Coveo Solutions Inc. ($CVO)

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Coveo Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Wednesday, May 27, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Adhir Kadve, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me to discuss Coveo's Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full year 2026 results are Laurent Simoneau, Coveo's Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Louis Têtu, Coveo's Executive Chairman; and Karine Hamel, Coveo's Chief Financial Officer. A reminder that some remarks made today will be forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including those regarding our plans, objectives, expected performance and our outlook for the first fiscal quarter and full year fiscal 2027. These are forward-looking statements given as of May 27, 2026. And while we believe any statements we make are reasonable, they are based on current expectations and assumptions, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied. Coveo disclaims any intent or obligation to update our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Further information on factors that could affect the company's financial results is included in the filings we make with Canadian securities regulators, including in the Risk Factors section of the company's most recently filed annual information form as well as the key factors affecting our performance section of the company's most recently filed MD&A, both of which are available on our SEDAR+ profile at sedarplus.ca or on ir.coveo.com. Additionally, some of the financial measures and ratios discussed on this call are either non-IFRS measures, ratios or operating metrics used in our industry. A discussion on why we use these metrics and where applicable, reconciliation schedules showing IFRS versus non-IFRS results are available in our press release and our MD&A released today. Finally, please note that unless otherwise stated, all references in 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 Financial Information section. I will now turn the call over to Louis to review our platform and strategy, followed by Laurent, taking us through the operational and strategic highlights of our fourth quarter, and we will end off with Karine taking you through the financial details and providing our outlook for the first quarter and fiscal 2027. We will then open the line to your questions. With that, over to you, Louis.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Fiscal Q4 was a record fourth quarter in new business bookings performance and another quarter of new customer strength. So we're ending fiscal '26 with the best new business bookings year ever. We also posted $13.7 million of operating cash flow in the fourth quarter and maintained the breakeven levels we had guided for the year, all this while continuing to scale revenue. Laurent and Karine will discuss the details. We attribute this performance to our focus on both our generative AI solutions and our go-to-market and strategic growth areas where our technology is highly differentiated and where the economics are very strong for both Coveo and our customers. I want to help investors understand our market dynamics, what we're hearing from customers and why we see growth in core markets in this new generative AI and agent era. AI is at the center of every enterprise technology conversation, but the market is still noisy. Customers are still figuring out the stack required, how they can deploy AI to create real durable business value. We don't believe AI will simply replace enterprise applications as perhaps the so-called [ SaaSpocalypch ] suggests. Instead, we think AI will become a new operating layer across the enterprise data and that the strongest software platforms are integrating AI to make their applications more intelligent, more automated and more valuable. And this is where we believe Coveo is extremely well positioned and that this trend increases our value. We provide foundational technology that makes enterprise AI work accurately, securely and at scale across all enterprise data. The leading brands we deal with have realized the need for this, and there are 3 reasons. First, none of the AI works unless it understands your context. In the enterprise, that context lives in the company's broad data. Much of it is unstructured, distributed across systems and governed by complex permissions. Large language models do not intrinsically understand a company's products, inventories, customers, documents, conversations, contracts, processes or business rules. The second reason is that generative AI is powerful because it can stitch together information fragments from many sources and bring those in context, generate novel, useful answers or actions in real time at large scale. AI models alone are probabilistic, but enterprises need to avoid hallucinations and force permissions and