to ground, generative AI as an example. And so that's the first dimension, which is the clear evidence of stronger demand and a recognition of the importance of the kind of infrastructure and tech that Coveo provides in that architecture. We couple that, obviously, with greater execution. So, with demand comes the need to grow the sales team and so on. And Coveo has been very, very focused since the IPO on continuing to improve our execution and really position ourselves for scale. And this is what we've been doing, and we're -- I will say we're very proud. John, our COO, is really driving the railroad very, very well with the team. And we continue to hire great people and grow the team and improve the efficiency. And we're very, very satisfied with our unit economics and our performance metrics improvement for sure.

That's good color. And just one last one for me for Brandon. Just given this improving validation from a product market fit perspective, do you see opportunity here for more pricing optimization?

We've been generally making headway, I would say, growing our ACV per customer. Our strategy or one of our biggest opportunities has been get into our accounts and then expand them over time. Average ACV per customer now, I think, is just over $200,000, and that's up nicely from at least a couple of years ago. So, in terms of how we think about pricing, we're constantly looking at the value we drive for our customers and thinking about how we can just drive greater pricing power that comes from that. But we're making headway there, and we'll keep at it. Good opportunity ahead, though.

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

Fantastic to hear about the expansion of the SAP relationship as a customer. Do you see this expansion as you being now fully deployed within the SAP properties? Or perhaps can you give us a sense of how much bigger they can be as a customer? And then I'll ask a little bit more about the partnership and the channel partnership after that.

Right. Thank you for the question, Doug. So, it's really just the beginning in our opinion, since the agent -- first of all, the Agentic market is evolving very rapidly. Obviously, SAP is a player there with Joule. So, we're seeing a lot of potential here. Now one step at a time, we're going to make sure that SAP to customer is deployed and is successful at the level we believe it can be. But in parallel, we're going to have -- you can expect us to have the conversation on how to leverage this to a larger market.

And so, you touched on something there that I wanted to follow up on. You're selling to SAP as a customer, you've got them as a partner. I guess I'd just like to understand how closely tied those 2 initiatives are. It would seem like they'd be on different sides of that organization. Maybe I'm wrong. So, could you clarify that or talk about where in the SAP organization or how high the Coveo relationship sits that you can have an impact on these 2 sides?

Yes. So, Coveo is one important component of the SAP customer experience main property. So obviously, we have visibility and we have we have, I would say, a high-level collaboration with the folks and with the executives that are in charge of customer experience at SAP. In parallel, we are having conversations also with the groups that are related to go-to-market around SAP CX. And we -- again, as I said, we hope that what we're doing today with SAP the customer will be -- will help us accelerate the relationship with these folks on the go-to-market side.

Okay. I appreciate the color. One more question for Brandon. Q2 guidance here suggests, I think, by my math, an uptick to 13% to 15% overall SaaS growth, and that includes Qubit. So, if we take out Qubit, 3% or 4% higher, I think we're lapping similar amounts. It would seem to suggest 16% to 19% core SaaS growth next quarter to hit your guidance. I guess my first question is, am I missing anything there?

Sorry, Doug, I mute the wrong way there. Your logic is correct. I think some of your math on the high end is a little high. If you take the high end of the guidance and assume Qubit continues to get smaller quarter-to-quarter. There will still be some qubit revenue in Q2. It's not going to 0, in other words. But your logic is otherwise correct.

Okay. And then directionally correct as well. So, I guess I'd like to finish by saying you previously talked about the prospect of getting to sort of a 20% overall growth rate on this metric by the end of the year on a normalized basis. That seems to be coming into view perhaps a little quicker. Is that a fair statement? Or maybe I'll get you to speak to the confidence in getting to those types of numbers with another quarter of bookings under your belt.

Yes. So, look, as I said on the call, we think we're off to a great start for the year. Getting back to 20% growth rates is certainly a key objective of ours, and we continue to feel confident in how -- our ability to get there. Look, it's the first quarter of the year, lots of execution still ahead, but we're feeling good about the path that we're on.

Your next question comes from the line of Richard Tse from National Bank Financial.

This is Mike Stevens on for Rich. Congrats on another strong quarter. Just more high level broadly, just given the rate of advancements that we've seen in AI and LLM models seemingly monthly, I'm just wondering on your side, has that been felt? Is there any impact on that? Are customers kind of seeing an evolution in their tools quarter-to-quarter type of thing? Or maybe just any insights on that?

Yes. Thank you for the question. So, what we're seeing is a specialization of those models. Some of them are better at answering short queries. Others are better at being quick and cheap to a certain extent. Others are very good at research-like answers. So, what we're starting to see is have a more flexible infrastructure to select really the right model for the right purpose and the right task and having the interoperability capabilities for customers also to use their own models if they need to, depending on, again, on the use case and the circumstances. So, it's evolving quite rapidly when the way we have designed our -- the way we're designing our platform is really to take -- to benefit from all of these changes.

Okay. Great. That's helpful. And in terms of your use cases, commerce has clearly been a leader in these early days. I'm just wondering your thoughts on -- into the future, if you think that, that's something a function of your go-to-market strategy and sales partners. Or is that a general market dynamics kind of function where you think commerce may -- the value prop may be highest to some of those players?

