Five9, Inc. (FIVN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Five9's 2021 Financial Analyst Day. Thank you for joining us today. We have an informative half day ahead, which will include 2 live Q&A sessions. We ask that you hold your questions until the Q&A session, during which you can use the raise hand function to ask a question. Rowan will walk through the agenda in more detail. But before getting started, I'd like to quickly review our safe harbor statement. Certain statements made during today's presentation are not historical facts, including those regarding the future financial performance of the company. Industry trends, company initiatives, and other future events are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are simply predictions, should not be unduly relied upon by investors. Actual events or results may differ materially, and the company undertakes no obligation to update the information in such statements. These statements are subject to the substantial risks and uncertainties that could adversely affect Five9's future results and cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the other risks discussed under the caption Risk Factors and elsewhere in Five9's annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition today, management will make reference to non-GAAP financial measures. You can find reconciliations of our GAAP to non-GAAP results in the appendix of the company's quarterly investor deck posted in the Investor Relations section of Five9's website at investors.five9.com. You will also find our Investor Day presentation there at the conclusion of today's presentation. And with that, let's get started with our first speaker, Five9's CEO, Rowan Trollope.

Thanks, Lauren. I'd like to welcome all of you to our 2021 Virtual Financial Analyst Day. We've been incredibly fortunate to have your support over the years, and we're so excited to have the opportunity to continue this journey together and to welcome those of you who are here for the first time in this Five9 Financial Analyst Day. Now since our last Analyst Day, 2 years ago, so much has changed in the world in ways that none of us ever imagined. But one thing has remained constant throughout, and that's Five9's ability to consistently execute and deliver on our commitments to our investors, to our customers, to our partners and to our employees. And we've got a great lineup of presenters today to walk you through how we're going to continue the strong momentum in our business. Now after my opening remarks, you'll have had the chance to meet Callan Schebella, our new Head of Product at Five9, who was also our Co-Founder and CEO of Inference. Callan is going to share more details on how we're coming up with new ways to think about the contact center through our industry-leading product and platform. Following Callan, Dan Burkland, our President, will share the significant progress we've made in our go-to-market initiatives and the tremendous opportunities we have ahead of us. You'll also meet 3 of our customers and have the chance to ask questions live and hear more about their experiences with Five9. Last, but definitely not least, Barry Zwarenstein, our CFO, who you all know very well, will share more on key financial metrics and the path to achieving our new long-term growth targets. And finally, we'll wrap up with a live Q&A session. So without further ado, let's get started. Today, the contact center market is clearly at an inflection point. Businesses are focused more than ever before on enhancing the customer experience, and we're at the forefront of empowering these companies, thanks to our innovative platform that allows businesses to transform the way they interact with their customers to deliver the best possible and the most differentiated experience. And the thing is we're really just getting started. So let me walk you through how we've been executing against this opportunity and how we're going to continue our momentum for the long term. And I'll do that by focusing on 3 topics. First, I want to set the stage by recapping the journey we've been on since our last Financial Analyst Day in 2019. Then I'll talk about how Five9 is best positioned in this massive market being driven by 3 key trends. And finally, I'll wrap up with our long-term strategy and how we plan to continue to drive durable growth. So I want to start off by refreshing your memory with some of the key points we made 2 years ago. At that time, we shared with you that our #1 purpose as a company is to make customer service a more human experience. Because while companies spend way more money on labor than they do on technology, the customer experience is often absolutely horrible. And because modern day customers are more demanding and way less tolerant, bad customer service is just no longer an option. And many more customers are now choosing to swap brands and services if they don't get the level of service that they want. The 2 key trends in the market that are enabling companies to transform their customer service experience are cloud migration and digital transformation. And we shared a long-term vision and laid out the key strategies for Five9 to win in these 2 areas as customers increasingly transition to the cloud. And since then, we've executed like clockwork across the board, which has really put us in a unique position today to be a clear front-runner in the market. In addition to these 2 trends, we also laid out our vision and road map for our AI and automation strategy to help contact centers optimize their labor, which, as you know, has come even more sharply into focus for every business these days due to labor shortages, the increase in cost of labor and the aptly named great resignation. So it doesn't hurt to get lucky sometimes where the world is catching up to where we already are. Finally, to complement our organic investments, we also made a series of key strategic acquisitions that allow us to provide a new way of thinking about the contact center, enabled by AI and automation and helping customers scale like never before. If you distill the essence of the commitments we made during our last Financial Analyst Day, we set out to deliver on 4 key strategic initiatives to continue growing our LTM enterprise subscription revenue in the 30s. First, we decided to segment our direct sales organization and create a strategic team focused on winning larger customers and customers where we could create long-term stickiness. Second, we started expanding our channel business to add new routes to market. Third, we started investing aggressively to build out our international footprint to diversify our revenue profile. And fourth, we laid out our vision to make AI and automation in the contact center a reality. So now I'd like to double-click into each category to show you how we've been absolutely crushing it in every single one of these areas, starting with larger customers. In the last 2 years, we've doubled our strategic sales team to be laser-focused on going after customers that have 500 seats or more, but more typically in the thousands of seats and boy, have they delivered. Two years ago, our biggest customer was generating just over $6 million in ARR with us. That's a good number. But after creating our strategic team, we've had significant success moving upmarket. And just the top 3 new logos alone are anticipated to generate over $47 million in ARR once they're fully ramped on our platform. And this is only the beginning of a long and prosperous journey with the pipeline for this team being bigger than ever before. Second, we already had a respectable partner ecosystem 2 years ago, but we set out to expand it aggressively, and we've been making significant progress on that front. As you know, we signed an exclusive partnership with AT&T and a key reseller agreement with CDW. We took a Switzerland approach to UC partners like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to add on a new route to market for the lower end. And we've added many, many more partners delivering incredible success, growing the total number of partners with $1 million in ARR bookings by 5x in the last 2 years. Third, our global expansion is gaining significant traction. We've quadrupled our EMEA team in the last 2 years, and we're investing in public cloud to further accelerate our international reach in all parts of the world. Now so far, we've been primarily focused in EMEA and LATAM and the returns have been phenomenal, growing our bookings in these regions by 161% each year on average. And last is our AI and automation strategy. When I first joined Five9, I said to everyone that the contact center was going to transform more in the next 5 years than in the last 25 years combined, and mainly driven by advances in AI and automation technology. Well, this is now becoming a reality. Now we've made key strategic moves in this space, acquiring Inference for IVA, Virtual Observer for workforce optimization and Whendu for workflow automation. And they've been wildly successful, significantly outperforming every target we had in place at the time of the acquisition. That's unusual. And complementing this is our deployment of organically developed AI solutions like Agent Assist, Voicestream and now Conversation Architect, as well as fully integrating workflow automation capabilities, all of which Callan will cover more in detail later on. But the key takeaway is that we made a big bet 2 years ago that AI and automation would be the new way of thinking about the contact center, and that has happened. And we at Five9 are leading the market on this front, as shown by numerous industry awards and industry analyst recognition. Now let's talk about Five9's positioning and how we are well positioned to capitalize on market trends. So what are the ongoing trends we're seeing in the market? And how are we going to capitalize on that? Well, a vast majority of what's happening in the market today is more of the same from 2 years ago, where customers are constantly expecting more in terms of better customer service. They're calling in more as contact centers have become the new front door for many businesses, and businesses are having a hard time meeting these rising demands due to the volume of interactions. Now all of this is further exacerbated by current trends in the labor market, where there is a shortage of labor and higher costs to attract and retain talent. So businesses are realizing that they need to completely reimagine the way they work across the boards to find better platforms to help them enhance their customer experience, becoming more efficient with their workforce, streamlining their workloads and also being geo-agnostic to make sure that they can get the best talent. And this is why a vast majority of contact centers are continuing to increase their budget in order to transform the way that they work. But these market dynamics are continuing to fuel the 3 key trends I discussed earlier, namely digital transformation, to meet the increasing demand of customers who desire a more human experience when they call into a contact center; cloud migration, to enable contact centers to benefit from the cutting edge of technology and give them more scalability and flexibility than ever before; and AI and automation to make contact centers become highly efficient and empower agents to focus more on complex value-adding work to improve the overall customer experience. Now Five9 is better positioned than anyone in the market to capitalize on these key trends and help businesses exceed their customers' expectations. Digital transformation and cloud migration continue to be the 2 biggest immutable trends driving our momentum, but we're also at the forefront of innovation, making the vision of AI and automation become a reality for our customers. For example, the #1 priority for businesses today is to digitally transform their platform to have a single view of the customer, and we solve this critical need for businesses by tightly integrating into their cloud CRM apps to provide a seamless experience for agents with a single user interface. And CRM integration is the primary integration point for us, which not only makes up nearly 90% of our new enterprise business today, but will also continue to be the biggest driver of our growth going forward. Also businesses of all sizes, even the largest ones in the world, are realizing that on-prem simply can't meet their needs. The only way they can deliver the experience that their customers are looking for is through the cloud, and they need a comprehensive solution that can help them get there. So Five9's born-in-the-cloud platform, which has been developed over multiple decades to become a clear leader in the space, has the scalability, the reliability, the security and the ongoing innovation that are a must for larger enterprises in the world to transition to the cloud. Finally, AI and automation. Well, frankly, this was more of a theory than a fact even just 2 years ago. But we have proven that we can create significant value for our customers by making their contact centers much more efficient as demonstrated by our number of new IVA customers that has grown 5x over just the last year, which is why we are so confident in putting our stake in the ground and declaring our TAM to include the $34 billion for AI and automation on top of the $24 billion contact center software market to bring our total addressable market to $58 billion. So how are we going to continue driving durable growth? Well, the opportunity is better than ever. For our industry, we're still in the early innings of a generational migration to the cloud. And we're also in the midst of a revolutionary cycle on business digitization and focus on customer experience. Both of these are further buoyed by the growing demand to arbitrage labor spend with AI and automation technologies. Our ambition is to be the de facto leader in this very attractive market focusing on 4 key strategies to power this long-term growth: first is to win the large enterprise transition by building on the momentum we've created over the last several years; second is to expand our channel reach to scale out customer acquisition and service delivery efficiency; third is to increase our serviceable market internationally and drive toward our long-range target of mid- to high-teens international revenue contribution; and fourth is to extend our gains and grow our AI and automation portfolio to further increase ARPU and stickiness. To execute on these strategies, we've been accelerating our investments in 4 key areas: first, go to market to expand both our direct sales team to continue our move upmarket and channel partners to expand both domestically and internationally; second, in R&D, to continue leading the industry with innovation; third is in professional services to support the momentum of our enterprise business, particularly with larger customers; and finally, fourth, in public cloud to support our global expansion and effort -- initiatives. And we're going to continue this pace of investment to enhance future returns. However, and Barry will touch on this point later on, we've proven our ability in the past to gain significant operating leverage in our business. And we'll do it again in the future to get to our long-term margin target of 23% plus. But the time is now to accelerate our investments to capitalize on current opportunities and further extend our leading position in the market. Now before I wrap up, I want to touch on our ongoing investments in public cloud as this is the key to setting us up for success in expanding our international footprint. As you can see, we have a very robust current landscape and road map for building out our global infrastructure over the next several years. We believe public cloud will allow us to scale very, very quickly and leverage its cutting-edge technology to continue innovating our platform at a rapid pace. While this will be a headwind to the bottom line in the near term, we're confident that it will pay big dividends in supporting our long-term durable growth. So to wrap up, if there's just one thing for you to take away from this presentation, it's the fact that we do what we say we're going to do. Two years ago, we committed to executing on a number of initiatives and we've delivered results that have far exceeded expectations. Now looking forward, I truly believe that we can drive durable growth for the next 5 years, and here's why? We have a massive market opportunity with now a $58 billion TAM, driven by 2 trends of cloud migration and digital transformation, along with a tailwind from AI and automation technology. And we're really well positioned in platform and process and people to capitalize on these opportunities. With our demonstrated ability to execute, we are very excited and confident in our ability to continue the momentum in our business and growing our LTM enterprise subscription revenue in the 30s. For the rest of the day, my leaders will drill down and unpack all of this for you. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Callan Schebella, our Head of Products, to take you through our product strategy. Callan, over to you.