control trusted outcomes and accuracy. High-precision AI outputs is the norm. The third reason is that many companies first tried to build these capabilities themselves, and they're reaching the same conclusion that enterprise AI success is not just about picking AI models. It's about data, relevance, security, governance and measurable business value. In fact, models are multiplying and agent pick evolves quickly. So preserving flexibility and interoperability is key. The ability of different artificial intelligence models, agents and systems to seamlessly work together across broad data. So net-net, 2 things are necessary, and Coveo does both. First, reaching data everywhere it sits is key. If you can use search to bring it together for AI context, that's a good start. Then grounding AI models with high contextual relevance is also key. So tech that can figure out relevance is a second critical piece. For more than 15 years, we've built our platform deploying successfully within thousands of use cases with customers globally, combining indexing, search, semantic, vectorization, machine learning, deep learning, relevance control, personalization and now generative experiences, AI applied in production and producing real business outcomes. Coveo has now evolved as the trusted relevance and context layer for enterprise AI. And that context window is a very precious piece of the enterprise applied AI stack in digital. Without it, it doesn't work. And AI models alone do not provide that infrastructure. And so it gives us confidence in Coveo's long-term position and value as enterprises move to AI deployment at scale. Here are some practical examples. In the quarter, we signed significant deals with several new Fortune 1000 customers in the B2B industrial, manufacturing and distribution sectors. Last earnings, we discussed the massive economics and competitive gains derived from our AI solutions across this B2B industrial sector. These large-scale companies know a thing or 2 about AI. Many have strategic partnerships with the leading AI companies in the Magnificent 7 and access to all the models and commercial agents, OpenAI, Anthropic, AgentForce, et cetera, yet they use Coveo for their AI stack. Laurent will discuss the reasons, customer examples and the high ROI in more detail. Over the recent years, Coveo navigated successfully through what we believe is the most profound transition ever in the tech industry from AI search in the pre-generative AI era to now the GenAI and agentic era. GenAI has redefined our market and almost every industry. Our company evolved as a result. First, our consolidated growth and net expansion metrics continue to reflect the broader evolution of our customer base. This includes certain more mature cohorts traditionally in service and workplace, for example, with simpler search use cases. These cohorts tend to have a more moderate renewal and expansion profile. We continue to thoughtfully manage and support them while directing incremental investments towards larger, more strategic customers operating in complex digital environments. This is where Coveo's relevance and AI capabilities are more differentiated. We seek to bridge those into our more advanced GenAI and agentic solutions. That being said, our strategic growth areas tell a very positive story. Those are B2B, commerce, GenAI and large complex enterprises deploying Coveo across multiple use cases. This cohort forms the vast majority of Coveo's overall ARR, almost all of our new logo acquisition focus in sales and all of our new customer bookings in fiscal '26. and those segments are growing fast with robust net expansion rates. I think this is an important message for investors. Coveo is not only participating in the GenAI transition, we're performing strongly and taking share in the solutions and segments that matter most for our future growth, winning in the new generative AI and agentic era and in the large enterprise B2B market segments. As the market continues to gain greater clarity and education, the team is focused on execution, conversion visibility, solid customer economics and more and more proof points. The success in our strategic growth areas reinforces our conviction in our long-term strategy and durable growth. This is where we invest. As we've discussed before, we also continue to see opportunities on home soil as both Canadian public sector and regulated industries seek to accelerate sovereign AI deployments. To that effect, we've announced an MOU with the Canadian government in the third quarter and now a strategic agreement with [ Bell AI Fabric ] in the fourth quarter. At this time, given the scope, geopolitics and unpredictable timing, we are not forecasting any revenue from this opportunity in our guidance. We, however, remain encouraged by the potential scale and long-term opportunity this partnership could represent. I'll now turn it over to Laurent.

