NIQ Global Intelligence plc (NIQ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good evening, and welcome to NIQ's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Will Lyons, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome to NIQ's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me today are CEO, Jim Peck; and CFO, Mike Burwell. Following Jim's and Mike's prepared remarks, we'll open the line for Q&A with Jim, Mike and our Chief AI and Product Officer, Troy Treangen. As a reminder, today's remarks will include forward-looking statements regarding our expectations and outlook. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. For information about factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, please refer to today's earnings press release and our SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made on this call, except as required by law. During this call, we will also discuss both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our earnings press release, which is available on our Investor Relations website. A replay of this call will also be available there. And finally, unless otherwise noted, revenue growth rates mentioned on this call are compared with prior year period. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Jim.

Thank you, Will. Good afternoon, everyone. Before I begin, I just want to apologize. I have a cold, and so I'm sure my voice is a little bit raspy and we'll just do the best we can. Q2 marked our fifth consecutive quarter, exceeding the top end of our guidance across all key metrics. We accelerated organic constant currency revenue growth to 5.8%, grew adjusted EBITDA nearly 22% and expanded adjusted EBITDA margin 270 basis points to 23.3%. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.27, well above the top end of our range. Levered free cash flow inflected positive at $74.1 million, and we reduced leverage to 3.1x. That's progression from top to bottom line. We are raising full year 2026 guidance across the board, reflecting our upside performance and positive outlook. It's been a year since our IPO and several things stand out: Strong demand for our solutions, our structural advantages and our strengthening financial profile, including durable growth and retention with 10 consecutive quarters of 5% plus growth in organic constant currency and strong Q2 retention at 105% NDR and 99% GDR. This is a strong core with emerging AI growth opportunities. We're also seeing expanded margins approaching our mid-20s target with a longer-term path into the 30s, increased profitability, tracking to more than $1 billion of adjusted EBITDA and more than $1 of adjusted EPS this year, inflecting cash flow in our raised outlook for $245 million to $255 million and continued deleveraging on track to achieve our sub-3x target. We're delivering results today while reinvesting in competitive differentiation in our future, AI-native innovation, consumer panel expansion, technology platform enhancements and disciplined tuck-in M&A. As I've described on our recent calls, NIQ sits on one of the world's most defensible data assets in our view, decades of permission harmonized data and vertical-specific context layer across consumer, retail and market intelligence. We believe that combination is impractical, if not impossible, to replicate. Last quarter, I outlined how NIQ Intelligence drives client decision-making and how AI adoption is creating additional growth opportunities. Today, it's about progress we're making on our innovation road map. Optiq Bridge and Connect AI, deliver NIQ Intelligence, the ground truth layer that enterprise AI runs on and to clients' decision flows. Whether through our tools and LLMs or their own, we're moving up the AI value chain from informing decisions to executing them. The balance of my remarks today will cover 3 areas: First, how a broadly healthy client demand environment is driving our core growth; second, our progress laying the foundation for additional AI-powered growth; and third, our progress expanding profitability by embedding AI across our organization. On point one, clients are buying more NIQ. Looking at our regions. Americas OCC growth led the way, growing 8.3%. EMEA OCC growth accelerated to 4.9%. In both, we saw new wins and strong upselling of our intelligent solutions. In the U.S., a leading coffee manufacturer consolidated onto NIQ from 2 incumbent providers at once. They told us why: Our AI capabilities and product road map as well as the seamless unified Full View experience across every data set. In EMEA, leading Swiss and U.K. grocers paired measurement with consumer panel to get the Full View. And a major U.K. grocer came back to us from a competitor on that same value proposition, choosing our new product granularity and e-commerce expertise. APAC returned to 1.9% OCC growth. Here, we saw a strong activation, cross-sell and early improvement in China, Japan and Korea from the retailer relationships and partnerships we outlined last quarter. In Vietnam, we won back a global CPG manufacturer from a competitor mid pilot by designing a tailored measurement plus field solution in weeks, not quarters. That is the pattern across the region. We start with granular measurement data and expand into analytics to power go-forward decisions. We also beat 2 major global incumbents doing the largest going global contract in that market to date, helping a major automaker expand overseas. We also recently acquired YiMian, an e-commerce data and insights business in China and Southeast Asia. It strengthens our digital commerce capabilities accelerates the Full View and extends NIQ into adjacent opportunities like agentic commerce in these markets. We also opened new categories and buyer types that were not in NIQ's a couple of years ago. A global ad tech platform licensed our purchase data to power privacy safe campaign planning at scale, selecting NIQ over a direct competitor and traditional panel providers; and Unlimitail, a leading European retail media platform chose NIQ to measure business outcomes across its multi-retailer, multi-country network, our first client of its kind. Ad tech and retail media are newer adjacent demand pools proof our data travels well beyond CPG. Growth was not only strong by region, but by product. Q2 Intelligence growth reaccelerated to 5.7% on new wins and strong upselling motion, particularly in e-commerce and consumer panel. And annualized Intelligence subscription revenue, our version of ARR, grew 5.8% in Q2 and eclipsed the $3 billion mark. Activation OCC growth accelerated for a second straight quarter to 6.1%, signaling our commercial and go-to-market efforts are working. A few proof points. In North America, a global convenience retailer expanded its renewal into SKU-level analytics, price and promotion and category management across more than a dozen countries, adding over $5 million of incremental value. In the Middle East, a regional manufacturer layered shopper and consumption analytics onto its core measurement subscription, and we took that work back from a competitor across 3 markets. And a global personal care leader extended its worldwide agreement, adding analytics and servicing on top of core measurement. Within Activation, demand remains strong for our analytics and innovation-based solutions. Year-to-date, these solutions were nearly 60% of activation revenue and grew low double digits. Looking deeper, our AI-native solutions, BASES AI and Retail Activate drove meaningful share of that growth. This growth isn't a one-off. It's driven by newer AI native offerings that feed directly from our proprietary core data. And