Thanks, Rowan. Hi, everyone. As Rowan just said, my name is Callan Schebella, and I'm the EVP of Product Management here at Five9. And today, I'm going to give you an overview of the product strategy at Five9 and what to expect in the next 12 months. So prior to joining Five9, I was the CEO and Co-Founder at Inference Solutions, and you may recall that Five9 acquired Inference in November 2020. And for me, that was the next big step in a journey that started more than 10 years earlier when I founded Inference with the aim of dramatically changing the customer contact experience. My mission has always been to change the way that businesses engage with their customers and deliver that brief moment of delight when you, as a customer, realize that your problem has been effortlessly resolved. But to do this, you need to embed artificial intelligence and you need to make every interaction context-aware and you need to make it persistent, and at Five9, we call this extending your contact center with the digital workforce. My entire career has been focused on commercializing artificial intelligence. In fact, my first job after college was in an R&D lab at a major carrier. And even then, we were looking to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize labor in the contact center. Back then, it was about sort of building speech recognition systems that could handle people speaking in a natural manner. But if we fast forward to today, that technology is kind of commonplace, and the challenge now is using such technology to deliver business and consumer value and to do it at scale. As you will see in the coming slides, we are focused not just on the technology required to run contact centers, but also how technology can be used to augment and even replace contact center agents, at least for certain tasks in the contact center. There is really no question that Five9 is a market-leading platform. Born in the cloud since day 1, we now have over 20 years of cloud contact center experience. Each day, we handle customer interactions for over 2,000 customers, and we do it in partnership with more than 120 technology and channel partners. Now in 2021, we were awarded a whole range of industry awards from AI winner to innovation winner as well as market leadership awards. And in fact, our most recent win was just a few weeks ago at Enterprise Connect, where Five9's latest AI platform won Best Application of Artificial Intelligence. In 2021, we were also awarded #1 in Conversational AI for self-service and agent assistance. Not only are we winning industry recognition, but we're also being able to do it at scale and to do it reliably. Our monthly systems availability for the last 12 months has been 99.995% and continues to improve. And in the most recent analyst report from DMG on cloud-based contact center infrastructure, we scored an incredible 5 out of 5 for 33 of the 34 categories based on customer feedback, and this was more than twice the number of perfect scores than any of the competitors listed in the report. In my introduction, I mentioned how Five9 has introduced a digital workforce, and I want to spend a few minutes talking about exactly what that is and how it works. If we consider a typical contact center or maybe a traditional contact center, it has always been about connecting callers with human agents. Now those interactions could happen over a wide range of channels from voice to chat to SMS and even e-mail and social. And Five9 realizes that the real cost of running a contact center is all the people required to staff it. And it is this -- for this reason that we focused for several years on trying to optimize that labor spend through our workforce optimization and our analytics products, in addition to providing the actual contact center software itself. If we look at the overall spend by enterprise, they spend around 10x more on the agents that staff their contact center than they do on the actual technology that runs it. If we now overlay what is happening in the industry, we see that this 10x spend on labor is getting even more difficult. We have consumers now looking for experiences, not just products. We have the need to support more and more channels of contact. And in many cases, contactless interaction is becoming the preferred method of interaction. But perhaps the biggest of all, labor is becoming more expensive, harder to find and harder to retain. Or to put it in another way, customers have realized that they can't hire their way out of the problem. Five9's answer to this is to introduce a digital workforce. So with that in mind, let's return to our contact center. Specifically, let's add technology to automate interactions entirely or to assist agents with the interactions that they're handling with customers. To scale effectively, we believe that customers need to redeploy some of the labor they spend into new technology and create a dual workforce that can scale based on business needs without incurring the high turnover costs associated with human capital. So let's now have a look at a real customer and see how they're starting to use the digital workforce. In this case, a health care provider was trying to scale and respond to demands on their business. And with agents working from home, it was very difficult for them to monitor everything centrally. Furthermore, they are in a situation that meant they need to hire new agents every single day just to cope with demand. And as I mentioned earlier, contact center labor is getting harder to hire, harder to retain and more expensive than ever. So they turn to a Five9 digital workforce. And in this case, they went with Five9 Studio to provide an intelligent virtual agent for their calls to interact with. They were up and running in under 10 days, they were able to respond to spikes in demand and importantly, they estimated to save over $2 million in the first year through the use of Five9 IVAs. So let us now look at the overall automation portfolio within Five9. We have 3 different offerings, but they -- all 3 are designed to work together and to enhance each other's effectiveness. For full conversational automation, we have Five9 intelligent virtual agents. And typically, these are used to entirely automate an interaction. For assisting human agents during the call, we have Five9 Agent Assist. And with that, in assist, we have the AI listening to the interaction between the customer and the agent and suggesting things to the agent via their desktop screen in order to improve the interaction. And we also have the ability for the AI to summarize calls or log it to the CRM, for example. And third is our workflow automation. We think of this as an underlying framework that we use to perform automation triggered by an interaction or sometimes independently of an interaction. For example, you may need an automation to modify the setup of your call center based on time of day or volume or some other metric. It's important to note that we have built this as a platform, and this is enabling some of our technology partners to also provide capabilities for 59 customers. And this is a really important part of the Five9 strategy. There's simply too many AI use cases and vertical specializations to address all the needs on our own. And these are built on top of our Voicestream APIs that allow accredited partners to get access to the live audio between agents and callers. We think of our digital workforce as being able to assist in many roles in the modern contact center. Obviously, they're self-service, I've talked a lot about that, but there are also coaching and quality roles. And here, you can see some partner logos that have built on top of our platform in these areas. And finally, an important role is to provide insight into what is happening in the contact center, and this is where we have Five9 WFO. Okay. So having said that, how do we do it? Well, when we think about our product strategy in AI, we're mindful to ensure that we're living up to our 3 product pillars. We want our products to be easy to implement. The average user of Five9 is not a software developer. We sell our products to business users that understand their businesses, but they're looking to abstract away the complexity associated with the underlying technology. We want our products to be accessible by our partners, and these are instrumental to our success and a key driver of scaling our business. And finally, as it relates to AI and automation, we want them easy to train and easy to maintain. And in particular, we want to be able to answer questions for customers like, where should I start with AI? Or how do I know if it's working well? What automation strategies will produce the greatest return and so on. The first 2 pillars are well established, and the third is a big R&D focus for the company in 2021 and also to 2022. Regarding easy-to-use and easy-to-develop, we released the latest version of our Studio platform in Q3. Studio is a full service creation environment for building intelligent virtual agents across any conversational channel, true drag-and-drop platform, low-code, no-code interface, multi-award winning and probably has more deployments than any other platform out there with more than 800, at the last count. And we make this available to all Five9 customers at a number of different price points. But the key thing is that we sell it to you as if it was a virtual employee. You purchase IVAs at Five9 on a per IVA per month basis, where each IVA is able to do work on your behalf in much the same way as you would hire a person to do the job. Five9 IVAs are now available globally. And recently, Studio 7 was announced winner at Enterprise Connect for the Best Application of Artificial Intelligence. At Five9, we focus on adding business value to our customers. As such, we focus less on those lower-level core engine technologies like speech recognition and natural language processing and so on because these are the parts of the stack that are quickly becoming commoditized. We've taken an agnostic approach where we allow customers to pick and choose the core engines that are the best fit for their business problem. And importantly, we convert what is typically an API-driven cost into a fixed price per IVA per month. And we have found this as very appealing to many customers that allows them to think of the IVA as an extension of their workforce. We also add value by actually building and publishing tasks for customers to use. Studio has a complete publishing framework that allows Five9 and its partners to create and publish content, and allowing customers to get results with their platform in the least amount of time. And here, you can see a typical task library for a range of IVA use cases inside of Studio. You can buy IVAs at Five9 at 3 different price points: Silver; Gold; and Platinum. And with each increasing price point, you get access to a broader range of underlying technologies. Gold IVAs are by far the most popular. And with the gold IVA, you can build tasks with true natural language capabilities. Think of them as sort of like the front door to your contact center where you can say, like, how can I help you, for example. And finally, I'd like to talk about some of the R&D we're doing to make AI easier to train and easier to maintain. Our main area of R&D relates to our new Conversation Architect product. And think of Conversation Architect, as the name suggests, as sort of the architect for your contact center. It will help you make decisions around what types of technologies to use and how those technologies are performing. So questions like, where should I start? What should I automate first? How do I know how things are going? What a customer is saying to me that I'm unable to understand, and am I responding in the correct manner? These types of questions are common to every single implementation, big or small. And as the aggregation point for customer contact, Five9 is the best place to resolve these. Here, you can see a screenshot of Conversation Architect in action. With Conversation Architect, you are mining your data to discover topics of interest, curate data for training your NLP and checking for mistakes. And this is all done with a simple web page. And you will be able to use this regardless of whether you're implementing IVAs or Agent Assist or both. So we expect to see a lot more on conversation architect in 2022. Having said all that, I want to spend a few minutes actually looking at the Five9 platform, specifically Studio 7. So now I'm going to actually switch to a screen share, and I will talk you through the interface. Okay. So let's have a look at Studio 7. Studio 7 is the latest platform from Five9. It's a platform that recently won the Best Implementation for Artificial Intelligence at the Enterprise Connect Conference. When you actually log into the platform, you'll see it kind of looks a little bit like a contact center wallboard. And the reason for that is, effectively, it is a wallboard, but rather than being a wallboard for human agents in a contact center, it's a wallboard for your virtual agents. So if I actually go in here and look at live usage as calls arrive into the platform, you'll actually see agents being occupied. So there's an agent just taking a call right now. Now I can also switch between accounts because one of the important parts of this platform is that it is totally hierarchical. And what that means is that we can have ISV partners or channel partners reselling this platform across their install base. And this is a very important part of the actual platform itself. Now everything in Studio 7 revolves around the concept of a task. So if I go to the task, I mean, here, you can see that I can create tasks pretty much across any channel: voice, messaging, workflow, chatbot and even channels like WhatsApp. Each task represents a job, if you like, that you're asking your virtual agents to perform. And if we look at any particular task, we'll actually see that the call counters will increment as calls arrive into the platform. So here, it was 1 task about logging PTO. And you can see that this got 1 active call in the platform right now. And then as the calls come and go, they'll actually leave the platform and there you go, it just left. So imagine I was a typical enterprise customer, and I had a particular business problem that I was trying to solve in my contact center. Maybe I've just launched a new part of the contact center. And I want to get some feedback from callers to see how that is going. Now typically, the way you would do that is you would go and work with an ISV partner and they might create some sort of survey platform for you or you might have set aside some agents to kind of ask questions after calls, things like that. But the way you would do that using Studio 7 is you would just simply create a new voice task. And you would pick from the task library a task that is similar to what you want to achieve. Now if there wasn't one, you could obviously create anything you'd like from a blank canvas, and you can even publish your own content for other people to use. Now in this case, we'll pick something like a Net Promoter Score survey. It's a very simple kind of thing that you would have a human agent do, but in this case, we'll have a virtual agent perform the task. So we'll call it a feedback survey. We can give it a little icon, I'll go to the balloon. Because this is a voice task, we're going to need to give it some sort of voice. And this is where you start to see the real power of the platform because as we scroll through this list, these are all the text-to-speech voices available on the platform. And you'll see here on the right-hand side that we have IBM voices and Google voices and LumenVox voices. And the reason for that is what you're really seeing here is an abstraction layer on top of a wide range of other core engine technologies. This is a very important part of the philosophy behind Studio 7 is that we just give you access to the best technologies that are out there. Now whoever designed this task and published it said that we need to actually configure some variables. In this case, it's just 1 variable, the name of our company. So let's say, Five9. It's going to ask us how we'd like to use the content and reuse the content that's created from this task. I'm just going to say reuse. And we have now published our task. Now here it is. It's a full drag-and-drop service creation environment. But the key thing I want to stress is that we can call this immediately. You're no longer waiting on an ISV partner to go away and scope this out and wait a number of weeks to get this feedback for you. You can do it yourself. And if I click here on the top right, we can actually preview this. You can hear a task connection. So you can see that we've gone from, "Okay, I have a business problem," to here is a solution that I can start interacting with in literally a few seconds. So the main 2 areas of the Studio in face that you'll probably be using is the canvas here and then the node pallet here on the left-hand side, and this pallet represents all the underlying technologies that you have access to in Studio. There is another area here, which is -- which I mentioned before, which is sort of the content folders. And this is where you can actually create your reusable content. So once I have created something in Studio, I can reuse it across any task that I create. So let's say I want to create a new prompt. I'm going to say my new prompt. And I can say, "This is my prompt. Do you like how it sounds?" And I can preview that through the browser. So let's actually listen to that. And actually, I don't like that particular voice. That's a particular text-to-speech voice, and obviously, I could change that, but we also have access to other types of technologies in the platform, for example, virtual voiceover. So here, you can see just how quickly things can be integrated into studio. This is a platform for creating voiceover files from a company called WellSaid Labs. It's only been out a few months, but it's already integrated into Studio. And what it is, is it's allowing us to generate this file using a human actor's voice, using a very high resolution computer synthesis of it. So let's actually listen to that in Elena's voice, for example. Just generating that file for us. And there it is in Elena's voice. And maybe we don't like how that sounds, so let's now try Wade's voice. And again, we'll generate it in another voice actor's voice. Yes, I do like that. So let's go with that. So again, just another illustration of just the power of Studio. Now there's an awful lot to the Studio platform. It is quite an extensive platform. We don't have time to cover it today. But suffice to say, not only can you build things and manage your content, but you can analyze how your virtual agents are performing. You can manage all of the content behind the scenes as we sort of discussed briefly. And then obviously, you can work with the task library. But I just wanted to give you a quick flavor of what Studio 7 is all about. So to summarize, our mission at Five9 is to transform how businesses engage with their customers. And specifically, we're looking to create those brief moments of delight, where customers realize that their problems have been effortlessly resolved, and we do this by embedding AI into every interaction. We make business interactions context-aware and persistent. And at Five9, we call this extending your contact center with the digital workforce. I hope you have found this overview of Five9's product strategy interesting. And with that, I'd like to hand you over to Dan Burkland, President at Five9.