Thank you, Louis. First, I'm very proud of our team delivering this record fourth quarter of bookings as well as a year of record bookings performance in fiscal '26. These results were driven by continued strength in our core growth areas, particularly B2B commerce and generative AI. They also reflect growing conviction for new and existing customers that Coveo is uniquely positioned to solve complex enterprise AI, search, discovery and personalization challenges at scale. This quarter, organizations, including Palo Alto Networks, [ Unomax Tires ], Elution, Intuit, Deloitte, Perficient and the Australian Taxation Office chose Coveo to power mission-critical commerce, service and enterprise experiences. We see strength with B2B manufacturers and distributors where large parts catalogs, complex buyer journeys, pragmatic content and technical service environments create exactly the challenges Coveo is built to address. For example, what happens when a mining machine, an aircraft engine or an MRI machine goes down. Our technology can consolidate product catalogs, documents, data and context from dozens of systems into AI so that the AI can orchestrate faster diagnostics, parts, engineering, manufacturing and contractual content. This intelligence translates into better uptime and in turn into tens of millions of dollars of revenue gains for these machines. This is not something you can do easily just firing up a set of AI models, and it also requires vertical expertise. It is a difficult problem. Content is fragmented, access rights are complex, catalogs are large and dynamic and intent varies by user role, journey, entitlement and context. Coveo's differentiation is making this complexity usable by AI across both digital and agentic experiences. Our differentiated technology enables B2B companies to industrialize generative AI and agentic capabilities at scale. We can demonstrate high ROI through fast pilots, phased rents and deliver a flexible model that works both as a complete solution and a composable platform, all with amazing simplicity and cost efficiency. For the second consecutive quarter, we landed the largest deal in Coveo's history, another 7-figure annual subscription with a Global 1000 industrial manufacturer. This customer operates a complex $1 billion B2B aftermarket parts and service business, representing about 1/3 of their revenue and their highest margin opportunities. Their customer experience was constrained by weak search relevance and an inability to interpret complex product models, technical configurations and parts shipment requirements. Coveo will power their B2B OEM AI parts discovery and recommendations experience, unifying complex catalog structures with broad technical content across systems into a single intelligent search, recommendations and conversational experience. It applies to our enterprise-grade scalability and security with support from multiple AI models and even the customers' own LLM across millions of parts in more than [ 3 ] languages. The conservative business case estimates hundreds of million dollars in incremental revenue over 3 years, driven by improved conversion and average order value, reduced manual maintenance and step change in SLA performance. Another new customer is a major HVAC manufacturer. They expect Coveo AI to deliver substantial ROI over the next 3 years, driven primarily by a projected lift in search session conversion with additional gains from listing page performance and recommendations led increases in average order value. The pattern for both these customers is the same. relevance and personalization precisely tuned to each customer's profile and behavior, guiding customers through the buying and product ownership journey while reducing customer effort and configuration overhead. Our R&D investments and innovation priorities are guided by customers and by a clear view of where enterprise software is going. Workflows are becoming more AI-assisted, conversational and agentic, creating a need for AI that is trusted, secure, permission aware and routed in the right enterprise data. Last quarter, we launched our hosted MCP server to support interoperability between Coveo and the growing ecosystem of AI assistance and agentic frameworks. As enterprises adopt different AI experiences, Coveo's role is to provide a universal grounding layer, so each experience can access the right enterprise content with the right context, permissions and relevance. We are also investing heavily in the convergence of enterprise use cases to create a unified intent-driven experience. Commerce, service and other points of experience are becoming one connected journey. We rolled out Coveo search agents to select customers, adding conversational and reasoning capabilities across these points of experience. These agents help understand what a user is trying to accomplish, retrieve the most relevant information, recommend the best next action and present it in the appropriate format, contextual experiences, intent-driven, unified and automated with AI. For example, a commerce conversation may begin with product recommendations and rich discovery, then evolve into education, side-by-side comparison or buying guidance. With ownership, the conversation shifts towards service. The same experience can surface the right knowledge article or troubleshooting advice alongside relevant parts suggestions while maintaining context. To further support interoperability, we are also making these contextual and intent-driven experiences easily available to agentic and personal assistants. This allows Coveo to extend beyond our own experiences and into the broader ecosystem of AI assistant and agentic interfaces customers choose to use. Looking ahead to fiscal '27, we will remain intensely customer-focused. To support that, we're transforming our customer organization around a new operating model designed to bring our teams even closer to customers and accelerate the path from customer need to product impact. This model creates a more coordinated life cycle engine built around technology architecture, outcomes and adoption. It brings together account management, forward deployed engineering, technical programs, professional services and support into unified customer motion. The goal is to provide customers with the trusted AI expertise, technical leadership and clarity they need across the full journey. We serve some of the largest and most innovative enterprises in the world. Our goal is to partner with them deeply, combine their domain expertise with our technology expertise and uncover and deliver new solutions that solve real business problems at enterprise scale, always with high ROI economics in sight. From a financial perspective, we will continue to scale the business in a disciplined and efficient way. Karine will provide more detail, but our focus remains on building a high-margin recurring revenue business that generates positive cash flow and allocate capital towards the highest growth and highest return opportunities. We believe our business model is sound. We have a differentiated platform, a customer-centric innovation machine and a large opportunity in front of us in our strategic growth area as enterprises invest in AI-driven search discovery, knowledge and agentic experiences. The market, as Louis said earlier, is gaining clarity, and we are right there as it inflects. Finally, I'm pleased to announce that we have hired a new Chief Sales Officer to lead our North American new customer team. This individual is a seasoned executive with more than 20 years of enterprise sales leadership experience. including executive roles at some of the largest software companies in the world. He is expected to join Coveo in June. To wrap up, I'm very excited about Coveo's future. We're differentiated. We bring high value to customers. We have momentum in our strategic growth areas, a clear path forward and a significant opportunity ahead in fiscal '27 and beyond. And I want to thank our incredible team for their hard work throughout the year. I will now pass the line to Karine to review our financial details.

