Five9, Inc. ($FIVN)

Good day, and thank you for joining us today. On the call from Five9 are Amit Mathradas CEO; Brian Lee, CFO; and Andy Dignan, President. During today's conference call, certain statements will be made that are not historical facts and are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our Q2 second half of 2026 and full year 2026 guidance, expected improvements in operating and financial metrics. CCaaS and AI revenue growth trends, industry trends, including with respect to AI, our strategy, priorities and execution, our product road map and technology investment, our markets, customer demand trends, our market position and opportunity, our capital allocation strategy, including our share repurchase programs and other future events or results. Such statements are simply beliefs and 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 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 adverse economic conditions lower growth rates within our installed base of customers, failure to manage our technical operations infrastructure, unsuccessful development of our AI solutions, failure to maintain and develop our contact center solutions failure to achieve the anticipated benefits of our share repurchase activity 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, management will make reference to non-GAAP financial measures during this call. A discussion of why we use non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of our GAAP versus non-GAAP results and guidance is currently available in our press release issued earlier this afternoon as well as in the appendix of our investor deck that can be found in the Investor Relations section of Five9's website at investors.five9.com. Also, please note that the information provided on this call speaks only to management's views as of today and may no longer be accurate at the time of a replay. Lastly, a reminder. Unless otherwise indicated, financial figures discussed are non-GAAP. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Five9's CEO. Please go ahead, Amit.

