eGain Corporation (EGAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the eGain Fiscal 2026 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jim Byers, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to eGain's Fiscal 2026 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results Conference Call. On the call today are eGain's Chief Executive Officer, Ashu Roy; and Chief Financial Officer, Eric Smit. Before we begin, I would like to read everyone that during this conference call, management will make certain forward-looking statements which convey management's expectations, beliefs, plans and objectives regarding future financial and operational performance. Forward-looking statements are generally preceded by words such as believe, plan, intend, expect, anticipate or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are protected by safe harbor provisions contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to a wide range of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ in material respects. Information on various factors that could affect eGain's results are detailed in the company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. eGain is making these statements as of today, September 3, 2026, and assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any of the forward-looking information in this conference call. In addition to GAAP results, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures such as non-GAAP operating income. The tables included with the earnings press release include reconciliation of the historical non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures. eGain's earnings press release can be found by clicking the press release's link on the Investor Relations page of eGain's website at egain.com. And along with the earnings release, we will post an updated investor presentation to the Investor Relations page and lastly, a phone replay of this conference call will be available for 1-week. And now with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to eGain's CEO, Ashu Roy.

Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone. Right at the end of fiscal 2026, the category we've been building toward for years got a name. In July this year, Gartner published its first-ever Magic Quadrant for customer service knowledge management systems and named eGain a leader, positioned highest for ability to execute and furthest for completeness of vision. This inaugural Magic Quadrant matters more than just our position in it. This is the first time our top analyst firm has drawn a sharp boundary around this market and explicitly called out knowledge management for customer service as its own category of enterprise infrastructure. Now they base it on the volume and kind of client inquiries they get in this area. And therefore, they have chosen to invest Magic Guardant level resources and attention to it. It's a very important signal for the market and the category that's building around it. As we have said, there's good reason this buying category is emerging now. Generative AI has collapsed the old separation between instruction and data. With an AI agent or agentic workflow does in any live customer or employee assistance conversation is determined entirely by the policies, procedures and know-how it is felt. When that knowledge is wrong, the AI is confidently wrong. When it's stale, the AI doesn't know it's out of date. So knowledge is no more documentation just for humans to optionally use it is instruction for AI, wrong knowledge equals wrong AI. Engineering that construction layer, governing it, operating it continuously is what we call AI knowledge ops, a term that Gartner reflected in their Magic Cordran report as something unique and important that eGain brings to this solution. It is the discipline enterprises are now realizing they cannot skip if they want AI to reliably work in production, not just in pilot. With this market trend and the analysts acknowledgments, let me walk through how fiscal 2026 came together. Before I do that, let me define a term that we will use moving forward and that is AI customer. An AI customer is an eGain customer who utilizes one or more of our AI offerings. So with that said, let's look at full year fiscal 2026. Our total revenue grew 3% to $91.1 million. Our AI customer revenue grew 20% year-over-year. AI customer ARR grew 13%, and represented 72% of total SaaS ARR at year-end, up from 63% at the midpoint of fiscal 2026. This is an intentional shift in the shape of our customer base. A growing majority of our SaaS ARR now sits with customers who are using one or more of our AI capabilities. Turning to new business. Our momentum continued to build. In the fourth quarter, we won several new logos, a couple of examples here. First, a leading European insurance company. They set out to automate their service operations with AI and recognize that they needed to put in place a government's knowledge foundation before they could deploy AI automation at scale. So they selected eGain to modernize their knowledge environment and establish that foundation. Second, a global multi-energy operator serving millions of customers. They faced a familiar barrier to scaling service, fragmented knowledge leading to inconsistent service quality. They are deploying our knowledge platform and AI agent in one contact center. Based on the successful blueprint from that deployment, they will extend the rest of their contact centers. We also plan to activate self-service channels and leverage the knowledge hub across the entire business. In addition, we added several new paid pilots this quarter. Increasingly, we see buyers wanting to extensively validate our platform in their own environment before committing to a full rollout, and they're willing to pay for it. This is a shift from where we used to be, where we were doing a lot of free click trials and pilots as part of our innovation in 30 days, the 30-day notice pilot that we time. Converting these pilots into ad scale production rollouts is a focus for us this fiscal year. I'll give you a couple of examples again. One is the -- 1 of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. Their use cases that their experienced scientists and specialists retire or change roles in their R&D teams and the company risks losing a lot of deep asset expertise. We're using our AI knowledge to capture that asset knowledge on a continuous basis and turn it into invaluable knowledge for their AI engine. Second, a global leader in testing inspection and certification -- they were facing a hard regulatory deadline, and they needed accurate instant guidance in a compliance-heavy environment. Early pilot results of our deployment indicate that the AI agents delivered 95% self-service resolution, and it's enjoying a strong 80% customer user satisfaction service. A global leader in gaming technology. They operate in a complex environment where every answer has to be guided and correct. Stepping back to the market. I want to share 2 trends that we see emerging in the last couple of quarters. First, businesses are treating knowledge as core AI infrastructure, and their tech and AI teams are actively building on top of this infrastructure which drives demand for richer platform capabilities like real-time knowledge APIs and stringent service levels. So our growing developer-facing capabilities on our Compose platform are being well received. Second trend we see is growing interest in customer self-service projects. Several new logos in the recent quarters have started out with self-service deployment, something we did not see a year ago when it was more common to start with contact center-based use cases. While contact center productivity, you still have great interest we sense that businesses are increasingly driving for ROI at scale on their AR investments. Moving to business momentum in fiscal 2026. Our new logo wins increased 27% year-over-year. As I mentioned earlier, several of the new logos we acquired in fiscal '26 are paid pilots in Global 2000 accounts, and they have significant upside, something we intend to pursue this fiscal year. Our pipeline opportunities valued at 500,000 ARR or more are double income year-over-year. And our core verticals, which are compliance heavy like banking, financial services, insurance and health care, we grew our opportunities in the pipeline by 40% year-over-year, exactly where our trust acknowledge foundation matters the most. Turning to products. Our innovation continues to accelerate with focus. Everything we launched in last quarter, which is in Q4 during our London eGain Solve event in May, fuels the cycle of knowledge and AI. First, we increasingly deploying AI in our platform to dramatically automate knowledge management. And the result of that generation on maintenance of trusted knowledge with low effort then drives better instruction to AI that is being used to reliably automate customer service and customer operations. So a few of the noteworthy announcements of new capabilities we made in May. The first was the eGain IVA, which is an intelligent voice agent. What's unique about it is that it is using the same trusted knowledge platform as we use for all our digital self-service pool. So that's consistency and quality is something that now we can offer as a complete omni-channel self-service offering. Secondly, our eGain agentic studio, which is a z-code application building environment we have launched so that business users can assemble these service use cases end-to-end, multistep complex processes with every step grounded in verified knowledge using short rules and actions and invoking human oversight when needed. It's a complete platform for service automation for using agentic capabilities. The third, which we have announced in the past is the eGain evaluator, which is our ingenious evaluation to go for AI pipelines that is we made it generally available, and it's a capability that's getting a lot of interest from our large customers who are looking to drive continuous quality assurance of their agentic pipelines. And finally, we announced a vertical -- new vertical for health care, which is our eGain AI knowledge suite for health care. And this is a governed knowledge foundation purpose-built for health plan and health systems. We will build on this momentum at our upcoming Solve event in Chicago on October 13 and 14 this year. We'll lay out our view of the year ahead. The shift from knowledge management to knowledge automation and the value of agentic AI assembly on top of trusted knowledge. And of course, will announce new capabilities and hear from our customers and partners. So in conclusion, our sustained bet on AI knowledge the market and products in fiscal 2026 is showing results. And so we are doubling down, and we intend to lead this market. With that, I'll turn it over to Eric Smit, our CFO, to take you through the financial details. Eric?