that data is growing fast. We added 4.3 trillion consumer transaction data records per week in Q2, 23% faster than last year. This spans 260 million product items with 10.5 billion product attributes in our 160 petabyte data engine, all rooted in NIQ's vertical-specific expertise. That granularity benefits our entire portfolio. In fact, more than 90% of our revenues derived from this proprietary data and our capabilities are increasingly at the fore as client AI adoption accelerates. Let me share some proof points from our first wave. Data point consumption on our platform grew 25% year-over-year. Roughly 51% of our top 100 clients now use at least one of our AI native solutions, and the number of clients using them has grown 64% year-to-date. This is also translating into financial results. Revenue from AI native solutions grew by 34% in Q2, and more than 80% of AI native revenue comes from recurring clients, a good sign of stickiness and long-term value. Clients are at the center of everything we do, and we're focused on doing more. In June, our annual flagship client event, C360 drew more than 600 CPG, tech and durables and retailer decision-makers from across the globe. Their message was clear: Help them cut through the fragmented data and disconnected systems and decide faster in a fast-changing consumer landscape and help them capitalize on their AI strategies. Which brings me to my second point, our progress laying the foundation for additional AI-powered profitable growth. Last quarter, I described our 3-pillar strategy to fuel the future of trusted AI. In Q2 and year-to-date, we accelerated innovation to deliver AI native value for clients and our business. And our first pillar, building NIQ AI applications for smarter outcomes, at C360, we announced Optiq Suite, our insights assistant and NIQ Cadence, our GenAI native marketing effectiveness platform. Aligned to our second pillar, NIQ IP that fuels AI. We announced the launch of Optiq Bridge and Connect AI suite, which embed decision grade NIQ intelligence directly into market-leading applications, AI-powered workflows and the enterprise. We've also progressed MCP access and integrations with all of the leading AI platforms so clients can reach secure, govern NIQ intelligence directly through these platforms. These launches let us meet clients exactly where they are. Whether they're an AI buyer of NIQ solutions directly or through an LLM or an AI builder embedding NIQ within their own AI environment. Importantly, every solution has permission service layers built in. Clients can embed NIQ intelligence into their AI use cases while keeping the NIQ decoder, the IP, methodologies and models that power our differentiated analytics. And last week, we announced the first charter clients for Connect AI. These include Purina, a global personal hygiene company; a leading beauty company and 2 global beverage companies. Each is working with a dedicated NIQ engineering and data science team to build AI ready intelligence infrastructure and decision workflows inside their own environment. Early client demand has been strong. Our pipeline has grown quickly to 49 live opportunities, including our charter clients and active discussions with many of our top clients. It is also broad-based across FMCG and tech and durables as well as with clients large and small. We plan to add more charter clients, including retailers, in the next phase. We are also in active discussions on several AI partnerships with major players that can accelerate our objectives. These include a partnership leveraging forward-deployed engineering expertise to accelerate deployment of Optiq Bridge and discussion with multiple partners around our agentic commerce measurement launch targeted for later this year. And on our third pillar, powering commerce intelligence and agentic commerce, we see a long-term growth opportunity. AI is playing a bigger and bigger role in consumer shopping, moving from answering questions to influencing consumers' decisions to helping execute them. As that happens, NIQ's granular content on product attributes, availability, pricing and consumer preferences moves directly into the commerce flow and rises in value. Our capabilities span product intelligence and availability, channel and media measurement and agentic transaction integration, positioning NIQ, we believe, to play an operative role in the next phase of AI-powered commerce. During Q2, we built toward that future. NIQ Commerce Lab is establishing the data, API and measurement infrastructure for AI-driven commerce. We launched Product Intelligence, the first offering in our Commercial Intelligence portfolio. It resolves fragmented product data under a single structured layer. This allows AI commerce systems to accurately identify, compare and recommend products to drive shopping conversion. Taken together, we believe this wave of AI launches positions us for significant growth. 2026 is a foundation building year, driving early adoption, expanding partnerships, validating monetization models and scaling our first client implementations. Over time, we look to layer on additional revenue streams, premium AI-ready data, usage-based AI services, AI native applications like Optiq Bridge and Connect AI; as well as AI deployment services. While we expect these initiatives to contribute some revenue in 2026, our raised 2026 outlook does not assume a material contribution from them. This year is about building. We expect to begin scaling commercially in 2027 and beyond. Leading that effort is Irina Stoian, who joined us as our Chief AI Commercial Officer in July from Palantir, where she scaled technology and analytics businesses. She's partnering with Troy and the team to drive our next chapter of AI-powered client value. and I look forward to you meeting her in the future. So our core revenue base is strong, and we're building AI value on top of it, which brings me to my third point. The benefits of AI-led operating efficiency. AI is accelerating our ability to build, deliver and support our products and our clients. We're seeing AI-led productivity gains across data operations, engineering, commercial and support functions, contributing roughly half of the 270 basis points of year-over-year margin expansion in Q2. And in the first half, we completed the vast majority of actions under our 2026 restructuring program, achieving most of the $70 million to $80 million of expected run rate savings. These are structural efficiency gains with less than 1-year payback, and we believe we've only scratched the surface. We're pursuing additional efficiencies across our largest expense areas, prioritizing these that carry little to no onetime cost to achieve. We'll remain disciplined, harvest efficiently, reinvest a portion in long-term growth and expand profitably. As I outlined last quarter, the path from the mid-20 margins into the 30s is fundamentally about flowing durable revenue growth across a largely fixed cost base that we're making more efficient. As a result, every incremental dollar of revenue should carry higher margin than the last. To close, we are doing what we said we would do. And as I've said before in a previous call, we are going to show you that we're an execution machine, driving our core algorithm, expanding margins, raising EPS, inflecting cash flow and laying the foundation for AI native monetization and operating efficiency into 2027 and beyond. Thank you to NIQ's associates worldwide for delivering a great quarter. I'm excited about what we're building. With that, I'll hand it to Mike to cover our detailed Q2 financials and our raised full year outlook.