Thank you, Laurent. From a financial perspective, fiscal '26 reflected continued progress in several of our strategic growth areas, alongside disciplined execution. We said we would focus on accelerating Coveo's core platform growth, improving bookings performance, scaling commerce and GenAI and maintaining financial discipline. We made meaningful progress against those objectives with 15% Coveo Core platform SaaS revenue growth, our strongest full year new business bookings performance to date, continued momentum in commerce and GenAI and positive cash flow. Now let me walk you through our fourth quarter and full fiscal year results. SaaS subscription revenue of $35.9 million, an increase of 10%. With the full depreciation of the Qubit platform, all SaaS subscription revenue during the quarter came from the Coveo Core platform, which increased 14%. Full year SaaS subscription revenue was $142.5 million, growing 13% with the Coveo Core platform growing 15%. Total revenue was [ $37.4 million ] in the quarter, an increase of 9%. Full year total revenue was $148.3 million, an increase of 11%. Gross margin for the quarter and full year was 78% and product gross margin was 80% in the quarter and 81% for the full year. Adjusted EBITDA was $0.8 million in the quarter and negative $0.8 million for the full year, in line with guidance. Cash flow from operating activities was $13.7 million in the quarter, aided by positive collections. For the full year, we generated $10.5 million in operating cash flows compared to $11.1 million in the prior year. NER on the Coveo Core platform, which excludes the impact of our deprecation of Qubit was 103%. We continue to be active on our buyback program, purchasing for cancellation approximately 1.9 million shares at a weighted average price of CAD 6.08 per share for a total consideration of USD 8.4 million during the quarter. For the full year, we repurchased approximately 4.4 million shares at a weighted average price of CAD 6.83 per share for a total consideration of USD 22 million. We maintain a strong financial position with approximately $102 million in cash and no debt. Let me now touch on a few of the strategic areas that continue to drive performance throughout the quarter and fiscal '26. Commerce is the primary driver of our growth this quarter, representing approximately 60% of total new business bookings, remaining our fastest-growing segment. We were pleased by the momentum in B2B commerce, where we're seeing increasing demand for large manufacturers and distributors. B2B commerce was a standout this quarter with recurring new logo additions and strong new business bookings performance. Turning to generative AI. Adoption continued to expand across both customer expansion and new logo acquisition, where our GenAI capabilities remain an important differentiator and growth driver. As we noted previously, these solutions are proving to be both highly sticky and an effective entry point for broader adoption. We see strong expansion trends for these solutions within the installed base with net expansion rate for generative AI SKUs remaining above 150%. We also made meaningful progress with new customers adoption this year, nearly doubling our GenAI customer count year-over-year. As a result, GenAI solutions now represent 13% of our total annual recurring revenue. You've heard us speak before about customers using Coveo across multiple use cases. When that happens, we typically see stronger expansion dynamics and greater customer stickiness as Coveo becomes increasingly embedded as a strategic platform within the enterprise. During the fourth quarter, we saw continued momentum in customers expanding their use of Coveo into additional use cases. We believe there is a growing need for enterprise-grade platforms, acting as foundational layers across increasingly interconnected commerce, service, website and knowledge experiences. As these environments continue to converge, Coveo is well positioned to help enterprises deliver more unified and intelligent digital journeys. Beyond new logo acquisition, we see expansion trends across several of our strategic customer cohorts. Last quarter, we highlighted that our top 20 customers generated a 3-year net expansion rate of approximately 150%, demonstrating the long-term expansion potential of strategic Coveo deployment and the stickiness of our platform in multi-use cases scenarios. Since then, we continue to grow the number of customers over $1 million of ARR, further reinforcing the strategic role Coveo is playing within large enterprises. More broadly, across our strategic customers cohorts, namely commerce, GenAI and multi-use case customers, we see robust net expansion rates. At the same time, some of our more mature customers cohorts expand and renew at a more modest pace than what we're seeing across our strategic growth areas. This reinforces our focus on larger, more strategic enterprise deployments with multi-use case potential, where customer outcomes and long-term expansion dynamics remain the strongest. Moving on to guidance. We continue to see healthy customer adoption and expansion across the strategic growth areas we've highlighted. Our fiscal '27 outlook also reflects a balanced view of the broader operating environment, measured expansion dynamics within portions of the more mature installed base and the timing uncertainty associated with large strategic opportunities in our pipeline. While these large enterprise deployment opportunities remain difficult to precisely forecast given their size and complexity, we continue to progress and depending on timing, could contribute incrementally to revenue growth in the fiscal year. As such, for the first quarter, we expect Q1 SaaS subscription revenue to be between $37.1 million and $37.6 million, representing approximately 12% to 13% growth for the Coveo Core platform and Q1 total revenue to be between $38.2 million and $38.7 million. And for the full year, we expect SaaS subscription revenue to be between $154 million and $158 million, representing approximately 10% to 13% growth for the Coveo Core platform and total revenue to be between $160 million and $164 million. Regarding profitability, we remain disciplined in how we manage our spend and are focused on operating efficiently, balancing improved profitability with continued investment in the business to support future growth. As such, we expect adjusted EBITDA in Q1 to be between negative $1.5 million and negative $0.5 million, reflecting the seasonally higher costs we typically incur in the first quarter. For the fiscal year, we expect adjusted EBITDA between $2 million and $7 million, and we expect to generate operating cash flow of more than $10 million for the full fiscal year. In conclusion, we're pleased with our fiscal '26 execution, including record new business bookings performance, continued progress in commerce and GenAI and disciplined financial execution. While our fiscal '27 outlook reflects appropriate caution in the current environment, we believe Coveo is well positioned as enterprises increasingly look for AI platforms capable of supporting complex and converging digital experiences. With that, operator, you can now open the line for questions.