Thanks, Ashu, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Before I begin, I'd like to note that we are again using slides to support today's call. We believe this provides thoughtful context and makes it easier to follow our results and outlook. We can access the slides in the Investor Relations section of our website alongside the webcast. As Ashu noted, fiscal 2026 demonstrated solid financial execution, total revenue increased 3% to $91.1 million. AR customer revenue grew 20%. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $13.6 million and cash provided by operating activities reached a record $21.2 million. I'll review our fourth quarter and full year results, explain the transition in more detail to our customer-based AI metrics and discuss our fiscal 2027 outlook and long-term financial framework. Starting with the fourth quarter results and starting with revenue. Total revenue was $22.2 million, exceeding both our guidance and Street consensus compared with $23.2 million in the prior year quarter. The year-over-year decline in total revenue primarily reflected the lower revenue from our legacy conversation and analytics customers. A customer revenue grew 11% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. Looking at gross margins. Non-GAAP total gross margin for the quarter was 72% compared to 73% a year ago. Non-GAAP SaaS gross margins was 78% compared to 80% a year ago. Turning to operating expenses. Non-GAAP operating costs were $14.1 million up 6% year-over-year and 2% sequentially. Sales and marketing expenses were $5.5 million, up 21% sequentially, reflecting our planned investments in go-to-market initiatives, including the against all event that we held in London. Looking at our bottom line, GAAP net income was $1.3 million or $0.05 per basic and diluted share compared with GAAP net income of $30.9 million or $1.13 per basic share and $1.11 per diluted share in the prior quarter. The prior year results included an approximately $29 million tax benefit from the release of the majority of our valuation allowance. Non-GAAP net income was $2.1 million or $0.08 per share on a basic and diluted basis, exceeding our guidance and Street consensus. This compares with $2.4 million or $0.09 per share on a basic and diluted basis in the year ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.2 million, representing a 10% margin exceeding our expectations compared to $4.5 million and a 19% margin a year ago. During the quarter, we repurchased 1.4 million shares for $10 million -- $10.1 million at an average price of $7.32 per share. Turning to our full year results. Looking at our revenue. Total revenue was $91.1 million, exceeding our guidance and up 3% year-over-year. Within total revenue, AI customer revenue grew 20% year-over-year. A customer ARR grew 13% year-over-year and represented 72% of total SaaS ARR at year-end. Looking at gross margins and operating expenses. Non-GAAP total gross margin was 74%, up from 71% in fiscal 2025. I -- non-GAAP operating costs were $55.3 million compared to $56 million in the prior year. Turning to the bottom line. Balance sheet and cash flows. Net income was $8.9 million or $0.33 per basic share and $0.32 per diluted share compared with $32.3 million or $1.15 per basic share and $1.13 per diluted share in fiscal 2025. As I've mentioned, the prior year results included approximately $29 million tax benefit. Non-GAAP net income was $13 million or $0.48 per share on a basic basis and $0.47 per share on a diluted basis, up from non-GAAP net income of $5.7 million or $0.20 per share on a basic and diluted basis in the prior fiscal year. Adjusted EBITDA increased to $13.6 million, representing a 15% margin up from $8.6 million and a 10% margin in fiscal 2025. Cash flow from operations reached a record $21.2 million, representing at 23% operating cash flow margin, up from $5.3 million or a 6% operating cash flow margin in fiscal 2025. Cash and cash equivalents totaled $73.3 million at June 30, 2026 compared to $62.9 million at June 30, 2025. During fiscal 2026, we repurchased 1.6 million shares or at an average price of $7.16 per share. At year-end, we had $9.7 million remaining available under the $60 million buyback authorization. Now turning to our AI customer metrics. As Ashu mentioned, instead of reporting by product hub, going forward, we're now reporting based on whether a customer is actively using 1 or more of our AI offerings. We call this AI customer ARR and AI customer revenue. And we believe it's a cleaner, more forward-looking way to show our AI adoption spreading across our installed base. Since many customers now use AI capabilities across multiple parts of our platform rather than within a single hub. This is the framework we'll use going forward. The strategic rationale is straightforward. We have found that the customer's overall adoption of our AI capabilities, not the specific product SKU or hope they originally purchased is the strongest predictor of long-term retention expansion to better measure and ultimately maximize that dynamic, we completed a full review of our customer base this year and segmented it into 2 groups. A customers, meaning those actively engaged with our AI platform and all other customers. This is a meaningful shift in how we think about the business. Our reporting focus is now on growing ARR per account, which we view as a primary measure of success. It's a specific product a specific mix of products or given customer consumes becomes secondary. We believe this customer base view better reflects how customers deploy our integrated platform how we manage these relationships and the broader retention and expansion opportunity within our AI customer base. These are now our primary lens for measuring the health of our AI business. A customer ARR is defined as total SaaS ARR from customers who are actively utilizing one or more of our AI offerings. This amount includes all offerings associated with the customer and not solely the AI offerings. AI customer