Good morning. My name is Dan Burkland, I'm President of Five9, and I'm thrilled to be with you today. Next month will mark 12 years that I've been with the company, and I've had the distinct pleasure of building and managing our go-to-market teams, including sales, implementation and ongoing support. And I've been in the contact center industry for over 30 years. As some of you may recall, I stood before most of you 2 years ago, sharing our go-to-market strategic initiatives. I'm going to update you on the results of these efforts and how they continue to be the primary growth drivers for Five9. But before I do so, I want to share a story that I hope will put things in perspective. Never before have I been so excited in my career than I am today, and you might ask why? Well, because I believe we are in the midst of a perfect storm. Let me explain. This industry historically has moved slowly and rather conservatively. For example, roughly 20 years ago, we came out with CTI, computer telephony integration, which meant I can now deliver, along with a phone call to an agent, I could trigger a CRM to deliver the customer record. So that the agent would know who it was that was calling because it looked up the phone number and matched it, and greet the customer. Hence, we could shave 5 to 10 seconds off of a phone call interaction. Boy, what a great ROI. In the cost-cutting days of 20 years ago, that was great, and that was considered innovation. And we spent a good decade going around to companies and upgrading them to where they could have a system that had computer telephony integration, and we milked that for a long, long time. And then the advent of multichannel came about, chat and e-mail. We're going to allow agents to respond to digital channels. Customers could inquire with chat and e-mail and the agents could respond to it. And that, again, allowed companies to go out and do upgrades to their systems to incorporate digital channels. These were considered innovative. And yet, we went through about a 20-year period where that was primarily it other than a few features here and there. Then came about cloud. And when we first started pitching cloud to customers, and even in the days of 2014 at our IPO, you may recall when we looked at one of the key elements of why customers are migrating to the cloud, it had to do with, "Oh, no servers, no spare parts, no expensive upgrades. You were always current on the current release, and you got to have the same functionality that you enjoyed before." And that was really the pitch, same functionality. No real difference or innovations in what you were going to do with your contact center. The only real innovation was the delivery method of the solution, which was now going to be hosted in the cloud. So that happened, and we went about our business and we found mostly small- and medium-sized companies that were willing to make that change. And we looked for still impending events. Was the company moving? Good time to go to the cloud. Was there M&A activity or consolidation in their undisparate platforms? Move to the cloud. But it was all with the promise that they wouldn't lose functionality. And then there was the real -- there was no real compelling event or reason for a large enterprise to take that leap and move to the cloud because the functionality and the value they were receiving was not truly incremental. And it was kind of the mentality of, "Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I'm going to stick with what I've got for a few more years." And that all began to change. And what's interesting is even the SIs and the channels at that time were saying, "Well, we're not real keen on cloud until our customers require us to go to cloud, so we're going to stay with what we've got." And that happened for several years. And then all of a sudden, there was a confluence of factors that began to hit. Customers began demanding better service from the brands that they interacted with. And they valued service nearly as much, if not more, than the product itself that they received from companies. And leading brands started to take notice of that. Social media was full of people venting about the poor experiences they were receiving. And service was becoming important. But enterprises didn't -- couldn't put their finger on how could they get there, how could they change that customer experience and really transform it and deliver what the customers were looking for. All the while, then the pandemic hit. And it was a work-from-home model that had to be instituted overnight, move your -- all of your agents to home and be able to operate business as usual. Most companies panicked. And if they were on the cloud system, it was simple. Move your agent's home, log in and you're set. If you weren't on a cloud solution, it was very cumbersome, very difficult, and it was a real pain in the butt for many weeks for some customers. All the while, there was a quantum leap happening kind of in the background for several years. Technology was experiencing a quantum leap. With the advent of AI coming about, and we all heard that AI was going to enter the contact center eventually, this was several years ago before the pandemic. But we got accuracy with speech-to-text. We saw NLU get to the point where they can interpret and understand what that text meant and go fetch important information and data and come back to the customer with their answers or come back to the agent with more intelligent information. And all the while, we were experiencing consumers getting used to speaking to voice interfaces. We all had adopted Siri or Alexa or other spoken interfaces that we started getting comfortable with. And this now opened up endless possibilities. These technologies would only become available if you were in the cloud. So one must be in the cloud to take advantage of these. And that's when enterprises started to take notice and recognize that. So the market began to open up and larger enterprises wanted these innovations to be able to serve their customers what they were looking for. And that began larger and larger enterprises, at least opening up and considering cloud and starting to talk to us about cloud. We saw this trend coming. And I stood before most of you 2 years ago as we were beginning to see the signs. And we recognized that in order to capitalize on this market, we needed to do some things differently and make some strategic investments. We continued mastering our sales approach to land and onboard and help our customers maximize the value that they achieved from the Five9 solution. We also took the effort to segment our sales teams because it's a very different approach to selling into a large strategic enterprise than it is to a small or midsized company. It's more transactional in nature. So we aligned different sales folks to work in the segments that they were most affected. We also anticipated channels would eventually flip from leading with premises solutions to leading with cloud solutions. It hasn't come yet, but we knew it was on the way. So we brought in experienced channel leadership, the likes of Andy Dignan and Jake Butterbaugh to head up and really expand our channel efforts and sign up new channels. Even though they weren't quite ready to lead with channel or lead with cloud yet, we knew those relationships would be key in doing so. And we began investing in our international go-to-market to lay the foundation for what lied ahead. So now let's take a look at these strategic initiatives, the results that they've given us and how they continue to be the primary drivers for our success moving forward. First, if you look at these 4 elements, when enterprises talk to us, the first thing they did was they looked at, is it scalable? Is it reliable? Is it secure? They knew they had to check those boxes to consider. But what they were really after was the fourth element. They were after finding a new way of delivering a transformed customer experience, and they wanted to do so through innovation and automation. So as I mentioned earlier, the segmentation was one of the first steps we took. So then we went out and 3 years ago, actually before the 2-year-ago meeting, and started segmenting our sales teams, bringing in strategic folks that had the wherewithal, the skill set, the experience and understood the process and nuances of strategic selling. And we also segmented further downmarket because we didn't want folks to naturally gravitate upmarket and neglect some very important profitable business in the mid-market. So having these 4 distinct sales teams has been very effective. It's helped not only in our win rates because they're selling into the accounts that they're most comfortable in they have the skill sets for, but also in the productivity that we've seen across the board while here at Five9. They're working and aligned with the accounts that they're most proficient in closing. So what's driving more enterprises to the cloud with Five9? It's the innovation through automation that we can now deliver to enterprises of all sizes. And as you can see here, AI is getting adopted in our new deals, 88% of the time in the strategic accounts, nearly 40% of the time in our enterprise accounts and even 16% in our mid-market accounts recognize that when AI is put in, there's a development effort and there are professional services that go along with it. So the larger companies gained the biggest ROI on that investment that they make in AI and automation. So now let's look at WFO. Also similarly, getting attach rates for WFO and analytics at record levels. Upmarket, we're replacing what customers had on-premise. That's why you see 100% take rate on our new strategic deals that we sell into the market. But we also continue to see further value downmarket as well with our WFO suite that we acquired from Virtual Observer. And now let's look at our proven leading implementation process. And I say that with pride because we have set records in this area and have a reputation of always delivering and exceeding expectations of our customers. So when we land customers and sell them, the innovative technologies, that's just the beginning. We've taken great pride over the years on onboarding these customers with that very high-touch model. We have over 300 people in our world-class PS organization with exceptional experience, and we continue to deliver unmatched NPS scores of 90-plus for our enterprise customers. So we do what we say we will do, and we meet and exceed the expectations of our customers. We also have a very high-touch approach to supporting our customers for the long haul. Not only do we assign a CSM to every account, but we also have an opt-in service or a technical account manager, or what we refer to as a TAM. They are -- these TAMs are technical resources that know the Five9 platform extensively but also work directly with the customers' staff to continuously customize and further optimize the solution so that they can maximize the value that they achieve from Five9 on an ongoing basis. This translates directly to our DBRR rates that you can see here on the right. So let's take a moment and switch gears and focus on our partner expansion. We saw the pendulum shift upmarket from premises to cloud, and that shifted in the partner ecosystem as well. And we added, as I mentioned, the key leadership with the experience and established relationships so that we can help them with that transition. And this was across referral partners, resellers, technology partners as well as systems integrators. So let's drill down and take a look at the different types of partners that we have unique programs for today and that we continue to expand with. If we look at this slide, the overall pie, and we've just indicated a few of the partners here for your reference. But we're showing different partner types. If you take the right half of this pie, we -- you'll notice that the right, these are all technology partners, placed in different categories, beginning with the most important and critical to any contact center, the CRM system. So that's a key integration point for us. And we integrate with them, as I mentioned earlier, either through one of our off-the-shelf adapters, which has been productized and proven to work with those or through APIs if they have a customer homegrown CRM system. Moving further along clockwise, you'll see our ISV partners, who certify their solutions with us to extend our platform and add critical value to our customers. Our WFO partners, who I mentioned earlier, whether it's -- we showed that -- the Virtual Observer which is our own now as well as Verint, which we resell our OEM for the high end of the market where it's applicable, followed by the UCs. On the left of this pie, you'll see our routes to market. These partners come in several types, and we've developed programs for each of them. These include carriers and other service providers located in the upper left slice, along with authorized resellers and VARs, followed by the referral partners. And then the leading SIs, which are increasingly becoming a vital part of our success upmarket in strategic accounts. I'll remind you, and most of you know this, the strategic SIs are often brought in by large enterprises to help them with their cloud migration strategies for their digital transformation strategies. And the closer we are to helping them build out those practices, the more apt they are to recommending and helping their clients with the proper technology and supplier selections. So let's look at the overall channel's focus. As you can see here, our channels team, which now represents over 40% of our bookings, we've grown -- that's just through resellers and referral partners, by the way. We've grown the headcount here 3x over the years. And on the right half of this chart, you'll see that we now have over 39 partners now sourcing over 1 million in ARR bookings in the last 12 months, up from only 8 such partners just 2 years ago. We provide them with not only the focused team, but also with enablement tools to make it easier for them to do business with us through a partner portal ongoing content, training and the like. Now let's talk about the SI partners. When we met 2 years ago, we had seen great results in our investments to help Deloitte build a business practice for cloud contact centers. And we saw that success and staffed up to replicate that with other leading SIs. As you can see today, we are getting great traction and results from the likes of IBM, Accenture, Slalom, Capco and EY in addition to Deloitte. Bookings we've received from working with them in large strategic and enterprise accounts has resulted in a 167% CAGR over the last 2 years. Our industry speaks a lot about CRM partnerships and the integrations as well as UC partnerships and integrations. I want to make a key distinction here. You heard Rowan speak earlier about the alignment that we have with the buyer we sell to most often, meaning 90% of the time, that buyer is the line of business fire. This chart validates the reality by showing that the CRM integrations that we have with our off-the-shelf adapters is 5x more prevalent than the integration adapters to the UC systems. If you include the integrations we do to proprietary CRMs using our APIs, that ratio likely goes to an 8 or 9:1. So clearly, the CRM is the key integration point for Five9 and the CCaaS providers. So as you can see, partners have played a huge role and will continue to play a huge role and as we now have a brand out in the world through our marketing efforts, through our sales efforts, with our customer references and now thousands of sellers out representing us through our partner ecosystem, who are all promoting Five9. These efforts are also contributing to our success internationally. So let's take a look at that international expansion. Now that we are past those stages of having established ourselves and trying to build a brand and even awareness within the market, in EMEA and Lat Am, it's now about execution. And with our expanded teams, our partners in place and our customer references there, it's now a matter of just expanding and putting into place the execution engine that we've done here in the U.S. as well. We are accelerating our growth in these major markets as they too have opened up to cloud. Our CAGR in Lat Am over the last 2 years is 128%; and in EMEA, 167%. We see these results and strong momentum helping us establish ourselves in neighboring countries as well. And we hit the ground running in those new markets because we've already got presence and partners and awareness within those communities. We also get leverage and assistance from the global SIs and the local partners in each of these markets. So in conclusion, we continue to believe we have a sound go-to-market strategy, which is helping drive momentum and deliver stronger results than the industry as a whole. This is allowing us to increase our market share and continue accelerating our success upmarket. Global enterprises with the greatest needs and complexities are turning to Five9 to help them reimagine the customer experience and deliver exceptional service to their customers. I'd like to thank you for your time today, and I'm happy to answer your questions during our Q&A session in the next hour. But now we will take a short 5-minute break, and then I'll be back with our distinguished panel of customers. I will be introducing you to 3 of our customers, asking them to describe the process they went through in choosing Five9. I'll share the details of that process and how they onboarded with us and the experience they've had and how it's helped impact their business. And then I'll turn it over to you all to ask questions of our panel. So we'll see you back here in 5 minutes. Thank you very much. Have a great day. I appreciate it. [Break]