Thank you, Tony, and welcome, everyone, to our first quarter 2026 earnings call. We delivered an encouraging start to the year, and I am particularly pleased to report an acceleration in subscription revenue growth with top and bottom line results coming in above the high end of the guidance ranges. While we are still early in our work, this quarter marks an important step in showing that our actions are beginning to translate into better business performance with the indicators we care about moving in the right direction again. This is my first full earnings call as CEO. I want to frame our work around 4 priorities that I believe are essential to driving long-term value at Five First, building a performance-driven culture rooted in accountability and transparency; second, optimizing operations; third, stabilizing and strengthening the core business, and fourth, winning an AI empowered customer experiences. Let me start with our first priority, culture. Over the past 3 months, I've spent a significant amount of time with our teams and leaders across the company and had frank conversations with employees across functions and geographies. What is clear to me is that Five9 has talented people highly strategic assets and a real desire to be. But winning also requires clarity of mission, high standard urgency and accountability. We need a culture where performance is measured rigorously decisions are made quickly and leadership is held to a high standard. That starts with me. Transparency with the investor community is equally important. Over time, our story has become harder for investors to underwrite than I believe it should be. Some of that was about how we executed, how we communicated and how clearly we translated our strategy into measurable progress. Going forward, we will demonstrate progress through clearer, relevant and trackable metrics that help investors assess the health of the business and hold management accountable. We understand that investors want evidence, not ambition. And our job is to convert our vision into results that are quantifiable. Turning to operations. Over the past year and with the support and oversight of the Board, Five9 has been executing a significant operational review designed to improve efficiency and simplify execution. This work, which was well underway before I joined, helped drive the 470 basis points increase in EBITDA margin from 2024 to 2025. This foundational work is crucial. But it is only the beginning. We are now in a better position to move faster and reinvest in critical areas. Building on this foundation and with the support of external advisers I am leading a series of deep dives across the product portfolio to align investments with our long-term competitive priorities. To help accelerate this effort, we are filling gaps and making changes in leadership, adjusting our organizational design, including reducing spans and layers to improve focus, speed and accountability. These changes will help us operate more efficiently and effectively and build more disciplined foundation for innovation, growth and continued operating leverage over time. An example of this was our recent hire of Gale, our new Chief Marketing and Growth Officer. In this newly created role, Gale unify global marketing with revenue strategy and operations to build a more aligned insights-driven go-to-market engine that delivers a seamless experience for customers and partners. Let me shift to my point of view on the strategic outlook for our industry and our business specifically. AI is one of the most important shifts underway in our industry. And customer experience is one of the most compelling application areas. In my conversation with customers, I'm consistently hearing that AI is fundamentally increasing the importance and value of every customer interaction. Historically, contact center spending has been overwhelmingly weighted towards labor, creating a difficult trade-off between lowering costs and delivering better experiences. AI is acting as a catalyst to change this. Customers now see the potential to reallocate a portion of their labor spend to fund the combination of AI and enhanced CX. Better addressing the trade-off between cost and quality. This makes the move to a modern cloud-based platform more urgent than ever. This shift is forcing a critical decision. Customers must now consider how AI is incorporated into their CCaaS platform because they want to avoid a strolling collection of disparate tools that cannot seamlessly coordinate between their human agents. This means that AI point solutions are not enough because they only solve a fraction of the problem. Enterprises are looking for a complete customer experience platform, they can trust to handle the entire life cycle the orchestration, the data, the integrations and the governments needed to run reliably in production. This is precisely what Five9 provides. What's interesting is that AI handles a large share of routine customer requests. The role of agents is elevated, not eliminated. People become experts who manage complex escalations and provide essential oversight and necessity in several regulated industries. A platform infused with AI and CX technology empowers these agents with real-time guidance and suggested next steps, while simultaneously giving supervisors unprecedented visibility into every interaction, not just a sampling. Importantly, human-based intelligence and case resolution provides a critical feedback loop for training AI agents, which in turn drives continuous performance improvements of the entire unified platform and further differentiates Five9. This evolution is about more than just efficiency. It's about value capture. As AI reduces the customer's traditional labor spend that budget shifts towards technology. We believe this fundamentally expands our monetizable service area. By enabling entirely new use cases and more differentiated customer experiences, our path to success is no longer about simply selling seats. Instead, it's about selling a complete solution based on capabilities and consumption. This is where we believe our category is going, and we plan to lead it by pairing these and other powerful agent capabilities into a platform that has trust governance that enterprises seek. But we are not assuming success here. We must earn it, and we will measure ourselves not by demos, but by production, adoption and customer outcomes. We are seeing signs that our strategy is working. In the first quarter, we posted our second consecutive quarter of year-on-year accelerating subscription revenue growth, an important indicator that the core business is strengthening. We are also seeing customers adopt our AI solutions in production as an integrated part of our CX platform, leading to multiple quarters of strong AI revenue growth. This effort is amplified by the strength of our platform and our ecosystem. Our cloud-native CCaaS platform is built for high reliability and features open integrations which has allowed us to build an ecosystem of over 1,400 partners. Our deep strategic relationships with market leaders within this ecosystem are critical. Serving to validate our technology, strengthen our go-to-market reach and accelerate enterprise adoption. This is a large opportunity, and we believe Five9 is one of the few key players truly positioned to capture it. We intend to do so with both urgency and discipline. Before I hand it over to Brian, let me say a few words about capital allocation. We take our role as stewards of shareholder capital seriously. Our approach will be disciplined, return oriented and balanced. This includes investing organically in our business, evaluating inorganic opportunities against a high strategic and financial bar. And when appropriate, returning capital to shareholders. On the last point, reflecting our confidence in the company's intrinsic value, we intend to complete our remaining amount of $150 million share repurchase authorization by the end of Q3. In addition, our Board has authorized an additional $200 million share repurchase program. We see this as a compelling use of capital, and Brian will provide more details in a moment. Since joining in February, it has become even clearer to me that Five9 has talented employees a portfolio of highly strategic assets and significant upside potential. It has also become clear to me that we must operate with greater urgency, better execution and higher accountability as we build towards an AI-driven future. That work is underway, and I intend to drive meaningful change as we work to turn Five9 from a good company into a great business with a disciplined focus on creating long-term shareholder value. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brian.