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

Can you expand on the go-to-market changes that you -- Laurent alluded to in your prepared remarks? Is that really about kind of leveraging FTEs upfront earlier in the process, recognizing that it's a complex technical sale? Or just what's the dynamic there that you're envisaging?

Thank you for the question. So I think we mentioned that in our prepared remarks. We are seeing more and more large enterprise-wide multi-use cases transactions. and customers. And with more AI, with more generative AI part of those deals, we feel that we need to have a greater strategic collaboration with our customers and our partners, bringing account management FDE support deployed engineers and also technical programs under one single umbrella. So coordinating all of that to, first of all, accelerate the deployment and the success of the project, help fix some challenges in the future, if any, and grow into new opportunities is really the objective here. And this is not a new model. The -- the most -- the multiAI-first companies, I should say, are using that model, that FDE model with a lot of success. So we are accelerating that.

Great. And I didn't hear you specifically call out service. You talked about multi-use cases and B2B commerce. Should our takeaway be that you're deemphasizing your service opportunities in favor of opportunities where service is a component of a broader use case like the B2B commerce?

Thanos, it's Louis speaking. What we're seeing, as Laurent mentioned, and if you look in the numbers, we reported over the past few quarters, basically almost every quarter, 7-figure transactions. So what's really happening, and I'll start with that and dig into service. What's really happening is that the Coveo conversation is becoming much more strategic, a much larger one. And we gave examples with the B2B examples that Laurent mentioned in the industrial sector. So what's going on really is that these customers no longer look at service in an isolated way or at commerce in an isolated way. These large manufacturers, equipment companies, distributors, energy companies through -- because of the power of Coveo AI and when we show it to them, the ability to consolidate the experience and unify it and drive the experience automatically with AI through the intent. So as you go online, for instance, and interact with a company, depending on your context, depending on what you're asking, we will branch -- you're looking for parts, you're looking to compare, you're looking for education, you're looking for part fitment, you're looking for troubleshooting or logging a case or symptoms and diagnostic. So we're really seeing that convergence right now. The historic cohorts pre-GenAI, as you know, quite a number of them were -- Coveo was before that. 4 or 8 years ago, we have a lot of those customers that were using Coveo only for service knowledge. The bigger one of those, we talked about SAP earlier this year, indexing 43 sources and Coveo helping to dodge 1.6 million calls. Those remain -- Coveo remains a critical infrastructure for those types of environments. In the lower-end market, smaller customers, simpler use cases, no complexity, et cetera. These companies are still trying to figure out whether a model, a simple model can just answer their questions and all of that. It's no longer our market. We've evolved from that. In go-to-market, we're really into large complex enterprises, industrial distribution, B2B commerce, tackling those bigger problems. So the net-net -- pardon me for the long question, but for everyone on the call is we're no longer seeing the world as service versus commerce versus websites and et cetera. Coveo is involved in much larger enterprise situations right now, which is to us is great.

The next question comes from the line of [ Doug Taylor ] with National Bank Capital Markets.

Perhaps a related question to Thanos is you stated in your prepared remarks that you've got these more mature cohorts in service and workplace that have lower expansion potential or profile. And then you've got these growth areas, and that's not the majority of the ARR. And perhaps I could ask you maybe to wrap some numbers or ranges around the relative mix of your current ARR base from those 2 cohorts, I think would really help us understand better and more quantifiably the trends underpinning the overall growth picture and when we can expect Coveo as a whole is going to see its growth better approximate the excitement that you're describing for your strategic growth areas.