Welcome back, everyone. It's now time for our customer panel. So please join me in welcoming our 3 distinguished guests. First, we have Andrea Brown, Senior Director of Workforce and Program Management from Teladoc. Secondly, we are joined by Emily Kenning, Vice President, Demand Planning and Customer Fulfillment from Stanley Black & Decker. And third, Brian Powers, Chief Experience Officer from Likewize. As I mentioned, I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves, share a bit about their business and the process they went through to select Five9 and share the onboarding experience and how Five9 solutions have impacted their business, and the overall experience they have with partnering with us. So first, Andrea, why don't you start us off?

Hi, everyone. I'm glad to be a part of Financial Analyst Day, Dan and Five9 team, thanks for having me. I'm Andrea Brown or AB, as a nickname that folks like to call me. I'm the Senior Director of Workforce and Program Management at Teladoc Health. We believe that everyone should have access to the best health care anywhere in the world on their terms. We deliver virtual health care for our consumers from on-demand urgent care to support for chronic and complex health challenges. We're changing the way people access health care. That includes creating data-driven, personalized experiences that flex to an individual's health care needs over time. Our partnership with Five9 has been a key component of being able to successfully deliver on our mission to connect our patients to clinicians when they need high-quality, affordable virtual care. We implemented Five9 in our contact center in 2015 during Q4, one of our busiest times of the year. In our selection process, reliability, stability and security were non-negotiables. What was also important to us was to work with a partner that could offer a scalable and modern platform that could grow with us and help us provide our best experience for our consumers when they request care. The onboarding experience was phenomenal. Five9 delivers on their promises to their customers. They do what they say they will do when they say they will do it. They met with us on-site to learn about our business, collaborate on the best solution and then executed on the implementation. Post deployment, they continue to work with our team to optimize the platform. I can say that the Five9's team commitment to listening being solution-driven and the premium support that Dan highlighted earlier that adds a technical account manager, or TAM, which we view as an extension of our team really differentiates them from their competitors. Since 2015, our partnership has continued to evolve and mature. Both company cultures share a relentless passion for defining -- for redefining how the consumer experiences health care and customer service in our respective industries with the goal of changing people's lives for the better. Since our initial implementation, we've worked closely with our CSM, TAM, the product and rational services teams at Five9 to grow our feature set in the contact center. We've scaled from our initial investment of 250 seats to supporting over 2,500 users globally. Over the past couple of years, we've implemented external integrations with our data warehouse and CRM platforms to support enhancements like a self-service IVR password reset option, Teladoc Secure Pay, and this year, we've added Five9's Agent Assist quality management powered with AI. Most recently, as of few a weeks ago, we completed a migration from our original North American Five9 domain to a global voice domain, which allows us to operate from a single BCC platform to provide patient support anywhere in the world. As a virtual health care company, we require HIPAA verification on 100% of our calls. So prior to using AI, we relied on our in-house QA team to perform QA on just a sample of calls per agent per month. With AI, we can now QA, HIPAA verification on 100% of our calls. Looking back over last year, the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic plus our merger with Livongo presented us with some unique growth and opportunity as well as some operational challenges. From a systems point of view, there was an increasing complexity to service all of our new products available to our fastest-growing member population. In the contact centers, our agents were faced with learning and operating out of multiple applications. So we needed to find ways to make their jobs easier and more efficient so they can focus on taking care of our members on each interaction. The addition of these products has contributed toward our CSAT score of 98%, a 90-second reduction in AHT and a 2% increase in QA scores for our newly onboarded agents. Most importantly, we received feedback from our tenured customer service agents that they love Agent Assist. It makes their job easier and allows them to be better listeners and more empathetic when helping our members access care. One last point I'd like to highlight is what really strengthened our partnership over time is that Five9 does not shy away from any issue resolution. While no platform is perfect from time to time when issues arise, I can definitely say that they treat their customers as partners and are committed to our mutual success.

Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing your story, AB. I guess I can call you AB now. Excellent. And Emily from Stanley Black & Decker. You're up, why don't you share your story?

Sure. Thank you for having me. So I'm Emily Kenning, I am the VP of Customer Fulfillment and Demand Planning for Stanley Black & Decker. We are a global tool manufacturing company. We are for those that make the world. I represent our Global Tools & Storage division. So that is most of the brands people are familiar with, Craftsman, Black & Decker, Stanley and DeWalt. And we service both our end users who are purchasing those products through our retailers as well as our retailers and distributors throughout North America. Dan, I think you pretty much summed up our decision to move to Five9, 7 years ago, in your go-to-market summary. But we were at a crossroads with a very outdated enterprise software solution that needed an immediate upgrade. So my telecom team presented several similar solutions to what we had, went through all the implementation plans and the cost. And basically, I would have gotten everything that I had for a whole lot of capital and none of the additions that we were looking for as far as call recordings, queue callbacks, all of the things that we really needed to improve our customer experience. So we were talking to our Salesforce.com partners, their CRM partners about other options, and we ended up landing with Five9. What really sold me was the ability to easily make changes without IT's help. No offense to any IT partners on the call. But being in the business, it's invaluable to be able to create change and add to our IVR platforms to our agent experience without engaging IT on a regular basis. So like I mentioned, we got queue callbacks, call recording and a much more streamlined CTI connection with some other wins like building data dips into our CRM platform that gave our agents more accurate information as well as routing our calls based on our account segments, so that the customer has got an even more personalized experience when they called into Stanley Black & Decker. We were also very easily able to roll out post call surveys at that original launch, and the support that we had at go-live was beyond what I imagine I could have gotten out of any other providers. We had technical resources in each of our 5 contact centers when we went live, from Five9, supporting our agents, walking around, making sure they were comfortable, supporting leadership. And from that initial go-live, we've been assigned TAMs -- the same TAM actually through the years who really has helped us look at what the art of the possible is, what we could be doing and just help us make even small changes that help improve the customer experience. From that initial kind of go-live within my division, our Stanley Black & Decker Corporate Telecom team launched Five9 as the contact center solution to all our divisions and regions globally. We have several domains, which help us segment specific customers and configure as appropriate to the specific regions and customer bases that they service. From my perspective, we increased our customer satisfaction and our actual CSAT scores by 15% back when we first implemented. The no more long hold times in our busy peak seasons were eliminated with queue call back, and we were able to segment that service by our account types, which meant that the CSRs knew who was calling and could develop those relationships and give a more personalized service. We reduced our average handle time by 30 seconds in the initial go-live just by presenting accurate customer information upfront to the CSR so that they knew what to expect when they answer the phones as well as through IVR routing and prompts that was gathering information to present to the CSR. And we also reduced our training time, which is important in the contact center world, by 20% just on being able to have all the information that the agent needed at their fingertips as well as the online trainings that Five9 had already kind of curated for us, so we could just kind of have our agents look at that, and then do some hands-on training and then they were good to go. Pre-COVID, contact centers were all on site. Even though we were on Five9 and in the cloud, it was our workforce plan that everyone would be on site. Obviously, that changed with COVID, but Five9 made it seamless for us to transition all our CSRs within a week to remote working with no disruptions. And at this time, we really have no plans on moving our agents back to the offices in the future because of how seamless it works with our Five9 platform. We've also been able to branch our workforce out to several BPOs in other countries during the past year with ease on Five9. We are excited about what is coming for Stanley Black & Decker and Five9 in the future. I think Andrea mentioned Virtual Assistant and Agent Assist is definitely on our road map in 2022 as well as scheduled queue callbacks to make that process even better and more accessible for our end users. So we really do appreciate the relationships that we've built with Five9. I feel that is the best part, being able to just pick up the phone and call our TAM and say, "Hey, I was thinking about this. What do you think?" is really invaluable to the business. So thank you.

Excellent. Thank you, Emily. That's a great story. I appreciate you sharing that with our audience. And Brian, those are a couple of tough acts to follow, but take it away.