revenue is defined as the total revenue generated from customers who actively utilize one or more of our offerings, inclusive of their SaaS and professional services revenue. This amount also includes all offerings associated with the customer and not solely the AI offerings. With that context, here are the metrics. AI customer ARR increased 13% year-over-year and represented 72% of total SaaS ARR at year-end. Total SaaS ARR declined 1% year-over-year, driven by the decline among our legacy non-AI customers. Turning to our retention rates. Trailing 12 months dollar-based net retention for AI customers was 104 compared to 120 a year ago. As a reminder, we have closed a significant expansion deal with PMC in Q4 of last fiscal year, which drove that increase in net retention. Net retention for all customers was 93% compared to 105% a year ago. Total remaining performance obligation or RPO of $87 million was down 5% year-over-year and return RPO of $62 million was down 2% year-over-year. Now turning to our outlook, starting with guidance for the fiscal quarter of fiscal '27, we expect AI customer revenue of between $13.7 million to $14 million and total revenue of between $20.9 million and $21.4 million. Turning to the bottom line. For Q1, we expect GAAP net income of $500,000 to $1 million or $0.02 to $0.04 per share, which includes stock-based compensation expense of approximately $900,000. We expect non-GAAP net income of $1.4 million to $2 million or $0.05 to $0.08 per share and adjusted EBITDA of $1.4 million to $1.9 million or a margin of 7% to 9%. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027, we expect AI customer revenue of between $59.5 million to $60.5 million, representing growth of approximately 8% to 10%, and total revenue to be between $84.5 million and $86 million. Our outlook reflects 2 different trends within the business. We expect continued growth from AI customers alongside an estimated 20% decline in revenue from our profitable legacy customers. We are using the cash generation from this noncore business to fund investments in the larger AI opportunity. We expect ARR from AI customers to grow approximately 20% in fiscal 2027, while ARR from legacy customers is expected to decline by 60%. On the bottom line, we expect GAAP net loss of $2 million to $3 million or $0.08 to $0.11 per share. This includes stock-based comp expense of approximately $4 million. Non-GAAP net income of $1 million to $2 million or $0.04 to $0.07 per share and adjusted EBITDA of $650,000 to $1.4 million or a margin of 1% to 2%. We expect weighted average shares outstanding of approximately $26.6 million for the first quarter and $26.8 million for the full fiscal 2027. Today, we are also introducing a long-term financial model that lays out our targets through fiscal 2030 as we complete our transition to a higher-growth AI-led business. We see fiscal '27 through fiscal '29 as a transition period with total revenue growing both increasingly converging with AI customer revenue growth and fiscal 2030 is the year that convergence is largely complete. Now turning to our long-term financial model. For fiscal 2030 relative to fiscal 2026, we are targeting AI customer ARR of between $100 million to $120 million, up from $54 million in fiscal 2026. A 17% to 22% CAGR as ARR compounds towards scale. Total SaaS ARR of $100 million to $120 million, up from $75 million in fiscal 2026 reflecting substantially complete runoff of non-ARR and migration to AI. For AI customer ARR, we expect that's going to represent approximately 100% of total SaaS ARR, up from 72% in fiscal 2026 effectively a pure-play ARR base with increasing contribution from our AI business. AI customer revenue of $105 million to $115 million, representing a 17% to 20% CAGR from the 55 million we generated in fiscal 2026 and a 20%-plus growth year-over-year of fiscal 2030, making our underlying AR revenue growth increasingly visible in our total results. And total revenue of $110 million to $120 million representing approximately 15% to 20% growth year-over-year by fiscal 2030. The total company growth is now closely mirroring our AI growth. AI customer revenue representing approximately 95% of total revenue, up from 60% in 2026, supporting a higher quality valuation framework and SaaS gross margins of approximately 80%, maintaining our attractive software margin profile and adjusted EBITDA margin that remains positive, while we fund AI growth, the deliberate balance between growth investments and profitability discipline. We believe our leadership in AI-powered knowledge management, expanding market opportunity and increased go-to-market investment position again to pursue durable growth while maintaining an attractive profitability profile. So to summarize, in closing, AI customer revenue and ARR both grew at double-digit rates in fiscal 2026, and we completed a shift to a customer level reporting that we believe gives investors a clearer view of the business and strengthens our position in following Gartner's naming of eGain, a leader in the inaugural Magic Quadrant for customer service knowledge management systems. We also delivered total revenue growth, strong profitability and record operating cash flow in fiscal 2026. With our strong balance sheet and cash generation, including the cash we generated from our declining profitable legacy offerings, we are all in on the AI knowledge opportunity investing to build on that position and pursue sustainable long-term growth. Lastly, as Ashu mentioned, we will be hosting an Investor Day and Analyst Day in conjunction with our upcoming eGain Solve customer events on October 13 in Chicago. Additional information and registration details are available on our website. This event is a great opportunity for prospective investors and analysts to meet with customers and learn more about our business. We hope you can join us. With that, I would like to open the call for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jeff Van Rhee with Craig Hallum.