Yes. No, very good question, Doug. And obviously, that's the right question to ask when you look at the overall numbers and trying to understand the mix. As you know, currently, we don't report by segment. So we'll see about that. But today, we report overall. What we did say and is qualified accurately is the ARR in our strategic growth areas is the majority of our ARR today. And that cohort is 2 things. Number one is growing significantly faster than the company average is obviously, those are obviously the segments where Coveo is, I would say, is designed for, I would say, the GenAI and the agentic era as opposed to the pre-GenAI world. So we -- the net -- the headline here is we'd rather be a company that's designed for the future era than the past pre-GenAI era. And I think that's an important message, as we said. And also very positive NER metrics there. The other portion, which is the minority of our ARR, as we said very clearly, we're retaining them at a much more modest pace. It's lower net expansion rate. And there's still -- the larger of those customers, we're very engaged in converting them to more significant AI capabilities, et cetera, because by nature, they're more complex. They need to reach more content and et cetera. The other ones, the smaller ones are the ones that are still -- frankly, the jury is still out. They're still figuring out what to do and et cetera. But we expect, given we're putting 100% of our go-to-market efforts on what we call our strategic growth areas, when we do the math, and we can't report any segment yet and any timing of that, but we're obviously going to outgrow the modest pace of the minority of the ARR, pardon me for -- I think you understand the mix here. And so overall, while the average growth, and we're prudent with the average guidance, as you can tell, because we're dealing with large transactions and the timing of this transition. But the net-net is we're quite exciting with the growth metrics, which I would frankly qualify as significantly greater than the company averages in those strategic growth areas.

Okay. And then as we map that to the NER as a company that you've reported and some slight compression there. And I guess I got to ask, is there perhaps some gross churn in some of those, say, noncore areas that's beyond what we would have expected with Salesforce. Is there -- is that at work here? Can you speak to the renewal activity in some of those areas?

Yes. Thanks, Doug, for your question. The underlying drivers, are pretty consistent to what you've heard from us earlier this year and tonight with Louis. We got a few isolated churn events this year and more importantly, a significant one with Salesforce in Q2. Additionally, we have strong expansion across our strategic accounts like in our growth areas, we're very excited about that. And yes, what we just talked about around some more mature cohorts, of course, influences that. But more importantly, Doug, I think when we look at fiscal '26, something we're really happy is that the new logo acquisition, so what we call internally land bookings, as we get those new customers on board, maybe you're not as familiar with our detailed math on NER. But as a reminder, we don't include those whatsoever in that metric. So as we have a greater penetration of bookings coming from new logo acquisition, of course, then that may have an impact on NER in the end. That would be how I would address your question, Doug. I hope this answers it.

Yes. I mean that helps. One last one for me while I've got you, Karine. The guidance implies a pretty steep rebound in the EBITDA in the second half of the year after Q1, which understandably is seasonally low. And I just want to unpack a bit. You've been signaling through most of last year an intent to reinvest and to some degree, that is happening still. But is there something about the market you're seeing, which is causing you to perhaps take your foot off the gas? Do you feel you've got the spend profile you need now to deliver against the growth opportunities, and we should expect more of the economics of your growth to trickle down from here?

Listen, Doug, this is a really good question. Thanks for asking. Thanks for pointing out, I mean, Q1 is highly seasonal in terms of spend, go-to-market mainly and so on. So of course, that will pick up over the next 3 quarters. Having said that, we've been, I think, always saying and talking about prioritizing growth over profitability. We still believe this is an important assumption. What we care about, Doug, is we look at strong customer economics when we think about the money we put at play to get a customer that will drive higher margin, the recurring revenue, long-term stickiness and so on. When we look at that, this what drives investment thesis here. So having said that, we want to be operating efficiently, and we constantly revisit that as we go on.

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

A question in regards to the change in the go-to-market strategy really to focus on larger, more strategic customers. When you look back over the last year, did you see higher sales efficiency on larger customers versus the smaller ones? And then looking forward over the coming year, if you're putting more dollars -- sales dollars to focus on larger customers, do you expect that will drive stronger bookings growth?

Well, I think, yes, that's certainly the objective. But yes, when what we're seeing the -- as you know, the economics of a company like ours is we run a certain -- we incur a certain expense to acquire a customer. And then that customer brings obviously, an annual contract subscription plus some degree of services, but not that much and mostly subscription and then grows over time. And it's really kind of a land and expand model and at a very high margin. We're obviously very enthused by the fact that our deal size is going up. We have a growing number of large enterprise wins, which obviously plays very positively, Paul, on the economics. we've always been and historically up until today, disciplined, as you know, with our P&L, and we continue to be. But as we see the market opening and really inflecting and we see the metrics of acquisition with these large accounts, we would expect that these economics will get better and better. Mind you, at the same time, as we see those wins, I think you can expect us to the last question about the EBITDA to continue to reinvest in that. We're seeing this market maturing right now. We're seeing companies making real decisions. We're seeing them compelled to deliver results and come back, as we said in the prepared remarks, to companies like Coveo and Coveo in particular, to execute on that. And so the answer to your question is all of these signals are trending in the right direction for better and better and better unit economics.