Thank you, Amit, and good afternoon, everyone. I would like to begin by underscoring our commitment to transparency in our reporting. To that end, starting today, you will find the supplemental metric disclosure in the Investor Relations section of our website. While many of these metrics have been disclosed previously, we believe this new format will help simplify your modeling. As Amit noted, we have taken decisive action on returning capital to shareholders. After repurchasing $10 million of shares in the first quarter, we intend to enter into an accelerated share repurchase program for the remaining $90 million under the current authorization, which we expect to be completed by the end of Q3. The Board has also approved a new share repurchase program of $200 million, which we expect to execute opportunistically. These actions reflect our deep conviction in our long-term opportunity and confidence in continuing to generate strong free cash flow, while also providing ample strategic flexibility. Now turning to our financials. Q1 revenue was $305 million, up 9% year-over-year. Of the total for the quarter, the contributions from subscription, telecom and professional services were approximately 82%, 12% and 6%, respectively. Our subscription revenue grew 13% year-over-year. This was driven by our CCaaS revenue, which grew 8% at our AI revenue, which grew 68% to an annual run rate of over $125 million. For clarity, please note that this AI revenue figure now includes both enterprise and commercial, providing a complete view of this growth driver. Our AI revenue now represents approximately 13% of total subscription revenue compared to approximately 8% a year ago, and the year-over-year growth rate accelerated from 49% in Q4 '25 to 68% in Q1 26 primarily driven by our backlog ramping earlier than anticipated. Looking ahead, we expect total subscription and CCaaS growth to trend with our overall revenue guidance. AI revenue growth is expected to fluctuate quarter-to-quarter given varying ramp schedules with full year 2026 growth anticipated to exceed 40% year-over-year. LTM dollar-based retention rate defined in our filings as the retention rate of recurring revenue from subscription plus telecom was 105%, which is the same as Q4 2025. Given our focus on subscription revenue going forward, we will transition our DBRR disclosure to LTM subscription DBRR, which came in at 107% in Q1 compared to 106% in Q4 '25. Please refer to the previously mentioned supplemental metric disclosure on our Investor Relations and upside with 9 quarters of historical dollar-based retention rates. As anticipated, both DBRR metrics stabilized in Q1 and we expect Q2 to be at relatively similar levels, plus or minus 1 percentage point before inflecting in the second half of the year. Adjusted gross margin in Q1 was 64% compared to 62% in Q1 last year. Adjusted EBITDA was $74 million or 24% of revenue compared to $53 million or 19% of revenue in the same quarter last year. In terms of cash flow, cash from operations was $64 million or 21% of revenue, and free cash flow was $49 million or 16% of revenue. These profitability and cash flow margins benefited by slightly more than 1 percentage point in the first quarter from a onetime discount negotiated with a key vendor that we do not expect to recur in future periods. From a balance sheet perspective, we ended the quarter with $724 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. On to guidance. For the second quarter, we're guiding total revenue to a midpoint of $306 million with a range of $303 million to $309 million. For the same period, our guidance for non-GAAP EPS is a midpoint of $0.60 per diluted share with a range of $0.65 to $0.6 And the largest driver of the sequential decline is the onetime discount I mentioned a moment ago that benefited Q1. Additionally, this guidance includes an estimated 3.6 million shares being retired through our accelerated share repurchase. For the second half, we continue to expect total revenue growth to accelerate to double digits driven by our backlog of both new logo and installed base bookings. For non-GAAP EPS, we expect steady sequential increases in the second half. For the full year 2026, we're guiding total revenue to a midpoint of $1.26 billion with a range of $1.54 billion to $1.266 billion, which is up from our initial midpoint guidance of $1.254 billion. Our guidance for 2026 non-GAAP EPS is a midpoint of $3.26 per diluted share with the range of $3.22 to $3.30, which is up from our initial midpoint guidance of $3.18 per diluted share. Additionally, we continue to anticipate annual adjusted EBITDA margin to exceed 24% and annual free cash flow to be approximately $175 million. That said, our organizational design initiatives are expected to initially result in higher temporary expenses to provide longer-term cost efficiencies, along with improved focus, speed and effectiveness. To assist with modeling, please note the following: purchase of PP&E is expected to be approximately 3.5% of revenue for 2026 due to a global data center refresh. Please refer to the presentation posted on our Investor Relations website for additional estimates, including share count and taxes as well as GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations. With that, I would like to ask our President, Andy Dignan, to join us for Q&A and open the call. Operator, please go ahead.

Okay. We will begin with Siti Panigrahi from Mizuho.

Great. Thank you, and Congress on a good quarter. Amit, thanks for outlining all those 4 priorities. Just wondering, what are the 2, 3 most concrete measurable milestones you think investors should track over the next 12 months to assess the progress of each of those areas.

Yes. Thank you, Cindy, and thank you for the question. Look, one, I think as we are going through as I'm going through deeper into the business, I think the #1 thing that I mentioned in the script in the call is I'm spending time on really diving deep into the market, into our tech, into our products. And where Five9 should be positioned. So I think one of the benchmarks that I think you all should be looking for is in the near future of me coming out and laying that out to you all and being very clear with how that is progressing and where we are taking the business. Two, I think there are 2 other -- 2 or 3 major other areas that I've been diving into. One is culture, like how do we actually drive more accountability, more ownership, more organizational design improvements within spans and layers within things like faster location strategy. and reducing a lot of the bureaucracy and processes internally. And I think the right measure of that should be reflected in the pace that we bring to the market in terms of delivery, in terms of delivery of some of these things that are underpinning such as margin improvements such as growth improvements. I think that's probably the best way to hold us accountable, and we'll be laying that out for fuel.