I was taking serious notes. We're walking in the same path here. We're all facing the same market. We call it the roaring '20s, right? Trying to hire agents right now is very difficult. So we're all using Five9 selectively around the world, moving calls, changing skill levels. So we're maintaining service levels and appearing like we're keeping up. So Brian Powers, I'm based in Atlanta, also an office in Dallas. I'm with Likewize, formerly Brightstar. So we're a technical services company, formerly logistics. So if you break or lose your mobile device or gadget, we'll get it repaired or replaced very quickly so your life is not interrupted. I've been in telecom 25 years. So yes, when we talk about -- I love hearing all the acronyms on these calls. And I had to write a few down in the prior slides from Dan because I don't know what those are. We used to have a dictionary in telecom of all the TLAs, all the 3-letter acronyms. So I've got a few to learn. But a selection process 2.5 years ago, typical RFP, pages of requirements, must-have, nice-to-have and then we look for innovation, followed by demonstrations. It's hard to tell what's vaporware, what's real. So we look for references. We call clients on those. You say you never get a negative reference, but if you really dig hard and you ask the right questions, and Andrea and Emily can back that up, we can speak to the positives and the negatives of all these different vendors. They're constantly calling, we get messages and e-mails and invitations from people in this industry daily, honestly. And now they're starting to cold call directly, which is annoying. Followed by the -- after the demonstrations comes the scorecard. The critical factors we're looking at, of course, overall business case and costs. Everybody's got a budget that's going to be smaller next year. So how are we going to save money? Implementation and pain, right? How much is our lift versus your lift? Moving an IVR is like changing a billing system. It's a lot of work, and it's got to be done in stages. But to the customers, it just got to appear seamless, and you don't want to have multiple voices and then dropped calls. So you have to monitor it throughout. The support team we met during the process -- and I echo Andrea and Emily, right? The TAM, Dan mentioned too, the TAM on each account is important. Customer success, right? That's now prevalent. That's a demand going forward. Somebody who's not incented to land and expand, but make sure that you're using what you've got, right? So it's -- I first heard that from Salesforce and it blew my mind, and that's what we get from this team. Hey, there's modules that we can add that we think will help you and maybe we're already paying for and not fully utilizing. That is great. That's what I look for from the account team because with my tech stack, we can piecemeal all these point solutions together, and I just can't have more QBRs in my calendar from all the vendors and everybody wants to meet with you and hear about your future and your plans. So we enjoy that this is an expansive modules. We subscribe to a number of them today to the supervisor plan, the IVR plan, all obviously call recording. And this has helped us through 3 major incidents recently, right? So first of all, we heard about COVID, right? Immediately, we had to push people to work remote. So the setup was quick and easy in our industry as well as we heard HIPAA from Andrea. But PCI, payment card industry for handling finances in a call center, you can monitor it. If they're remote, you can't, right? So you don't want them handling credit card and financial information while remote, very sensitive data. Remember, all the cyberattacks and people are very careful about who has access to their information. So using Five9 after speaking with an agent, if there's a deductible or a fee to be paid, we can transfer them back into the IVR and set that up. So we take the payment through the IVR system. Been on the road map for 2 years; with COVID, we got it done in 2 weeks. So it was an outstanding priority escalation, and we worked really closely with Five9 to implement that. Also setting up all the customer agents remotely done quickly, but we also couldn't get to all the calls because some of the agents had symptoms. They had COVID and our service levels were dropping. So we immediately set up this callback option. I believe Andrea had mentioned that as well. You don't want to have to call people back, but -- even I'm traveling today, the airline says, "Hey, we're expecting higher-than-normal levels, if you'd like a callback, we see your number." So we implemented that here, the U.K., Canada as well. I don't think we did that in the ANZ market, but it's all there. It's quick and easy. We could turn it on, turn it off and configure it. So we like that kind of flexibility, and I don't need to call Five9 in order to implement that. And also something called Intent in the IVR. So we can do a data dip, see if they're calling about tracking number, status of an order and provide that to the customer. So it's digitally contained and call -- not call deflected because it was made in the first place, but resolution in that channel without reaching an agent, right? The best call is the one never made. But really, if we can provide that information upfront based on what we think they're asking about through the IVR, that's just as helpful. I mentioned the roaring '20s. They're back. Some of our local restaurants are closing because the cooks are now the waiters and the waiters are the managers and nobody wants to cook. Call centers everywhere, right? We're trying to hire people. So actually, in the U.K., I can't hire. We're raising the rates. So now we're using people in Canada through our BPO. Through Five9, we quickly set it up. We're monitoring how this is working. We're able to skill-based route the calls throughout the day so that none of these service levels are lacking. So where the service levels are needed, we can just move these calls around. So the WFO, the WFM are all working well. So the third event was rebranding, so formerly Brightstar, now Likewize, so we had to update all of our voices. And the voice of Brightstar is no longer with us. So now that we're Likewize, we need a new voice, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the IVR's spoken word and the recorded voice. Voice talent is expensive. You have to schedule it, record it, save it, make sure it's all at the same pitch. So I liked hearing that -- the male/female voices. So we'll take advantage of that. Also the intelligent virtual agent is -- we say, AI, we need to get to ML. And we want our IVR to move to spoken word. We think our customers are there. It's no longer a novelty. How can I help you today instead of press 1 for billing, 2 for sales, 3 for et cetera. So we think the customers are ready, so we want to move to that. And as a result, we've seen our Net Promoter Score rise in the last 1.5 years, 20 points. That sounds great. We weren't in a good place, but now we're much better and heading north, a lot of that due to call deflection digital containment and opening up other channels. We use chat through Five9, right? So people more and more want to do self-service or follow up with a chat and chatbot in the future. And my calls per incident are down 30%. So we're looking for another 15% next year, so we're going to work with our account team on how we can use these innovations through the IVR, and automated QA is on our list, too. So we'll be following up our account teams on all those fronts.

Great. Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate that update. And my intention was to ask each of you a follow-up question. But for the sake of time, I want to make sure that our audience has enough ample time to ask the questions that they have. So I'm going to jump straight to that. But first, a couple of comments. Clearly, all 3 of you have global operations. What I heard you, all 3, say was the interest if some of you have implemented some of our innovations, and automation solutions, but there's an interest to do so by all 3 of you. And the other thing I noticed is all 3 of you mentioned through the pandemic, the flexibility of the system was such a help in allowing you to make the adjustments you needed to on the fly with very little warning, if any, and so that's good to hear. So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and just we'll own it up for our audience members, our analysts to ask the first questions. So Matt, take it away.

We have our first question from Scott with -- are you muted? Scott Berg with Needham. You are unmuted.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Certainly appreciate your commentary. I guess the first question is for -- we'll go with AB since you mentioned that it was your -- that's what you go by earlier, Andrea, I appreciate it. Is -- I guess on the AI side, you talked about leveraging some of the AI functionality with Five9, is -- can you talk about some of the -- how you measure the return on the spend in that area, right? Because it's a certainly different use case than a human agent. So I'd like to understand that. And then secondly, you've recently brought your Five9 implementation more globally. Can you talk about maybe some of the differences domestic versus global in terms of maybe what the performance of the system is like?

Sure. Great questions. So from an AI perspective, I just want to call out a couple of things. I think one of the things, as it's kind of out there, AI, it sounds a little bit big brother-y. So I think one of the really great things when we pilot it with Five9 is we really set kind of realistic expectations on what AI can do and what it can't do. So obviously, there's still opportunity for it to grow. And so we came up with some very specialized use cases so that we could kind of take a singular campaign, kind of train the AI, really work with it and make sure that it was meeting our expectations before then we wanted to expand it. So one of the ways we've seen an ROI with the QA. So the team that I mentioned, historically, kind of a traditional contact center with staff, an in-house QA team with a team of analysts that would have to do the call samplings each month. I think it was about 5 per month per agent. So what we were able to do essentially was to redeploy that QA team into other areas of the organization. And we just kept really a small team that now is actually the -- like analysts are actually just managing the application. So from a headcount perspective, now we're going from just that small sampling, but we're getting 100% HIPAA verification on our calls with a team about 1/4 of the size. As it relates to the global, as we continue to grow, originally, when we worked Five9, we were just operating in the U.S. And so today, we have contact centers in Canada as well as Denmark, Argentina and Australia with plans to do some work expansion in EU as well. So I would say what's really flexible and the reason that -- instead of us standing up and maintaining the 2 domains that we've operated in the past 1 year, 1.5 years, what we really like about having the global voice is it really does allow us all those same configuration options that we have in the U.S. Those are available abroad. And then some of the features that we have from a regulatory perspective in the advanced recording uploads with the ARUs that you can customize configurations, whether it's skill or campaign-based routing, to your house call recordings, keep data in country and Five9's local, what they call POPs or point of presence. So that's been a really valuable solution for us. And again, it's very easy to set up users and route that trap. We have all that capability in-house. If we have any questions, of course, our TAM can help us. But really, it's pretty seamless to route calls from 1 geographic location to the other.

A question from Terry Tillman with Truist.

I think the precedent has been set. Your name is AB, so thank you, AB, for joining us and also Emily and Brian. If I could hopefully not being overzealous here or too aggressive, but I was hoping to ask a question for all 3 of you. Earlier, one of the slide presentations from the management team was talking about the importance of integration in the CRM versus UCaaS or business phone systems. I would love to pull all 3 of you in terms of do you have a strong integration with Five9 with some sort of system of record or CRM solution? Maybe you could talk about that. And then secondly, is there importance or relevance to integrate Five9 with the UCaaS tool?

I could start. We actually have integrations with multiple CRMs within Stanley Black & Decker. So we started with Salesforce.com, and we have recently, part of our business, we've migrated to Zendesk. Both of those integrations within -- from a Five9 perspective have been incredibly easy. It is downloading an app and adding that information into our CRM platform with very little IT effort or even needing help from our TAMs to get us there. So both of those actually feed together, and we can see the data from all of our end users within the Five9 platform or within both of those CRMs. So we've had really easy experience implementing 2 separate CRMs.

I can add to that, so we also...

Emily, just to clarify, if you could. Do you have integration? Or is there a need or desire to integrate to the UC? I think that was the other question.

Yes, sorry. We do not at the moment. So I do not have that on the road map.

Sorry, over to you, AB.

So yes, so we don't have the UC opportunity to speak about, but we are in a similar story to Emily. And we do integrate our Five9 with homegrown CRM as well as Salesforce. Salesforce, I'll tell you, is very seamless and easy to do. And it did require a little bit more IT work on our end just to integrate with the homegrown. I would say on the very first one, we set up kind of the phone number lookup, kind of easy money, if you will. And really, once we had a developer on our side, that was kind of familiar with Five9 and partner, then the subsequent integrations that we did were far easier, took a lot less time from a homegrown standpoint. But to echo Emily's sentiment, the sales force is pretty much plug and play, very, very easy to do.

Brian, yes, so we also have a homegrown CRM, right, which is funny. All of us -- there's so many options out there. But yes, integration was through APIs, and it was not a problem. We used the account team to assist with that. It's moving target. As we continue to evolve, we always have updates, we need to test and make sure that full integration and data integrity is present. Also with Zendesk integration, similar to what Emily was doing, so I echo that. And we do not have an integration to UC, I just checked on that.

We have a question from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.

Great. You guys all mentioned kind of integrations with your voice teams. And just wanted to get a sense of, do you manage kind of different modalities, whether it be e-mail or social or even the chatbot? Are those different agents? And if so, are you using a different solution for those integrations? Just trying to get a sense of whether it's an omnichannel solution and implementation.

I can start. We're routing. We do have multiple channels. And we do have live chat, and e-mail, phone. People still fax us. We get a lot of different types of increase into customer service. We use our CRM as the Omni, but we've linked Five9 phone into that. So we're looking at all of our transactions through Omni, through Salesforce, that includes Five9.

Brian. Yes, so a similar story, right? We're looking at opportunities that go out there and convest all the different touch points. Like Emily, we just have so many touch points. People have courage behind the keyboard. So we posted an article on LinkedIn and people start commenting, and some of them want service. They tweet it to you. And then we reach this on our Facebook page. So those aren't our active support channels, so it's actually through our marketing organization that manages those, plus our mobile app comments, I forgot about that. But then it goes back to our service team, and then we update comments in the CRM. But I'd be very interested in something that can help us aggregate without adding another vendor to our tech stack.

And similar here, we use the sales force for our chat and our e-mail, but we are actually exploring SMS. So I had a group reach out 2 weeks ago. I actually already reached out to my SMS. We had a demo of the SMS feature with Five9. So we'll be looking to implement that in Q1.

All right. We have time for one more question from Sterling Auty with JPMorgan.

And again, I really appreciate you doing this. You kind of answered it, but I just want to ask you to put a fine point on it. When you look at the automation solutions, how important is it for you guys to get those automation capabilities directly from your CCaaS vendor versus we do see a multitude of kind of other companies that are popping up in that space offering different types of automation capabilities. Do you think it needs to come from CCaaS only? Can it be a mix? And Brian, I think you had touched upon not wanting to add another vendor. How important is that to the whole decision?

So we saw on the earlier slide from Dan all the -- what they focus on to their core capabilities, they're expanding, they're adding more modules. And where they don't, and they don't see that as something to their core competency, they have partners, right? So they introduce us to these other vendors. So we're still going through Five9 as single source without further complicating thing, and then we have kind of that one hand to hold when we retail to our account teams. And they bring us the innovation. I look forward to QBRs and hear about road map. So then I can echo that internally because their competitors call and talk about their road maps all the time. So it's an ongoing relationship, and we look forward to see what additional things they bring. Automation to your question, very important. It's big for cost savings year-over-year.

Okay. I think that brings us to a conclusion for our customer panel. I want to give a very big thank you for your time and sharing your stories and experiences. Andrea, Emily, Brian, I can't say enough. We appreciate that today. And now I'd like to hand over the floor to our Chief Financial Officer, Barry Zwarenstein. Barry, take it away.