That's helpful. And then just trying to tie together, connect some of the dots with the last couple of questions just on churn. And you mentioned bookings, you anticipate bookings to continue to be strong. How do we think about the '27 SaaS guidance? You look at the numbers, the growth rate seems a little bit slower versus '26. How do you sort of bridge between that? Like what's sort of the disconnect between bookings growth and SaaS growth?

Yes. A very good question. And look, I understand everybody on the call is certainly asking the right question because it's the right question today. We're -- the high-level answer is we're taking a prudent approach in our guidance. until the timing becomes visible, particularly of larger transactions. And of course, we have, as you know, exceptional -- potentially exceptional transactions that we're not including in the guidance just because we don't understand the timing of those, and we talked about some of those in the prepared remarks. But you're right that we -- when you look at -- you have to look -- you have to do the math, and I understand we're not breaking it down by segment again for you guys just because we haven't yet. You have to do the math on a blended basis. And that would probably be the best explanation we can give you. Karine, perhaps you can give a little more color on that one versus the other.

Yes. And as I said, Paul, on the call, I mean, there's 3 main drivers on the guidance here. We talked about those large opportunities. Look, we're super excited about those opportunities active in our pipeline. Timing could make a difference there, but just felt it was responsible from my perspective to take a prudent stance here. Then on the second, we've talked about the more mature cohorts, right? Those dynamics are also at play in our guidance. And finally, I think in the current environment as well, world is active and so on. So it's all of that together that drove what you're seeing for fiscal '27.

Just lastly, just on gross margins is the AI costs having an impact on gross margins? Or do you see gross margins -- product gross margins remaining stable here?

Yes. Thanks. Good question. This is clearly something we monitor very closely, Paul. Of course, there were a lot of incertitude when GenAI started around that, and we have a cloud ops team that is really highly efficient and driven by optimization all the time. So while we see some pockets where costs could be a little more heavier on the other side, we continue to be highly optimized and efficient, as you can see on our reported adjusted gross margin. So it's very healthy there.

And I might add that the structure of our platform is such that we're agnostic to models. So we create actually, which is an advantage right now that customers are realizing, we create optionality. So as a reminder, Coveo has -- think about Coveo as a platform that's obviously agnostic to data, agnostic to models, agnostic to apps and agnostic to agents. And so we create optionality. So customers don't have to lock themselves up in one model versus another. And increasingly, there are now hundreds of models on the market, and you can A/B test them and so on. So that's another consideration, which is important because you're enabling that cost optimization through the use of various alternatives here. just to qualify that part. So we're not -- right now, we're not seeing at all that our margins will go down as a result of higher expenses, although the consumption of Coveo is increasing actually at a pace that probably outpaces the company right now, which is also good because we can absorb that.

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

A question about the guidance. It seems to imply that there's a solid quarter-over-quarter pickup in new SaaS revenue for Q1 but also seems to imply a slower pace in terms of new SaaS revenue for the balance of the year. What's driving that? Is that just given the strong bookings we've seen in recent quarters boosting the Q1, but the impact that Karine kind of outlined as it relates to the macro, the increased deal complexity, that's kind of driving the slower growth over the balance of the year?

Yes. Thanks for your question, David. As you said, the timing of opportunities matter here. So that's definitely to take into consideration. Our approach in the outlook is simply to remain as appropriately balanced as possible given the size, complexity and timing, as we've said. And then the seasonality around bookings and around renewal dynamics also is taken into consideration. As you know, seasonally, H1 is usually not as strong as H2. It's been like that for the last, I don't know, even probably before my time 10 years ago. So this is also into consideration in the growth rate that you're seeing. David, sorry, I just want to add one thing. I forgot something. Remember, ARR growth and GAAP will follow sometimes not necessarily the same trend. So what you're seeing from a GAAP would be slightly different from an ARR perspective.

No, great. That's helpful. And tying into Paul's question on the margins, like are you adjusting your pricing right now just given the increased token prices that we're seeing? And have you seen a material impact to the gross margins over the last couple of quarters?

David, so the short answer is we're keeping our gross margin at a very healthy level, and it's a mix of discipline on our part, but also optimization from a customer part where we offer them the opportunity to use the model that is the most efficient for what they want to accomplish first. And sometimes, we make this own selection on our own, depending on the use cases and depending on various circumstances. And of course, yes, we adjust pricing when it's appropriate and when we feel that the value we create is linked to certain models that may be more expensive.

Is that built in...