That's helpful. And then one more follow-up. You must have talked to customers and partners over this quarter. And AI is moving much faster than any other trend we have seen before. What are your customers doing in terms of adapting to this faster pace. And what's your assessment of Five9 opportunity there? And why you think Five9 is well positioned versus some of the other emerging vendors?

Yes. Another good question. Thank you. So look, as I've been talking to customers, it is pretty obvious that everyone is excited about AI, what it can do and where it is going, particularly in the contact center. I think the one big thing that customers is under realized is that AI is truly allowing for greater interactions to happen. And really driving an increase in their ability to connect with customers who are maybe Tier 2, Tier 3, who they had relegated into different channels because of OpEx. So Customer experience, CX is a reflection of your OpEx. I know how to make call times go to 0 or whole time to 0 double your OpEx, it's challenging. So as these -- as AI comes in, I think there is one big thing that is happening. One, as AI replaces seats, those dollars are not leaving the contact center. It is actually getting reallocated towards software. And companies are looking to platforms like us that can actually marry voice, digital and AI and presented in a format where it is all connected under one roof and it actually allows them to get far larger outputs in increases in efficiency through that system. So that is really where AI is going. That is why I think pipeline is really well positioned because of the shift. And by the way, I think you all may know this, but the TAM for CCaaS plus support AI is nearly 2x the displacement of seats that will happen. And so we now get to play in a much larger market as we evolve and build into this platform.

Our next question will come from Terry Tillman from Truist.

John Carlo on for Terry. You mentioned see counts. And we were wondering how has the end market been for contact center seat counts. Are we seeing it stay stable, growing or declining? And I guess what are customers sharing in terms of their plans for seats as we look into the next 6 to 12 months?

So let me start on the Asia count, and then Amit can chime in as well. So we mentioned that the seat count continues to grow at a healthy rate, relatively in line with the CCaaS revenue growth that we had provided. And that was a commentary we provided last quarter, and it continues to be the case. And so from a -- if you look at the backlog of our customers that we've already won, there's actually a large portion that CCaaS oriented, a smaller portion but fast-growing portion that's AI. So definitely, the seat growth from a customer perspective internally has been growing at a healthy rate. And I think to the second part of your question around what customers are telling us, it's what I mentioned to Siti, which is as they see the ability for them to get more efficient, with their human agents. What they really want to do is start investing into software tools, platform tools, AI tools that allows for the overall efficiency to grow and for them to actually increase the overall interactions. And a number of customers that we are working with today is exactly in that use case.

Our next question will come from Raimo Lenschow from Barclays.

Congrats, great start, Amit. Quick question. If you think about the industry at the moment, there's all this thing about AI disruption. But the 1 thing that we pick up when we talk with guys in the field is like how much still is in -- how many of the of the call centers are still actually on-premise and how we've actually kind of need to think about first cloud migrations. And then we can do AI. What have you picked up in your customer in your client conversations or the first 3 months on that whole dynamic? Because many years, you were the cloud provider that had the structural kind of tailwind in theory, that should be coming your way even more now given that people have to modernize finally.

Yes. Thank you for that question. And I'll chime in and let Andy add any additional color. Look, what we are seeing is there are a number -- there's still a vast majority of customers that are still on-prem. And eventually, we'll have to make that decision of moving to the cloud. A lot of them are actually testing out AI right now and saying, can we just go deploy AI on-prem. And candidly, it's been -- and we've seen a pickup of some of those requests where they want to come in and test AI first. But also, I can tell you that the results have been a little bit of a mixed bag, right? Because when you are on-prem, the chiles heel of AI working seamlessly is data and architecture and how it is connected to the rest of your ecosystem. And in some cases, it works in some cases, it doesn't. And so I think you will see a lot more of customers testing AI on prem. My hunch is some for some may be okay, but a lot of them will start realizing that you have to move to the cloud for this to be the best of breed and full adoption and the scalability that they want. And so that's my kind of first read into it. Andy, anything to add?