This is Vijay on for Jeff. First one for me, just in the target model and kind of here in the prepared remarks, you talked a little bit about running off the non-AI ARR. Is there a time line for that in mind kind of similar to what you had with the messaging business? And then just how does the profitability of those businesses compare to the rest of the business?

No. Good. Thanks for that. Yes. So for clarification, if you as we sort of described in the model, the expectation is the non-AI business should be substantially. The goal, obviously, is to convert some of that into the AI business, but from a modeling standpoint, we'd expect that to be 0 as we get to the 2030 time frame.

Got it. And then you talked a little bit on previous earnings calls about some of the potential impacts of AI more generally on the business, maybe pricing pressure on SaaS products. Are you seeing that show up in the business at all? Or is that still kind of expected later down the line?

This is Ashu here. So I would say that we are seeing some pressure on that, but we are also seeing our ability to create new product offerings, which layer on of additional revenue from these value-added AI capabilities. So all in all, the effect has not been as significant as I would have feared yes, I mean, we are prepared for it. We do think that there may be -- my sense is 1 or 2 base-point pressure over the next 2 to 3 years is how I see it. But Eric, do you have anything more to add?

Exactly. Yes, I think that's sort of alignment at this stage. I think given the construction layer that this is building, it's sort of creating opportunities that are different from what we would have seen historically as well, which I think will obviously impact sort of the way the pricing approach this.