Thank you, Dan. And a big thank you to Andrea, Emily and Brian. We really appreciate you sharing your insights and experiences. Today, I'm going to talk about our building blocks of growth. When it comes to growth, Five9 has 2 key commitments. We are addressing a massive TAM that is now more than doubled to $58 billion. We are writing on the wave of the 3 immutable trends Rowan mentioned: carded option, digital transformation and AI and automation. We have demonstrated our ability to execute like clockwork. All of this gives us considerable confidence to make our first commitment, which is to continue delivering durable growth in the 30s in our enterprise subscription business for many years to come. And second, we are a bit old fashion in that we've always focused on both the top and the bottom line, what we call balanced growth rather than growth at all costs. It's just the way we are, a core belief. We are currently in the process of accelerating investments to fully capitalize on all of the tremendous opportunities we have in front of us. This will depress margins in the near term, but we are confident in our ability to resume generating operating leverage down the road in the same way as we did the last time, we took a detour and accelerated investments, which was at the start of 2019. So our second commitment is to deliver a balanced approach on both the top and the bottom line. Finally, I will pull both commitments together with a discussion of our 2026 financial model, which we introduced on our November 8 earnings call. With that, let's dive right in. We have strong conviction in our ability to continue growing our LTM enterprise subscription revenue in the 30s as we have for years. If I look at just the last approximately 5 years, in 2017, the LTM enterprise subscription growth was 37%; in 2018, 36%; 2019, 34%; 2020, 39%; and for Q3 2021 year-to-date, 51%. There will, of course, be fluctuations, including in the near term. But it is obvious that our conviction to deliver 30%-plus durable LTM enterprise subscription revenue growth is well founded. So what are the foundational building blocks upon which this durable growth risks? First, we are gaining significant traction upmarket with $1 million plus ARR customers. Second, our installed base of existing customers is getting meaningfully larger and is expanding as demonstrated by the increases in our LTM dollar-based retention rate, thus driving further growth. Third, our investments in international are starting to pay dividends. And fourth, our AI and automation portfolio that Callan presented is enjoying considerable momentum and will drive ARPU increases in the long run. So taking each in turn, $1 million-plus ARR customers are the fastest-growing category amongst all of our customers. Two years ago, at Financial Analyst Day, we disclosed 49 such customers, and that number has more than doubled to 123 in the 2 years since. The CAGR on these 123 customers from inception averages out to 87%, up from a CAGR 67% we disclosed 2 years ago for the 49 customers, demonstrating the trust they have in our capabilities to continue expanding their business with us. Turning now to LTM dollar-based retention rate. As our base of customers continues to expand at a healthy rate, it is showing up in our retention rate. As you heard during our earnings call, our LTM DBRR came in strong again at 123% in the third quarter. While this figure will definitely fluctuate, including in the near term, especially as we ramp larger customers at different times and rates, we confidently expect this metric to move into the high 120s in the long run driven by 3 key factors. First, $1 million-plus ARR customers that I discussed in the previous slide tend to have significantly higher DBRR than the corporate blended rate. This makes intuitive sense given the larger the customer, the less likely we are to land 100%. And remember, as I just mentioned, they are the fastest-growing category within our customer base. Second, as we continue to sell more of our AI and automation solutions and add digital seats, our ARPU should naturally increase, which will further drive up the retention rates. Lastly, if you look at the breakdown of DBRR for the enterprise versus commercial, the rate of enterprise is higher than the blended rate, while the rate for commercial is in the 90. Given that enterprise is growing faster than commercial, the revenue mix shift will naturally provide a modest outlook to DBRR over time. Yet another arrow in equivalent is international, an important arrow given that there are more agents in the rest of the world than they are in the U.S. As you have heard, we've been investing aggressively in our international efforts across the board and is starting to pay dividends as evidenced by international revenue growth starting to outpace U.S. revenue growth. In the long run, as we continue to invest in global expansion we expect this part of our business to become even more meaningful, increasing from the current 9% of total revenue to the mid- to-high-teens percent. You may wonder why are we not expecting an even higher contribution from international revenue by 2026. The reason we are not is quite simple. Dan and his domestic team are continuing to grow the much larger domestic business at a very healthy clip, resulting in the rate of increase in the international percentage being more gradual. Turning now to AI and automation. As you have heard, the problem for contact centers is hiring and retaining agents, and quite simply, they cannot solve this problem without AI and automation. And Five9 is extremely well positioned to solve this problem with our AI and automation portfolio. Evidence of our gaining significant traction in this area of balance. For example, as Callan mentioned, Five9 has won numerous industry awards for our AI offerings. As Dan mentioned, 88% of our new strategic customers are purchasing AI solutions with their initial order, and 100% of them are buying WFO upfront. The 2-year CAGR on this part of our business is 75%, more than double the CAGR on our total revenue growth during the same period and it now represents 12% of total revenue. This is only the very beginning of a long journey so you can imagine how meaningful AI and automation will become as part of our overall business in the longer term. Now that you have a good sense of the different drivers supporting our ability to deliver durable revenue growth, let me share with you our balanced approach, delivering not just on the top line, but the bottom line as well. But before I do, I would like to make a statement. We do what we say. What you see on this slide are all the commitments we have made as a public company, and we have delivered on every single one of them and done so, we submit with prudence, with Christmas and with financial discipline. I won't drain the slide, but I will discuss 2 of the items listed. First, as I mentioned earlier, we've grown our LTM enterprise subscription revenue above 30% ever since we started that part of our business, and we are absolutely committed to continuing this trend and have the right building blocks in place to achieve it. Second, gross margin expansion has been one of the key drivers of our ability to improve the bottom line over the last 7.5 years since we went public. We are currently accelerating investments in the public cloud and in professional services to support global expansion and enterprise momentum. But we are confident that when that normalizes, we will resume expanding gross margins and reach into the 70s in the long run. In short, we hope, as you scan the items around the bull's eye that you will take away from this slide an overarching impression that this is indeed a team that does what it says. This will be a familiar slide to our long-term investors. We call it our Monalisa slide. We retained it because it crisply illustrates the progress we have made since IPO and because it also illustrates the balanced approach we believe in, and it does all of this in the context of a real framework that the Street is familiar with. As you can see from the blue, our growth rate has risen from 22% to 38% despite the increased scale. And essentially, all of this growth is organic. And as you can see from the red and the green, margins have improved by 46 points to 18% with 13 points of the improvement coming from gross margin expansion and 33 points coming from operating leverage. And as a highlight decide, if you want an illustration of consistency, consider our track record on G&A. We now have 28 consecutive quarters of year-over-year drops in G&A as a percent of revenue. In short, we are very happy with our balance 55% [ rule of ] 40 performance achieved despite the increased investments. Now I'd like to discuss our new long-term model and share with you our perspectives on how we plan to achieve these targets. First, I'd like to discuss the path to the $2.4 billion revenue target in 2026. The left bar represents the midpoint of our 2021 revenue guidance of $601 million, while the right bar represents our 2026 target of $2.4 billion. Under the 2021 revenue, you can see 3 of the key jump-off point metrics we disclosed during our Q3 earnings call last week. Modeling out 50/50 assumptions of 30s growth for enterprise subscription revenue, of increases in the dollar-based retention rate to the high 120s and of international revenue increasing up to mid- to high teens of total revenue, we come to a $2.4 billion 2026 revenue target. And for the avoidance of doubt, by 50-50, we simply mean that these assumptions reflect our best judgments to arrive at a 2026 revenue number, where there's a 50% chance of making the number and a 50% chance of failing to do so in contrast to our more prudent approach to quarterly and annual guidance, which will continue as before. Let's now turn to gross margin expansion. The key lever to increasing our EBITDA margin from 18% currently to 23% in 2026. Today, our gross margin is 64%, but we expect this to expand meaningfully over the next 5 years to reach 70% plus. Expansion is primarily driven in the subscription part of our business. We expect gross margins to increase from the low to mid-70s today to approximately 80% by 2026 as subscription revenue scales against fixed and semi-fixed costs. And note, this is not avoid to discovery, it is largely more of the same. As for usage, while we don't expect further margin expansion, I'd like to point out that our telco team is consistently executing to maintain strong usage margins in the high 50s. We expect a small contribution from PS margin, as this revenue stream heads towards high single digits gross margins through scaling and other efficiencies. In terms of total gross margin, we also expect a contribution from the mix shift in recurring revenue from usage to subscription. In summary, our gross margins at the time of the IPO were 53%. They are now 64%, and we are on a journey to our 70%-plus target. Finally, everything I discussed today culminates in our new long-term model. We said our revenue and EBITDA margin targets in line with the 2026 [indiscernible] numbers at $2.4 billion, and 23% plus, respectively. Revenue growth will be supported by the drivers I discussed a moment ago, namely enterprise subscription revenue growth consistently in the 30s, expansion in dollar-based retention rate and growth internationally. EBITDA expansion will mostly come from the increase in gross margins I touched on just now, although gross margins will be under some pressure in the near term as we accelerate investments in public cloud and in PS. We expect sales and marketing and R&D to tick up slightly from where we are today, particularly in the near term as we will be accelerating our investments to support our global expansion further drive our enterprise momentum and expand our AI and automation portfolio. For G&A, we expect continuing but slight declines. All over this then, results in our 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin target of 23% plus. With that, I'd like to thank you for your attention and open up the call for Q&A.

Let's go ahead and queue up our first question. And our first question will be from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo.

I want to start off with the expansion rates. And what stands out is not just that they've expanded from 123 to 113, but the expectation, those remain elevated and trend into the high 20s. I think this has historically been a heavy model. I know the expansion rates have not seen the...

I don't know about you, but I didn't hear the end of the question.

I think he froze.

Yes. Sorry, Michael. Well, the question is about expansion rates and sort of historical support for the projection moving forward, I believe, Hopefully, he can jump back on. But Barry, do you want to comment on expansion rates, the LTM DBRR projection?

Yes. Go ahead, Jan. Yes. So Michael, sorry that you froze. There's very few things in business that people can be certain about, including what the dollar-based retention rate is going to be down the road. So this is one that we feel a very high conviction on. And it derives on the fact that the moving up market, continuing to do so. And the dollar-based retention rate on these million-plus ARR customers, as I've mentioned in the past, is meaningfully higher and makes sense. The bigger the customer, the more likely are not to land the whole account at once. And then in addition to that, we will get ARPU increases as these customers can afford to buy more of the product, not just the large one, but even the medium and smaller size ones. And then finally, we do have a gentle tail breeze, if you will, from the mix shift to enterprise from commercial where the rate is lower.

All right. Thanks, Michael. Hopefully, you were able to get back on to hear or heard that. Our next question?

Our next question is from Samad Samana with Jefferies.

And Barry, I I'd love to hear you when you talk about that the company does what they say they're going to do, and we appreciate that about it. And maybe one on the guidance, and I think it's a follow-up to Michael's, and I appreciate the commentary on how larger customers in their net retention. But maybe unpacking that a little bit further, how much of that should we assume is future product additions to the portfolio versus what's in the existing product portfolio today? So can you get to that high 120s without adding anything new in the bag? Or does that rely upon additional modules being rolled out over the next several years?

Yes. Samad, great question. It's primarily the existing product, but there is some benefit clearly from the newer products, including notably the IVAs because what we're talking about here, if you've got a live agent, we're talking about in the order of $200 per month per agent, whereas with the digital agent, we're talking automatically by -- we've got 3 different SKUs, but basically, you can use $400 per port per month. So we have both primarily seas but support from additional products, including IVAs.

I'll just add to that. I mean the reality is we can't stand still, right? You've seen this moving up in part as a result of portfolio expansion and grabbing more wallet share but also growing the wallet share. I mean both of those are going to happen. And I think this is a function of time. In the near term, we don't need any new products in the portfolio to continue to drive that up. Over the fullness of time, as you see the market continue to unfold and other things, we will continue to introduce new products to these contact centers. But I think we understand now, and you can see in our confidence in sort of setting that new TAM target, that there's a lot of upside here to see the expansion continue.

Great. And Rowan, if I can ask you just a quick follow-up. I think one of the interesting things from the customer panel was they all said that UC and CC wasn't necessarily or something that they -- they don't have integrated today. They don't see it something that's on the road map. But you did mention the importance of your CRM partners in that park is consistent with kind of history. I think that maybe the company's own partnership strategy on the technology side, does it make sense to maybe -- how should we think about leads coming in from the CRM side going forward? And it was interesting to hear them talk about homegrown CRM systems as well. Back in 2021, we wouldn't hear about that. And so just maybe help us think about that and how UC wasn't as big of a factor.