Yes. The only thing I would add would be we're seeing more of those conversations. I think throughout the kind of process of working with -- on an opportunity, they realize that they can move -- there's this concern that you got to take a year to move to the cloud and then start getting AI. We've done a lot both within our product and our processes around how we deliver that we can deliver AI at the beginning, but also migrate them at the same time. So they can kind of get the best of both worlds is really what they're looking for.

Okay. Perfect. Yes. That's very clear. And then, Brian, first of all, thanks for the kind of tightening up disclosure, et cetera, that's really helpful looking forward to working for that. The other thing is like if you think about guidance, it's Q1. Usually, people kind of think it's Q1, do I change my annual guidance or not. Can you talk a little bit about the puts and takes for you to change what to change annual guidance a little bit as well and about why you took that level.

Yes, absolutely, Raimo. Thank you. So let me take that in 2 parts. Let me actually talk a little bit about the first quarter, and then I'll talk about the annual guidance. So in Q1, subscription was the key driver of revenue growth. there was a second quarter of acceleration to 13%. And that was -- if you break that down between CCaaS and AI, CCaaS was stable at 8%. And AI accelerated to 68%, primarily driven by backlog, the strength of backlog converting to revenue. And then if you -- and by the way, before I go to guidance, for modeling purposes, I do want to point out something around the AI revenue because this time, the disclosure is different from the past periods in the sense that we're including enterprise and commercial to give you a full picture of our AI revenue as well as total subscription. And that AI as a percent of total subscription revenue going back a year ago for Q1 '25, it was approximately 8% of total subscription revenue, and it stepped up 1 percentage point each quarter to 10 in Q2, Q3, Q4 until the most recent quarter was 13% of total subscription revenue. So I hope that helps from a modeling perspective. But now going forward into Q2 and the rest of the year, it's really driven by the backlog that we've been talking about. It's growing at a very healthy rate. We have great visibility into it. It's comprised of both new logo and installed base bookings that are converting into revenue. And every customer has a unique ramp schedule. And it just happens to be back-end loaded, which is what's driving that acceleration to double-digit growth in the second half. But it's the visibility that we have that gives us that comfort to actually increase the midpoint of our annual guidance from $1.254 billion to $1.26 billion which essentially covers all of the Q1 a little bit more.

Our next question will come from Catherine Trebnick of Rosenblatt.

Yes. Thank you very much. Nice quarter. You hired a new Chief Marketing Officer, it is really happy to see that Jay Lee. Can you explain -- I noticed you had a really strong data background, so it doesn't look like your typical branding type of marketing person and give us some details on why is a particular hire with that background?

Yes. Thank you for that question. And yes, we're super excited to have Jay here. And as you rightfully called out, we also adjusted his title to reflect what he is here to do, which is Chief Marketing and Growth Officer. Look, Jay brings a tremendous amount of experience not only in the marketing realm but also in analytics data and piecing those things together. And from my view, I think as we look at driving a unified go-to-market as we look at driving improvements in efficiency and how we serve our customer, you have to look at the full life cycle. And that implies that you have to all be working off one sheet in terms of the data in terms of the funnel, in terms of how it actually translates into revenue operations and all the strategies that ties to it. So this is one example of some of the changes that we are making, which is, I think, beneficial to the company where under one roof, you're going to have one go-to-market strategy, 1 more go-to-market delivery mechanism and one go-to-market measurable data set that drives all of that.

Our next question will come from Michael Funk of Bank of America. Michael, you can go ahead and unmute at this time. Okay. Our next question will come from Scott Berg of Needham. Scott, you can go ahead and unmute at this.

Hopefully, you can hear me. Nice quarter here. Amit, in our 4 priorities, one of them was winning in AI, your fourth one. It's obviously the key question most investors are asking on Five9 given what the state of the contact center environment is. But how do you see the company today? And do you think you're winning effectively? Is this product item? Do you think you need to lean into product or potentially lean into maybe distribution more to continue to drive and really capture what's a pretty interesting AI opportunity today.