Thanks, Jim, and good morning, everyone. As Jim outlined, it was a stronger quarter. Results exceeded our expectations and our guidance across every key metric. Revenue grew 5.8% in organic constant currency. Adjusted EBITDA grew 21.9%, and margins expanded by 270 basis points to 23.3%. Adjusted EPS was $0.27 and leveraged free cash flow improved by $137 million to positive $74.1 million. Taken together, these results reflect disciplined execution, improving profitability and continued progress toward a stronger balance sheet. Our raised guidance reflects continued strength in our core business and AI-driven efficiencies from our 2026 cost program starting to ripple through our cost structure. I'll cover the details after walking through our strong top and bottom line results. Q2 reported revenue accelerating to 8% growth or $1.1 billion, 5.8% in organic constant currency. This growth came from execution of our revenue growth algorithm, strong retention, pricing and cross-selling and upselling with contribution across Intelligence and Activation. Net loss was $30.5 million, while adjusted net income improved by $80 million on a year-over-year basis to $78.7 million. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA grew 21.9% and year-over-year to $262 million, and we expanded margins 270 basis points to 23.3%. This came from increased operating leverage as well as AI-enabled automation benefits and our 2026 productivity program, making our largely fixed cost base more efficient. From a segment perspective, our largest markets continue to lead the way. Americas grew 8.3% in organic constant currency, driven by intelligence and cross-selling our Activation solutions. In the U.S., a global personal care company consolidated its retail analytics work with NIQ, displacing a legacy provider on the strength of our data quality and analytical depth. Americas adjusted EBITDA grew 10.5% to $143 million with margins of 31.4%. Our EMEA segment grew 4.9% in organic constant currency, with the same drivers as we saw in Americas. EMEA adjusted EBITDA grew to 26.1% to $179 million with margins expanding 550 basis points to 35.3%. And our APAC region returned to year-over-year growth, up 1.9% in organic constant currency, a meaningful sequential improvement from Q1 and in line with the trajectory we outlined in May. Growth was driven by improving commercial momentum and cross-sell for our analytics and innovation-based activation solutions as well as improvement in key markets that Jim cited earlier. APAC adjusted EBITDA increased 9.2% to $32 million with margins expanding 120 basis points to 19.8%. So strong results. Americas and EMEA signal competitive strength and APAC is recovering. Outside Americas performance remains solid despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. We believe Q2 demonstrates healthy client demand for both our measurement and analytics solutions and any macro backdrop. We believe our top line results demonstrate that our revenue growth algorithm is working. From a product perspective, Q2 was our tenth straight quarter of intelligence revenue growth above 5% and annualized Intelligence subscription growth above 5.5%, extending our performance track record. As Jim highlighted, annualized Intelligent subscription revenue exceeded $3 billion, up 5.8% and continued strong net and gross dollar retention underscores our mission criticality with our clients. Activation revenue improved for the second straight quarter, growing 6.1% in organic constant currency. Looking deeper across all regions, we've seen low double-digit growth in our analytics and innovation-based offerings. This has been driven by traction, scaling our retail analytics wins in Americas as well as high single-digit growth in APAC. Overall, we see broadly healthy client pipeline for our Activation solutions. Looking down the P&L. Q2 operating expenses increased by 5.7%, driven primarily by targeted investments in data coverage and granularity and to a lesser extent, by onetime costs related to our 2026 restructuring program. Excluding these charges, operating expenses grew much slower than reported revenue growth, demonstrating the ongoing cost discipline and increasing operating leverage across the business. Onetime restructuring costs totaled approximately $36 million in the quarter, $15 million came from our 2026 restructuring program and the balance from our legacy NIQ and GfK transformation initiatives and onetime deal-related costs. These legacy transformation programs continue to roll off as per plan. As Jim mentioned, we've completed nearly all of our 2026 program actions in the first half and we're tracking towards a $75 million cost to achieve target for 2026. These actions, which have less than 1-year payback, are setting us up for increased structural cost efficiency for years to come. From a cash standpoint, we incurred $20 million cash outlay for this program in the first half. We expect the majority of the balance to be paid out in the second half of 2026. This program has less than a 1-year payback and we expect to continue to identify additional efficiency opportunities as we move forward. Depreciation and amortization was $154 million for the quarter, approximately 14% of revenue, in line with prior quarters. If I look below the operating line, GAAP interest expense was $55 million, $40 million lower than the prior year, reflecting