If I may qualify here, we're -- to Laurent's point, we control that essentially is how I would summarize that. We have the levers to control the margins here. So we're very confident with the margins going forward on this one because customers understand that there's a price depending on the models and what they want to achieve. So they -- we can absolutely transfer that cost and maintain our margins.

Okay. Okay. So that there's something baked into your contracts that allows you to adjust prices as it relates to what the prevailing token prices are?

No. Our contracts are -- well, to be accurate, no, it's not -- well, we have provisions for price increase in the contract and so on. But if you want to activate a certain model in the future that will perform certain types, we saw it with CRGA when we launched initially the initial versions of Relevance Generative Answering because before we got into a and tick and all of that. And we were able to charge incrementally for that. And so if our platform is built in such a way that if we want to activate in the future, something that would provide some much higher level reasoning abilities or whatever, we would absolutely be in a position to charge customers for it.

And technically, what it means, David, is we charge typically an entitlement of queries and also an entitlement of generative queries. So complex use cases may require more generative queries. And if they get about their entitlement, then we have the conversation to provide more.

That's helpful. And on a related note, what -- can you say what gross margins you're assuming for the '27 guidance? Is that similar to what we saw in '26 or?

Yes, you can assume similar gross margin, David.

And the next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda with BofA Securities.

This is George McGreehan on for Koji Ikeda. I appreciate you guys taking the time today. As we think about NER kind of how it's contemplated in the guide directionally, is it kind of down from conservatism around mature cohorts? Or is it kind of like up/stable from maybe faster growth, more strategic newer cohorts kicking in and their renewals through the year?

So of course, you got it, George. Those 2 dynamics will be impacting our NER, as you said. I do not provide guide on NER to be clear, though. However, directionally, what I want to tell you is that the NER we're seeing on the strategic cohorts we've mentioned, like multi-use case customers, commerce customers, GenAI customers, really healthy. And as you probably heard from Louis, is significantly higher than what we're seeing in the reported NER. Now having said that, the dynamic around our monitor cohort also have to be taken into consideration here.

That makes sense. And maybe just one on kind of these large strategic deals and the go-to-market focus there. As the go-to-market motion around these large strategic deals continues to learn and improve, like how are these conversations trending? And maybe if you guys could touch on, too, as it pertains to shifting resources maybe from more mature to the faster-growing strategic opportunities, what signals would it take for you guys to maybe shift even more aggressively resources, go-to-market resources towards these more strategic opportunities that you have in the market?

I'll start with that, George. The way to think about the company right now is there is obviously the pre-GenAI cohort, the search cohort that we have an account management team that actually works hard actually to look at those accounts and make sure that we get them into the agent and the generative AI world and so on. And that dynamic is still unfolding as these companies are sort of discovering what to do and et cetera. This market everybody was talking about AI, but everybody on the line needs to realize that customers were a bit on a holding pattern and experiments and all that, and we've talked about that in previous quarters. The reality is if you look outside of that account management team, all of our effort, if you think about go-to-market in terms of marketing, in terms of lead generation, where we -- where the company is selling and et cetera, 100% is within the strategic growth areas for the reasons we mentioned above. The metrics are outstanding. The deals are big. The growth is high. The NER is high, and it ticks all the marks. And so it's -- I don't know if we talk about an evolution of the go-to-market, or really what is today, but it's really where in 2026. And as we reported in 2026, all of our new logos came from those -- from there. And again, we announced record deals quarter after quarter, 7-figure deals, which had never happened for new logos in the history of the company before. So obviously, we're all in on that and growing that. To -- on the last part of your question, we're managing that gradually. We're reinvesting. The more we win, the more we will reinvest and the more the market is opening up. There are many catalysts right now. Companies, and it's no different than our narrative in the past quarters. We're just more and more certain of that is companies now can no longer wait. they have to deploy AI period. Otherwise, they'll compete against it. And they can no longer experiment. They've tried, many failed. So that -- those are huge tailwinds for those markets. And again, the economics, when Laurent spoke on the phone about one example that we signed in the quarter with this large industrial Fortune 100 company, you're talking about hundreds of millions of ROI that is demonstrated. And so this is the game that we've always wanted to play. This is the game that we started playing more and more, and we're going to continue to invest in 100%. So basically, we're all in on these strategic growth areas. which are B2B, B2B commerce, industrial, distribution and large-scale complex enterprises is really where we're all in.

And this concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn it back to Laurent Simoneau for closing remarks.

Thank you. So I want to thank all of our shareholders for their continued support and look forward to updating you on our progress in fiscal '27 Q1. Thank you.

Thank you, presenters. And ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.