Thank you, Scott. Look, I think the answer really is, if I just start with the basics and say how are we performing today with REI capabilities, I think just looking at the performance of what we've delivered with 68% year-on-year growth. acceleration and just a whole year view of where that's going. I feel like we've got some pretty good jobs in what we are doing today. That being said, I do think the market is moving fast, and we have already announced some new products that are in data that will be coming out in the next quarter or so into general availability. And so for me, the real viewpoint is how do we stay on top of that, how do we speed that up? And near term and long term, I do think at the end of the day, which I mentioned on my first call, look, to be disciplined, I cannot serve every piece of AI and -- and we will have to be selective as to what the platform requires and where our advantages are and where -- whether that is done organic or inorganic, and then where we partner with other players to fill gaps that we may not fill or things that are vertical or certain CX centric that we may need. So I don't -- Scott, I don't think the answer is one or the other. I think it's going to be a combination of how do we continue to deliver and build faster bring more products tied to where our platform is going and where we want to own the market and where partners play a role to fill gaps that would make it easier for end users to just say, hey, I'll work with Five9 because it's all available in one place.

Helpful there. And then my follow-up is actually for Andy as a follow-up to that question is what are you seeing in sales pipelines today? What's the team seeing in Q1 maybe versus a year ago on that fast-changing environment perspective. Is the composition of deals is substantially different in terms of, I don't know, feature functionality, et cetera? Or I guess, is a state pretty steady?

Yes. I mean, I think -- so we track, obviously, our RFP and pipeline levels. They've been at elevated levels that we've talked about for the last 2 years, and that continues forward. In terms of the makeup, I would say, similar to what we talked about earlier, we are seeing more conversations around that sort of AI first. And again, I think we have a strong go-to-market around that as well as a product strategy. So I think that's going to continue to play to our strength.

Our next question comes from Rishi Jaluria of RBC. Rich, you can go ahead and you at this time.

Wonderful. I'll keep it just one. But look, great to see these continued results, continue to amend and appreciate the greater transparency. One thing we're all trying to figure out a little bit of is thinking about what exactly the impact of AI broadly, whether that's your portfolio DIY third party. And look, I appreciate that you're talking about, you can't do everything yourselves and partner where it makes sense. But to what extent has that had an impact on the nature of conversations you're having with net new customers around migrating from on-premise to cloud, how has that changed maybe some of your competitive dynamics in the RFP process. Maybe just help us kind of understand all these pieces, how they're currently coming together and maybe -- is there a point at which AI and contact center starts to get not mature enough, but widespread enough that it actually starts to speed up some of the sales cycles.

Look, I'll take a stab at that question, and Andy may have more color. Look, I think in the on-prem solution or on-prem offerings, what we're getting a lot of requests for our AI apps that actually speed up a lot of the humans that are out there, things like age and assist some of our AI agents to help as they are contemplating voice change-outs. That -- look, the whole view for me, and I'll say this when I think about my role as a new set of eyes on this business. What is happening in the CX space is as AI is replacing humans over time. As I mentioned earlier, those dollars are going back into the software, going back to make all of these humans and AI itself more efficient. If you just pass forward to your question, even 6 months, even a year, I think people think about point solution AI as, hey, here's a all -- most customers are basically saying, if I have humans that are going to be around, I need it all to be on one platform because there are certain functions I cannot do through point solutions. Agent assist doesn't work unless it is in real-time conversations. If I've even talking about AI voice like Argenti, think about what a platform offers in the near future, right? You are going to have as someone comes in and says I want to speak to a human, you go into whole time. That whole time actually becomes a window in which AI agents actually perform maybe a check or get you ready for the human call. Those sorts of things cannot happen in point products, working on working independently for our platform. As humans get elevated, the other big thing that will happen is you will start finding that human agents will start monitoring a bunch of AI agents. And if an AI agent is stuck on pronouncing month with us, my last name and does it 3 or 4 times, a human can see something go yellow and say, I'm directly stepping into that call and taking it over. That cannot happen with point products that has to happen on a platform. So I think the 1 thing that everyone is talking about Agentic. Here at Five9, we're talking about Humantic, which is the combination of humans and agents doing things that have not been thought about before. And so that is the direction we're going, and that is where I see this all coming together. So I hope that helps answer some of your questions.

Our next question comes from DJ Hynes of Canaccord. Okay. Our next question will come from Elizabeth Porter. Elizabeth, you can go ahead and unmute at this time.

Great. This is Jamie on for Elizabeth. Congrats on the strong results. is just going back to some of the earlier comments, I think I heard you guys say that some of the strength you saw this quarter was from more of that backlog coming in ahead of expectations. Just curious if you could unpack that a little bit more? Was that more attributable to strong execution on your side? Was it customers looking to accelerate those deployment time lines. And then as a result, just how has that sort of influenced your thinking for the path of those deployments for the rest of the year for what's still in the backlog?