lower debt balances and our transformed post-IPO capital structure. Changes in foreign currency resulted in a de minimis gain in Q2 compared to a $57 million gain in Q2 of 2025, a period that contains significant FX volatility. The lower gain primarily reflects less foreign currency impact on the remeasurement of foreign currency-denominated debt. Income tax expense was $38 million or approximately 14% of adjusted EBITDA, roughly in line with expectations we provided. The net loss was $30.5 million, primarily reflecting lower FX gains versus Q2 of 2025. Adjusted net income improved by $80.3 million to positive $78.7 million, driven primarily by higher adjusted EBITDA and lower interest expense. Correspondingly, Q2 adjusted EPS came in very strong at $0.27, well ahead of our guidance and consensus. If I turn to liquidity and free cash flow, as of June 30, we had $417 million in cash and cash equivalents and $747 million available revolver capacity resulting in total available liquidity of approximately $1.2 billion. We remain undrawn on this revolver during the quarter. Cash flow from operating activities was $140.1 million versus a use of $80.6 million in Q2 2025. Capital expenditures were $66 million reflecting continued investment in strategic growth initiatives, such as building our AI capabilities, expanding our technology platform and growing our data assets such as our omnichannel consumer panels. Leverage free cash flow was positive to $74.1 million in Q2, up $137.3 million on a year-over-year basis and $197.3 million versus Q1. This is driven by revenue growth and stronger flow-through, given prudent cost management; as well as improved working capital and lower cash interest expense. I'd also note that we saw a particular outperformance from net working capital execution versus what underpinned our Q2 guidance in May. Our 2026 is the strong cash flow inflection we've previewed since our IPO. And our raised full year 2026 free cash flow guidance implies approximately $300 million of leverage free cash flow generation in the second half alone. This factors into our strong Q2 outperformance from working capital execution and aligns with our broader guidance philosophy of providing expectations we believe we can achieve, if not outperform. Net debt was $3.1 billion at quarter end, and our net leverage ratio improved to approximately 3.1x, down from 3.4x at the end of Q1. We remain firmly on track to achieve our net leverage target by the end of 2026. And a quick note on capital allocation. Our capital priorities of the business are unchanged: fund growth, expand margins and particularly pay down debt. We have successfully reinvested some of our cost program savings to fuel our AI growth strategy and we'll continue to pursue strategic tuck-in M&A where we see compelling returns. As cash builds, we gain capital allocation flexibility. This is strengthening ahead of expectations in 2026 and positions us well as we head into 2027. We will update you on our 2027 priorities as those plans firm up. Now before getting into guidance details, a quick reminder about our guidance philosophy. The strong back half and higher full year 2026 outlook is grounded in our first half overperformance. If that momentum continues, we expect to finish at or modestly above the top of our ranges. And we've set that range at the level we believe is appropriate. So for the third quarter, we expect reported revenue growth of approximately 4.9% to 5.3%, organic constant currency revenue growth of approximately 5.2% to 5.5%, adjusted EBITDA growth of 15% to 17%, driving margins of 23% to 23.5%; and adjusted EPS of $0.22 to $0.24. Our raised full year 2026 expectations include reported revenue growth of 7.1% to 7.4%, organic constant currency revenue growth of 5.2% to 5.6%, adjusted EBITDA growth of 15% to 17%, driving margins of 23.5% to 23.9%; adjusted earnings per share of $1.08 to $1.12, a more than 13% increase at the midpoint; leveraged free cash flow of $245 million to $255 million, up approximately $8 million at the midpoint and we expect to be below 3x net leverage by year-end. Our raised guidance reflects our business outperformance and favorable foreign currency from Q2 as well as our YiMian acquisition. I'll also note that we hit the ground running, integrating YiMian into our business and their solutions into our distribution channels. Based on our reported results and our Q3 and full year guidance, our implied Q4 outlook reflects OCC growth in line with our Q3 expectations, EBITDA margin expansion on a year-over-year basis, implying approximately 370 basis points of improvement versus Q3 2026, reflecting our typical Q4 revenue and cost seasonality; and adjusted EPS nearly double our Q3 expectation. I'll note that our full year 2026 modeling assumptions remain unchanged: Depreciation and amortization of $614 million to $619 million. GAAP net interest expense of $230 million to $235 million, income tax expense of $165 million to $170 million. Diluted share count of approximately 300 million and CapEx of 6.5% to 7% of revenue. In closing, it was a strong quarter. We're delivering on our promises. Our financials are strengthening. We're executing well on our core offerings, and we're building additional monetization opportunities on top. With that, operator, we're ready for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Please go ahead.