Yes, one of the biggest surprises, to pick up on your last point, that I had in understanding our customer base was the huge amount of sort of homegrown CRM that's out there, much, much, much larger than I would have thought, and I think so equally surprising to you, it seems. And that's a really important factor though because while it's important that we continue to partner with the largest vendors in this space, still the biggest sort of part of our customer base and especially in the larger customers are what we would call homegrown. So -- and they may be using off-the-shelf here and there, but tons of these companies still have many, many legacy systems that they have to integrate with. And so the fact that we have a really broad API surface area allows us to be able to make those integrations easy, and it's a big part of our partnerships with the systems integrators who make a big difference here. So from a leads perspective, I think that's going to continue to be one of the big areas of growth, is going to be the systems integrator partners who are making this problem kind of easy for customers by taking off-the-shelf systems. So if it's -- it's very rare we see a sort of all in where throwing a big company. They're never throwing out everything and starting from scratch, right? I mean they're always tying together various systems and maybe they're adding a new sales force deployment for this or that, but it tends to be a complex landscape, and so the systems integrators tend to be very, very key there.

Next question is from Will Power with Baird.

Okay. Great. I guess a couple. One of the common areas of feedback, I think, from the customer panel was the growing importance of an omnichannel capability. In some cases, relying on the CRM, but also relying on UI and some of the partners that you have. So I wanted to better understand how you're thinking about addressing that over time, opening up more omnichannel capabilities? How much of that can you do organically versus partner? Do you need to do M&A there? It sounds like that's a really important element longer term.

Sure is. Yes. Maybe, Dan, I'll let you comment, but just to sort of set the umbrella answer. The -- we have a very good omnichannel offer today that a lot of our customers use. We -- when we go in and sell the customers, we sell the digital first -- really, the digital-first message is the key message we try to land. So we try to take a legacy contact center on-premises and say, "As we move you to the cloud, we want to move as much of your traffic into digital channels as we can." We've integrated that into our single routing engine. So it's not like there are different channels like many customers currently experience. These are all integrated and tied tightly together. At the same time, we don't stand still here because this isn't -- this is a part of the market that is still very -- still developing very, very quickly. So there's new channels coming out. There's very -- these tend to be very regionalized. So around the world. Different products tend to have much more market traction. WhatsApp is huge in different parts of the world as opposed to SMS in other parts of the world and so on and so forth. So while we support all the big ones, there's still a lot more that we can do. I think to answer your direct question about there's going to be organic, we have quite a few teams that work on this and a pretty big investment in our omnichannel capabilities. But we also are looking at -- we also would definitely look at acquisitions and tuck-ins to sort of move it along there. And a big area of interest is certainly around automation because digital channels are the ones that sort of open up the door for automation and insight. Inference, for example, as Callan can attest to, does a really nice job of bringing together digital channels, along with voice and using the same automation tasks across multiple channels. I think that's a really important part of the future strategy, is to leverage all of the channels to drive automation across the complete landscape. Dan, anything you'd like to add?

Sure. Real quick. Just a comment on -- if you think about our full native omnichannel solution, used by lots of our customers. But when we go into a customer, if they're already using chat and e-mail from another provider, typically their CRM provider, we don't want to -- we want to be a good partner to our CRM partners and not go in and steal that channel away. And yet, if you think about what a CRM provider does with chat and e-mail, they get the inquiries. They put them in a big bucket, but they have no concept of skills or availability of agents or routing those. So they put them in a bucket. And if you don't have Five9, the agents during their idle time, go and cherry pick and grab those messages and respond to them. What we do is we enhance Salesforce chat and Salesforce e-mail by grabbing it, assessing the intent of the question and then routing it to the right skilled agent. So when they say we have omnichannel from Salesforce, yes, they have the actual channel from Salesforce, but the intelligence and the routing is provided by Five9. That's the -- routing engine piece is the key.

That's helpful context. If I could maybe slip one in for Barry here too, actually a 2-parter. I would love any further context you're able to provide around near-term investments. I think you liked it early in 2019 that helps drive some of the long-term opportunities. And then is there any way to kind of sort of framing around what you think AI and automation will be as a percent of revenue in 2026? I think you said 12% today. I'd be curious kind of where you think that goes over the next 4 or 5 years.

Yes. Great, Will. So first, with respect to the near-term investments, concentrated in 2 areas. Moving to the public cloud, you heard all the plans that we have for especially international growth where this is more prevalent. Although down the road, we'll have it domestically as well to accommodate that growth efficiently. And the other one is our professional services where we've been hiring at a tremendous rate. It's a key differentiator for us. These bigger global customers, they're taking us into geographies that it's new for us. We have to staff up, and there's initial cost for that and providing them the type of support that you heard from the customer partner. And where it shows up in the geography of the income statement, it's primarily in cost of revenue. There will be some also in R&D and sales and marketing. In terms of magnitude, you should think of somewhere in the 2% to 3% range, which will last through 2022. Then as AI as a part of the total, we will be less than candid if we didn't admit that we don't know exactly what the take-up rates are going to be. This is early days yet. Rowan talked in his part about some of the potential and the interest in that. But we're not, at this stage, willing to put -- unlike we did on dollar-based retention rate, unlike we did on the international, a number on something that still evolving.

Our next question is from Ryan MacWilliams with Barclays.

So it seems like the AI monetization opportunity is certainly here today. And since the adoption of virtual agents is particularly strong in your strategic accounts, how would you characterize a difference in adoption between your strategic accounts to enterprise accounts for virtual agents? Is it education or your largest customers just more willing to spend up?

Dan, do you want to take that?

I think as I described in my slides earlier, we get a higher take rate. The larger the customer, the higher the take rate. I think it was 88% of our net new strategic accounts are opting in for the automation solutions; and about 2/3 of our enterprise, which is the next tier down, and it further falls off from there as you move down. And part of that is the development effort, right? There's a lot of customization and tuning and handholding of building the application. Hard to justify that expense if you've got 3 agents, 3 virtual agents. If I've got 100 of them, I'm going to get a huge return on that development effort. So it's kind of -- that's where we're seeing it today because it's early adoption, early days of IVAs. As this becomes more prevalent naturally, we'll get better at being able to randomize the PS effort and make more templatized solutions that we'll be able to go down market more effectively.

I'd just add one thing to that, which is you could think about -- I think one of the factors here is that the legacy technology took, call it, an order of magnitude more expense and time and capability. So those customers were -- had the kind of expense that would justify that. So they're well aware of this technology already. For a lot of other customers, that was really never an option. And so they may not have been aware of it or ever considered it. But now it's an option. Because with our technology, it's an order of magnitude easier and cheaper to deploy and configure that within a business. So I think we're going to see more adoption as we -- as this gets more and more awareness and as these smaller customers basically start to become aware of the fact that you can do this and make it easy and it doesn't happen -- it's not only for the big customers anymore.

Excellent. And then kind of a high-level question. Rowan, as a former contact center rep yourself, we talked a lot about AI today, but how do we think about how the remote by customer service agent, how that role changes? Like just put more of a premium on things like WFO? And then just with some of the retention issues that your customers highlighted of hiring new contact center rep talent, are you seeing Five9 increasingly pitch to new service agents and to retain their existing customer service reps?

So a couple of parts and take that in 2 parts. WFO has definitely become a more interesting solution and, call it, a requirement really when you're running in a remote environment. I mean the way that you manage a contact center in person is often by -- the supervisors walk around, they listen, they overhear, they pull together people during breaks and say, "I heard you on that call, blah, blah, blah." In remote world, you just can't do that. So that's where virtual observer has been getting even more traction as has our solution that we sell to our customers from Verint. So think WFO is much more necessary, just a critical component of anyone who's considering continuing in the remote sort of agent world. We haven't -- we don't know to what degree that remote agent is -- sort of profile is going to continue as we come out of the pandemic. We'll have to sort of wait and see on that front. But the second thing is, certainly on the retention side, WFO and WEM more broadly are used to analyze retention factors. They're also like a key part of the training and onboarding, so right? When a customer -- when the -- and I think the second part, the new term for that space is workforce engagement management or workforce experience management. So it's as much about the experience your agent has as it is about the experience you're creating for the end customer, the end user. And so that is really important from a retention perspective, providing more flexibility on ours and better training and better feedback in real time so that the agent is actually having a better experience. So all of those things definitely become more important in a constrained labor environment.

Just to add to that, too, one of the issues with retention and contact centers is often, unfortunately, they may not need of what's being done. And so being able to complement human agents with self-service or even agent assist technology, you allow those agents to work on sort of higher-value activities for their organizations. And that creates a rewarding environment in general.

Yes, yes. As an agent, it was great to hear things like, you know that call that you've been taking 30 times a day every day for the last 6 months, you're not going to have to take that call anymore because now the computer will take over and do that in a better way. So definitely should help on the -- the IVA should help on retention.

Yes. Just 50 password resets in a row.

Exactly.

Next question is from Peter Levine with Evercore.

Maybe just to kind of piggyback off of the last one was, how was the current labor market impacting, I think, contact center operations right? Are customers leveraging the AI automation suite more to reduce headcount? Or is it viewed as a tool to kind of better help and assist these agents going forward or just to provide a better experience?

Callan, do you want to take that one?

It really does depend. I'd say it is a bit of both. I mean, I think if you went back 5 years and you looked at sort of technologies, automation technologies were seen as somewhat of a labor replacement technology. But now with the fact that you're using AI and AI assistant form and so forth, it's really about just changing the nature of what contact center agents are able to perform in the contact center. So I think it really comes down to the industry that you're talking about and in particular specifics of any one company and how their labor pool, where they're sourcing the labor from and all those sorts of things. So it's a pretty complex sort of dynamic. Do you want to add?

I would just add, we see some customers that are focused on growth. So we're needing to hire a bunch of reps, but we can't. So IVA seems like it seems like a good answer. Second is we do get customers come in. They're just really concerned with cost savings. Now how they redeploy those expenses varies. Sometimes they're redeploying it back into customer experience. I mean generally, either they've got a target for management as you need to reduce your expenses on an ongoing basis or they have a target that says you need to drive a better customer experience. Either way, they need to drive efficiency to invest in those things. So it's kind of both of those that we see, both sort of reinvesting -- either driving savings to the bottom line to always have those targets or they're just trying to grow and they realize they can't hire more headcount right now because it's very difficult.

Third element it also adds is the seasonality, right? Where you have companies that have peaks that come and go. It's hard to go hire labor, train them up and use them for a few weeks during the holidays as an example. And if you can deflect a certain percentage of the traffic to self-service, you can still maintain service levels without building these big, long queues for people that have very basic questions. So you can use it as an overflow mechanism as well.

Okay. Perfect. And then just one quick follow-up for Barry. The investments you're making near term around public cloud infrastructure, can you quantify what the margin impact will be in calendar '22?

Yes. So both on the public cloud, Peter, and on the professional services, they will primarily hit cost of revenues, some in sales and marketing and R&D. And the hit is in the order of magnitude of about 2% to 3%.

Our next question is from Meta Marshall with Morgan Stanley.

Great. A couple of quick questions. I was maybe surprised to see how quickly the IBM relationship had ramped or in that chart of just kind of the contribution to the much larger accounts. And just trying to get a sense of, is that a relationship that has just ramped a lot faster or they're kind of targeting the higher end of the market and that's what we should draw from that? And then maybe second. On the professional services kind of target margin, just can you refresh us as to whether that target of getting into the high single digits on a margin standpoint is -- I think you had kind of gotten to above that previously. So is it just -- what informs that target of what you think you can get professional services to kind of mid-2026?

Dan, do you want to take the IBM and then Barry comment on PS?

Yes. IBM has been a wonderful partnership we've had going for about 3 years, a little over 3 years. And it doesn't take many when they're working with those large, large companies. So as with most of our SIs, right? So a few large deals move the needle pretty significantly. So that's what they've been able to do with us and very excited to be working with them because they do have entree and access into some very, very large companies. Barry?

And then, Meta, thanks for being so very much on top of what we've been saying. We did indeed go into breakeven, but that is before the mega accounts and the need to get ahead of that. We also feel very comfortable in getting into the high single-digits as a gross margin for 2 fundamental reasons. The bigger of the 2 is that we have just got such great leadership there, as Dan mentioned and Andy Dignan and his team. With a lot of specific innovations we're actually talking about later on today, in terms of automation, the data transfer going live, et cetera. And we also, secondly, take some comfort in the fact that there are many other B2B companies, as they scale, getting into even the low-teens, but we've been conservative in saying in the high single digits. So while the level of conviction here is not quite as high as say on something like the DBRR one as I said earlier on, it is so we feel very sanguine about it.

Our next question is from Scott Berg with Needham.