Yes. So Jamie, it was a combination of a number of factors. So it wasn't just one customer, it was many customers. As you -- as I mentioned earlier in the year, we did have some contingencies built into our guidance as one. Part of it is that in terms of timing coming in earlier than anticipated. It's also -- we always say that our PS resource in terms of implementation is always there ready to deploy as quickly as a customer wants. So I think there are times when the customers align faster internally on their end and the deployment cycle actually speeds up. And I think we saw some of that. And the deployment was the strongest on the AI side this quarter, which is why you saw that acceleration from 49% to 68% year-over-year growth. Now going into Q2 and beyond, I'll give a little bit more color in terms of CCaaS versus AI because they're all coming from the backlog here, but you'll see that we have our total revenue guide where we reported 9% in Q1. We're guiding to 8% in Q2 and then double-digit growth acceleration in the back half. So the CCaaS portion from the backlog will more or less mirror that shape. And then AI on the other side will actually fluctuate up and down because of the varying deployment schedules that our customers have. But at the end of the day, for the annual number, we're anticipating AI revenue growth to exceed at a minimum 40% year-over-year.

Our next question comes from Peter Levine of Evercore ISI. You can go ahead at this time.

Maybe the first one, Amit, you made a comment pet remarks, not really selling seats anymore and more towards -- moving more towards the consumption model. So maybe just walk us through like what that progression looks like. What are you hearing from your customers? And then how does the model change over time? It does become more consumption. And second, Brian, I know last quarter, we talked about the guide for '27 being anywhere from 10% to 15%. Is that still -- is that still the path forward as you think about the business now and as we go into the second half.

Thank you, Peter. Look, just to start, we have started to transition to with all our new logos as well as with our existing customers as they renew, is more to a -- like a fixed revenue model where they are committing to a revenue number. And what that brings is predictability to them and predictability to us. And what the whole thesis there is that as seats compress over time, potentially that our customers get the option to fill that revenue with RAI tools and others. And why they love it is because it brings predictability and they have a -- and they're also betting on our road map, which says, hey, as new products come in, we're backing that. And we will keep consuming those AI tools to make our humans in the combination more efficient. And that is why, and we're seeing that start to happen. A lot of our business is starting to move. It's early days. So as I mentioned, that is starting to pick up. But when it goes towards Peter is the original comment I made that as seats compress, customers are saying, hey, those dollars aren't leaving the contact center, they will be utilized in other forms of AI and software tools, and that is what they're committing to. So I'll let Andy add in anything beyond that.

Yes. No, we've seen strong traction out of the gate customers have a great interest in sort of buying into that motion. And I think back to something that Amit said, the most important part is the oftentimes, they're making 3- and 5-year decisions, right? And so their belief in the road map, what we have today and what we're going to be delivering is what gives them the confidence to sign up for 3 to 5 years and make these revenue commitments. And going to help sort of protect our downside as well as easier for Brian to forecast.

Thank you. And Peter, I'll just chime in with the last part of your question. So we're not going to be providing 2027 guidance today, but you have our 2026 guidance, which keeps us on the path toward double-digit growth exiting the year and expanding EBITDA margin. And as you know, we're in the middle of deep dives across the portfolio, and we have our new Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, and we want to let that process play out before revisiting the longer-range framework.

Our next question comes from Jim Fish of Piper Sandler. Jim, you could go ahead and you at this time.

This is Ryan on for Jim Fish. One question I had was as you guys think about the guide going forward and your backlog that's driving that guide, how much upside do you guys have a view in the pipeline through the end of the year? How much of that left is go get versus what you kind of already have in that pipeline?

Yes, Ryan. So if you look at -- I think the best way to look at that is -- if you break down our guide for the last 3 remaining quarters, it basically implies we need to get $80 million of incremental recurring revenue. And I would say about 2/3 of that roughly will be coming from our DBRR, as we said, it's going to stabilize in the first -- in the second quarter, plus or minus 1 percentage point and inflect upward in the second half. So about 2/3 of that $80 million comes from that portion. The remaining 1/3 is coming from new logos, but it's all new logos for our backlog that's converting to revenue. And as I mentioned earlier, there's different schedules for each customer and happens to be much more back-end loaded. So there's essentially no dependency on new logo go gets for the rest of the year.