I just wanted to ask about just the general trends in the quarter. If you look, I think the Intel subscription growth remain strong, but it was really activation and I guess the transaction piece of Intel that release did well this quarter. So just trying to appreciate how much of that pull forward you talked about last time or push forward rather in April? And how sustainable these kind of growth rates are in activation maybe for the second half of the year?

Sure. Sure, Manav. This is Jim here. We're going to -- we'll let Mike take that one right out of the gate.

Thanks, Manav. So we're excited about the growth that we saw in both intelligence and activation for the quarter. Intelligence at 5.7% and Activation at 6.1%, we're continuing to continue to see that momentum build. In particular, when we look at our APAC business, we saw it improve to 1.9% here in Q2, and we expect that to continue to contribute overall growth, which will help both on Intelligence and Activation as that continues to grow overall. As I highlighted, our e-commerce and CPS growth rates are very, very strong, call it, north of 30% in terms of the growth rates associated with those two areas in particular. And we should see those continue to move both our intelligence in particular and to some degree, activation. So we're very excited about it. And as you know, 80% of that -- our business is 3- to 5-year contracts. We're continuing to grow that in terms of win backs in the marketplace, as we highlighted in the course of our prepared remarks. And so we're very excited about what we're seeing in the business. I appreciate the question that you've asked, and we continue to see real good results as it relates to both Intelligence and Activation.