So, we're winning in commerce, and we're successful in commerce for 2 big reasons, right? The first one is we have proven our ability to drive revenue per visit lift, conversion and now profitability with AI. And our customers have been quite successful with this. So that's the first point. The second aspect of it is also our customers and our prospects are trusting us. They believe with our generative AI capabilities to provide -- to help provide advices -- advice, not just finding product, but how to build this, how to address that. It's extremely important in B2B commerce. So not only they are believing in that capability in commerce, and we're seeing some convergence that is happening and that will grow between B2B commerce and knowledge or in customer service also. So that's another driver, if you want, for the future.

Okay. I appreciate that. And just to sneak in a last one. As your go-to-market partners, SIs, you have some major non-SI players. Just how you see that mix evolving or how you would like to see that mix evolving in the future of your bookings?

Well, the bookings are all direct, right? I mean SIs are the family doctors and referral partners for Coveo, and they do a lot of the work. They get certified and they do a lot of the work. They insert Coveo as kind of the core platform within the architecture. What these SIs are doing is really bringing to their customers the AI transformation within digital experiences. The transformation -- what the market is realizing is that bringing AI to points of experience is becoming an imperative, and it's a major, major transformation agenda. And Coveo becomes the platform to do that. So just to clarify, they're not resellers. We work together with them, and then we bring them revenue with that.

Okay. So just in terms of the mix you see kind of going forward in the future as far as some non-SI partners bringing in revenue for you guys versus you go directly without them, anything that we can kind of glean in the future?

Yes. We'll continue on that model because it's working really, really well. I think we're the ongoing -- we say and I think our customers would agree that Coveo is -- we're obviously a Software-as-a-Service provider, but think of us with our SI partners as data science as a service and really ongoing innovation as a service because our platform is multi-tenant -- it's evergreen. We released 1,500 changes and innovations every month, and it's rolled out in near real time to all of our customers simultaneously. So, this is an ongoing thing. And our role in this is really to provide part of the knowledge -- some of the knowledge, the data science and the technology, obviously, and the innovation and then the SIs is to provide the transformation, the deployment, the implementation and continue to roll that out and expand. And that model for us is working extremely well. And the major SIs we deal with, as you know, are companies like Deloitte and Accenture and many others, focused SIs like Perficient or Slalom or Valtech or others. And we're certainly pleased with those relationships. We're continuing to build them. We're enabling more people and continuing that. And again, the demand for what we do and above that for the transformation of digital experiences with AI is really, really inflecting.

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

This is George McGreen on for Koji Ikeda. I wanted to ask just in light of the kind of success you guys have seen in terms of commerce customers and the partnership motion there that's driving results, as well as the 20% acceleration goal where you guys are also seeing great success and progress towards reaching it. I guess to what extent did -- does that goal incorporate commerce acceleration? And then maybe kind of just with the success you've seen in partnerships and the momentum there, what's kind of the potential for outperformance and maybe acceleration past 20% going into the future?

Yes. Look, George, thanks for the question. I think -- I hope, and I think by now, the market and you guys understand that we're not conservative, but realistic in guidance and have had a history of meeting goals and targets. So, it's really one step at a time here. This is the first quarter. This is obviously the third quarter in a row where we reported last summer that we were seeing the inflection in demand and the AI and GenAI market gaining much more understanding and clarity on the part of buyers. And we're seeing that. We're showing that. So again, one step at a time, we were pretty happy with resuming growth rate that starts with a 2. We've guided in and around the 30, on a Rule of 30 basis. So, it's -- the unit economics are very healthy and et cetera. I want to come back on the first part of your question, which is about commerce. Coveo is really about bringing AI to digital experiences, and that is in knowledge content as well as in commerce or as Laurent mentioned, in both. When you think about B2B commerce, in particular, there's a lot of room for experiences and the convergence of service and commerce because typically in B2B commerce, it starts with a problem description, right, to find the right part or component or whatever to fix an issue. And so, it's really across the board. I think we're seeing a lot of traction, as we said, in commerce because our algorithms do deliver very tangible results. I think what's going on in knowledge is quite interesting is that initially, when GenAI came out, the market said search is dead. And now it's a full reversal of events. It's almost turned on its head where people say, well, you know what, in order to make these large language models work, you need to ground them in search and relevance and in enterprise data. And so, we're seeing good solid growth in that area and a lot of interest around what we do because, guess what, unless you have the powerful indexing vectorization, semantic and relevance ability that we have, you just can't make Agentic work at the scale and precision that enterprises require. So, the net-net of this is that we're seeing growth across the board. And -- but about acceleration of growth, and again, it's one step at a time. You'll hear from us, guidance that we're comfortable with. And I don't think there's any reason right now to get ahead of that. It's -- we're building strong foundations, not just for the next 3 quarters, obviously. I hope that helps.

There are no further questions at this time. Please continue, Mr. Laurent Simoneau.

All right. So, I want to thank you all for joining us today and for your continued support and interest in our company. We appreciate your time, and we look forward to reconnecting with you in 3 months for our next earnings call. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.