Our next question comes from Tom Blakey of Cantor.

I just want to talk about that AI volatility. Brian, thank you for all the extra color, by the way. covering you guys over the years is very helpful. I thought maybe just maybe start with question number one. Can you just double-click on what's driving that? Kind of volatility in terms of obviously a dynamic inflection in terms of AI usage across the space.

Yes, absolutely, Tom. So this is really the way the bookings have come into our backlog from 2025. And is the deployment schedule of each of those customers. And because it's a fast-growing part of our business, but it's still small, right? It's still 13% of total subscription revenue. And so when you have these customers that are ramping at different times throughout the year, it does cause quite a bit of lumpiness. And that's really all it is in terms of when we say it's kind of fluctuate up and down throughout the year. We're really looking at bottoms-up every customer that's in our backlog and look at the schedule of deployment, and that's just how it's playing out for the rest of the year.

Was there an element? Just a follow-up to that. Was there an element of use cases or seasonality or like nonrecurring type of revenue in there in the AI line front?

No, not at all. So there's no seasonality whatsoever. It was actually all just -- it was new -- more on the new logo AI backlog that was ramping.

Okay. And then just -- I think it was to Peter's question about -- or one of the prior questions about this, the high visibility in terms of the back half acceleration we've asked about this in the past. I apologize to double-click here. But just conversions has been a bit of a sticking point as some of these deals have become increasingly more complex and expansive in scope given the importance of CX and organizations. Can you just maybe talk about how Five9 is executing, say, this year or in the recent quarters versus prior years in terms of ramping up these deals from backlog? That would be helpful.

Absolutely. I mean we have a wide variety of customers that we are actually deploying. The Fortune 50 financial services company is 1 of them. They started ramping in 2025, and then they're ramping more so throughout 2026 as well. But that's just 1 example. There are many other customers in our backlog that are actually continuing to deploy throughout the year. And as I mentioned earlier, we do have really good visibility into those. We work extremely closely with our customers to make sure that we're deploying on schedule. And it's really about the customers that drives sometimes the fluctuations in that. But generally, the potential services organization forecast very well, and we continue to stay right on track on that front.

Our next question comes from Jackson Ader of KeyBanc.

Great. Just one question really for me. We've seen in some other areas of software that -- just the pace of AI innovation has maybe led to some like spending paralysis. On the behalf of customers, they just feel like it's too early on, things are changing too quickly. They're like nervous to pick a winner, too early in the innovation cycle. And I'm curious, since customer experience was a relatively early environment for AI to kind of infiltrate I guess it's two questions from the same thing. One is, Amit, do you feel like you saw that and that did play out in your market? And then second, if so, are we starting to get past that, where there's no longer this uncertainty about picking winners and it's time to actually act and spend and deploy.

Thank you, Jackson. If I think I've got the question right, I think you're asking about our customers and saying, is it -- are they starting to move? Are they saying, hey, we've sat on the sideline and it's now time to pick winners. The one thing I can tell you is given the use case for CX and AI, the number of start-ups in this space is mind-boggling. It's mindboggling. And for our customers, you can imagine every single day, they're being inundated by here of 500 voice AI companies, you're x amount doing something else. I think what we are seeing from our customers is, yes, there are some early adopters that go try a few things. But when they start to really appreciate from companies like Five9 and I'm sure from others is, hey, what you are bringing us is tried and tested what you are bringing us is now with the security and governance. What you are bringing us is things that may not be, hey, the bleeding edge of everything, but it is something that we know will work and it is actually things that will drive meaningful and tested outcomes. And I think that is why you are seeing a lot of customers pick us over time versus all the hundreds of options out there in the market. And my sense is I think you're going to see a lot more of this, where the trust and governance, especially in large organizations becomes a more meaningful part of their decision making.

Our next question comes from Ryan MacWilliams of Wells Fargo. Okay. This concludes the Q&A portion of our call. I will now hand the call back over to CEO, Amit Mathradas, for closing remarks.

Well, thank you all for participating in our Q1 earnings call. Like as you all can see, we've had a good start to the year. But there's obviously more work to be done, and we continue to build upon this momentum and look to capitalize on the larger market opportunity for AI and CX. We look forward to updating you all as the progress unfolds throughout the year. Thank you.