I guess I have two questions that really focus upmarket in the strategic -- I guess first one is -- and I don't know if this is a question for maybe Rowan or someone on the product side is, when you think about the product and functionality you have in that strategic segment today, is there a size of a customer that you just won't target? And what I'm really trying to understand is, how high or how big do you really feel you can scale today in terms of the customers you target?

Yes. I think the bigger driver of that is not size but complexity, potentially global scope. Like we have data centers where they need them today? Is that an investment area for us? We've been -- so that's like the primary lens we look at. So we actually -- just yesterday, we did this. We went through our large deal pipeline. We looked at every deal that sort of hit the street in terms of RFPs and which ones we wanted to go after and which ones we didn't. We're not currently walking away from really deals of any size that we have seen. I mean deals -- and this is tens of thousands of agents, right? We are looking at those. We're pursuing them. We're interested in them. We weren't doing that before. If you recall, Scott, I've sort of said in the past that those were ones that we didn't necessarily want to go after. However, we've made pretty significant strides in our product scale and capabilities such that we now can comfortably serve, we argue, some of the largest contact centers in the world. I mean the biggest one now, that $24 million ARR company -- customer that's paying us $24 million, that's a great example of, call it, one of the largest contact centers in the world. But we're still selective on that front because the variance in customer needs across that landscape of, call it, mega scale is pretty big. So we're still like -- Dan is not out there with a shotgun hunting. He's out there with a rifle, trying to pick off the ones where it makes the most sense for us.

That's helpful. And I asked the question because you're right, you had shy away maybe really large deals are really complex historically. So good to see that you're trying to tackle those today. I guess my follow-up perspective, probably a question for Dan. You mentioned your pipeline coverage in that strategic segment is 10x today. I guess 10x is a big number, especially I'm assuming the historical coverage range is in the 3x to 5x kind of area But is that larger coverage driven by just volume of deals that are out there? Is it more size and ASP on the deals? And then how much of that is coming from or being sourced by your partners today versus something you're doing direct?

Great questions. If I unpack that, the upmarket, we're seeing that sourced by all. I mean whether it's the size bringing it to us, whether we find out directly and then look to partner, yes, they're involved in the same, like we've always quoted, 2/3 over 2/3 of our business is influenced by our partner ecosystem. So it can come in a variety of flavors. But we're seeing that upmarket traction. And I -- the first part of your question, if you can repeat that again. I had a key point on that [indiscernible].

No, I'm just trying to understand that 10x coverage. Is it more...

Oh, the 10x coverage...

volume of deals versus our models, et cetera?

Yes. So if you look at the 10x coverage, one is you've got a much longer sales cycle in those accounts, right? That's part of it. But secondly, as Rowan just mentioned, we're getting into those accounts, and we're being selective. We're not just going to try to be all things to all people. There are some unique requirements where we'll walk from deals if they're not a great fit for us. So we want to look at our win rates and our abilities to be successful in each of the accounts. And because of that 10x coverage, we're expanding that team more rapidly than any of our other sales teams because the demand is there. My points earlier was the market, all the vectors are coming together in this perfect storm all at once, and suddenly enterprise over the last year or 2 as we're ready. Let's look at this. And so all of a sudden, the demand is up, we're scaling that team to accommodate that. But it comes in both volume and in size, so that's why we look at that and say, yes, 10x is coming. And some of them have long sales cycles, so we've got to take that into account as well.

Next question is from Catharine Trebnick with Colliers.

Dan, I want to hit on your strategic partners, Mitel and AT&T. Any expansion you can discuss or traction with those 2 in particular?

Yes. I'll start with AT&T. That continues to expand and grow, and we get further upmarket as they've now validated and proven themselves in some of the smaller and midsized accounts of AT&T. So we're continuing to see momentum there. As far as Mitel, we had gone out and signed up a lot of their channels, their partners and been able to set that up. So that's just the right base that we see with a lot of customers that are on legacy solutions that need a CCaaS solution. So they've always been one of our largest because of the size of their installed base globally, one of the largest installed bases that we "replace" the contact center for. And now they've got a partnership established on the UC side, but we don't see that really impacting our ability to sell into that.

And then the follow-up is on Microsoft Teams is a partnership that's come on board again. And where do you see how you differentiate with that partnership versus an 8x8 or an in contact, et cetera?

Yes, Teams tend to be up market more than those others. And if you think about where we're going in for the knowledge workers that are using Teams, we want to give them assurance and comfort that we can have that integration and seamless movement of interaction between the contact center and the back office. And so that's one thing our integration provides. And so we oftentimes get brought in or recommended or endorsed by them. A lot of times, those are direct selling efforts that we're doing with the customer, and they just want to go do their check, right? They want to get a hold of their Teams folks and say, "How well do you work with Five9? How deep is the integration?" And them giving us that endorsement is absolutely what we want. It's surprising still to me even, and you heard it from our 3 customers how rare it is that they actually go ahead and implement that integration. They want to be protected because someday they might need to move calls outside the contact center to knowledge workers. But up market, most of the contact center folks don't even know who those other people are and they wouldn't know where to bridge them in. Smaller or midsized company, that's different. But in the larger companies, they don't even -- our buyers don't even, in some cases, know. I think you heard Brian say, I just checked. We don't have integration with UC. They don't handle what they have for UC in many cases.

And clear as Microsoft as a platform company, there's not a lot of -- you don't -- you actually won't see very much differentiation because they have an API. They provide the same API to everyone, and we all implement to it. And it's actually really rudimentary. I mean it's the same across all of the UC vendors. Essentially, it's tell me, give me the list of contacts in the company with directory. Show me their presence and then let me transfer calls back and forth, essentially. And that's pretty much the UC integration. And so across the board -- and Microsoft, by consent decree, actually has to provide the Switzerland -- the same API to everyone. So it's not possible as far as we know for anyone to differentiate beyond what they make publicly available. There can be slight differences in the quality of the implementation on the vendor side from -- like from our side, but this is not a big area of differentiation, frankly. It's like a check box. Okay, yes, we integrate and we can do the basics.

Our next question is from Steve Enders with KeyBanc.

I can appreciate the investments you're making in international, that being a bigger point of focus, but just wondering how you're thinking about the opportunity there and potentially to invest in APAC and expand more into the Asia side. It seems like it's a pretty big opportunity. So wondering how you're thinking about that.

Yes. I'll take that one. So Dan mentioned the growth we've seen in Europe. Really, our approach right now is focused. It's a big -- the world is a big place. We could get easily distracted by trying to chase every deal in every part of the world. And APJ is a very dynamic environment with a lot of different -- especially even worse in Europe, in some cases, some regulation on the telco side. So we've been very careful. That's not been an area of focus for us. We've really just been focused on Europe. And I think this is just about -- go back to what we said earlier, like we do what we say we're going to do. This is a reflection of that, which is go build out the blueprint and the playbook to go execute in another country and then go run that successfully, and then we can take it and replicate it. So the opportunity is in the near -- in the, let's call it, in the near future for us to start expanding into APJ, but we wanted to get that playbook really, really tight in terms of our execution of it in Europe and in Latin America and Canada, where we had first started before we move into APJ. So it's just a focused question right now, staying focused.

Next question is from DJ Hynes with Canaccord.

Dan or Rowan, I don't know who is better suited to answer. I want to see you guys up for some just competitive commentary. I think 2 years ago, I think back of like how we were positioned in this market, it was kind of a 2-horse race, you versus inContact. Now I think the investment community is hearing more from Genesis are seeing what's happening with TOPdesk. Can you just talk about evolution from a competitive standpoint? I think investors are trying to figure out like who wins, what deals and why are some firms better positioned further up, further down. Just walk us through kind of your assessment of beyond inContact, who else is relevant?

Yes. I'll start and Dan add any color, please. We've started seeing Genesis more, as you pointed out. And I think we've been pretty open with that and primarily as a result of us basically attacking their turf. As we go into the large enterprise, that's where they tend to be strong. We've been taking them out of larger and larger deals. And so we're, of course, seeing them more. And it's just more of a function of being on the offense for us. Getting into their partner, they're sort of their partner relationships and taking out the big customer wins where they have a stronghold. So that's why I think we've been seeing Genesis more. Of course, they've also been getting more and more maturity on their cloud platform. So -- and they've been investing in that area as they look to their future and realize that cloud is important. They still have a huge on-premises base that they're trying to protect, obviously. But yes, we do see them more. Maybe you can provide some commentary on Talkdesk as well, Dan.

Yes. Talkdesk, we still see mainly down market. Our mid-market team and commercial teams will see them, but not in the enterprise and strategic deals that we're working on. They'll try and they'll come in, in some cases, but they just don't -- they haven't had the proof points to validate what they can do upmarket, and I don't think they can scale to that point. But the point on Genesis, if you just look at it, yes, it's historically been us nice inContact. And Genesis is really too exactly what Rowan said. We're in their base trying to replace their legacy on-premise base. And Genesis is in there saying, well, we have cloud, too. The problem is it's not mature. It's not robust. It doesn't have the functionality or depth that we have to actually go in and replace. They have a lot of functionality in their legacy on-prem solutions, but they haven't replicated that in their cloud solution. So they may -- even if they enjoy the partnership or the supplier relationship that they have with Genesis, they sacrifice quite a lot if they want to go to their cloud. And so we're kind of that perfect fit where we can take them to the cloud, switch to something that's leading the market, and we give them the innovation solutions that Genesis just can't do yet.

Yes, yes. That makes sense. And I guess like foundational to it all is like it's a huge market that's fairly in the cloud, right? It's like 15% still kind of the right metric to be think about?

I think it's around that, yes, and maybe lower. It could be higher, not short. But the other thing I would add is that on the competitive front, our win rates remain consistent and high, and so that hasn't changed. We've seen a little bit of mix shift as we've gotten more offensive with Genesis, but we're still winning the same amount.

We have our next question from Taylor McGinnis with UBS.

So I guess what are you seeing in the pipeline for million-plus deals that's giving you guys confidence in this segment of the market? You talked about an acceleration in growth of the $1 million plus ARR customers. So do you have visibility to the pace of those ads continuing to accelerate? And then maybe as like a second part, given that these deals are recognized over time, maybe you can talk about the impact of these customers and how you kind of expect their contribution to evolve towards our out year 2026 target?

Yes. Great question, Taylor. And I think as you heard Barry shared earlier, those numbers of million-plus ARR customers is just accelerating as is the pipeline when I talked about our strategic accounts for the most part, are all million-dollar-plus deals. And that's expanding. We now have 10x coverage on that pipeline. And that's the market that when I talked about the perfect storm, it's all of a sudden, enterprise has opened up, especially on the back end of the pandemic, saying, okay, let's really roll up our sleeves and take a look at cloud because we just went through a period where they saw the consequences of not being on cloud, and they're recognizing the urgency to now provide these automation solutions and innovation that their competitors are starting to deliver. So it's kind of -- you've got to jump in and stay up with your competitors in whatever field you're in. So we have customers that we knock on their door for 3, 4 years ago, Lukewarm, somewhat interested, there was no urgency on their part. And I'm looking at the pipeline today, and those very same customers are knocking on our door saying, let's go, let's talk. So I don't want to share too much about Q4. But when you look at the mega deals or -- we've got several, I'll just say, several multimillion-dollar ARR customers that we've already contracted in the first half of Q4. So all good signs.

We have time for one more question. Our final question is from Sterling Auty with JPMorgan.

So just one question from my side. So if we go back prior to the potential acquisition by Zoom. I think, Rowan, you had talked about Microsoft being the #1 partner in terms of the volume of leads that were coming in. Has that returned to that same level? Was there any disruption to it or any changes in the way that they're viewing U.S. prime?

In the in the UC space, it actually never changed. It continued. It was #1. It continued to be #1 as a UC partner, and they still are. And I think they were relieved that, that deal wasn't happening because they saw us as a great partner. I mean even in their latest release, they listed us in the first spot. So yes, I think it's -- we're in a good place with them right now.

I pass it back to Rowan for closing comments.

All right. Well, that concludes our 2021 Financial Analyst Day. I'd like to thank you all for taking the time to join us today, and I hope you found this session useful and informative. Just to wrap up. We've been really successful executing our growth strategy, and we are confident in continuing the momentum as we move further up market, as we expand in international and channel growth. And we're confident in leading the market in labor automation with AI. We're super excited about what's to come in the next 5 years as we march toward this $2.4 billion revenue target, and we really look forward to sharing our progress with you. So I'd like to thank you all for your support and take care. Goodbye.