Okay. Got it. And Jim, maybe just on Connect AI, just help me visualize exactly what you're building for clients and perhaps how that gets monetized?

Sure. So I'll -- Manav, I'll give you a little lead in. And we have Troy in here, our Chief Product Officer, I want to make sure you get to hear directly from him. But what we started seeing really later last year and then as we came into this year, just being in conversations with our clients is they're trying to figure out how to accelerate their ability to innovate, of course, how to save money, how to do better price erosion, how to do everything better than they had before by using all the assets at their disposal. And what they clearly understood as they need our information and our models inside their world. What we started finding out is they also needed our know-how and how to integrate information together. And they were finding this out because they were coming to us and saying, "Hey, the x integrator needs help." And so these charter deals that you heard us announce are a lot about that. They are about new use cases, by the way, with new budgets inside our clients' world where we're helping them do the things that they normally do every day, just better, faster and cheaper. So I'll turn it over to Troy to give you more color. I think this is a really important thing for us to spend time on.

Yes. So our Connect AI services are specifically for one of our segment -- AI segments. And that AI segment is our AI Builder segment that Jim just talked about. So these are a series of clients that want to bring insights and analytics into their environments and use that NIQ intelligence to amplify those workflows. So like Jim mentioned, we announced our first charter clients last week, Purina was the first one that's named. But that group also includes a global personal hygiene company, a leading beauty company and 2 global beverage companies. We're going to be adding more charter clients through the end of this year, which will include retailers. Each charter client ultimately gets dedicated engineers and data scientists that help make our intelligence work within their workflows. So what this means is they actually help write code and connect their environments to ours. And Jim also mentioned in his remarks that our new products have permission service layers built in. This creates additional value and we are the decoding and the certified answer for things around our data and our intelligence. And like it was already said, but already say it again, demand has come fast. 49 live opportunities in the pipeline many more active discussions are in process. And I think soon, you'll see retailers and other clients into the mix. And then on top of that, we also have active discussions on several AI partnerships to scale this even further. One, leveraging forward-deployed engineers expertise to speed up our development for our solutions that we'll bring to market. And then we have multiple partners around agentic commerce measurement and touchpoints, and that product will be launched later this year. More to come on that soon. So the charter phase is all about proving the value and hardening a repeatable model. It's deep, it's sticky, and it's where we see the biggest middle to the long-term opportunity in our space.

Your next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh with UBS.

Congratulations on the results. I wonder, just given the trends in the organic constant currency growth, maybe just talk to activation because that looks really good. And on the intelligence side, too, even off a tougher comp, you saw a real nice reacceleration is really important. So maybe you can just revisit that a little bit.

Kevin, you broke up just a tiny bit in there. I think your -- this is Jim, your question in essence is, tell me about intelligence and activation growth and how you feel about it? Is that...

Yes, that's exactly right. Really just and even off tougher comps, you saw a real nice reacceleration. So maybe just a little bit on that because it's really nice to see that.

All right. So appreciate it, Kevin. It's Mike. I mean when we look at intelligence, and I mentioned we saw the rebound associated with APAC at the 1.9% growth. And one of the things that we did, and we mentioned this a bit in Q1, was we improved our coverage. We signed up a couple more retailers that we specifically talked about in Q1, and we're starting to see that starting to pay off and see it in the growth that we're seeing in intelligence. And we're continuing to win in the marketplace. Those are continuing to add. And as I had mentioned a little bit during my prepared remarks and to Manav's question, when you look at really what's been happening in e-com and our panel on demand has just been really been very attractive to the marketplace and have been growing at plus 30%. So all those are contributing to our intelligence growth, and we're continuing to see that happen. On the activation side, people are very interested in our analytics solutions, in particular, And our AI BASES screener is just one example that's happening in our BASES portfolio as well. So as I said in my comments, both of those business lines are growing at greater than double digit overall. And so the demand has been very strong for Activation. So that's what we're seeing overall, Kevin, and we're very excited about what's happening in both of those areas. And as well as what Troy had mentioned previously.

And then just real quick, as you're phasing in AI, any way to think about where it is from a geographical perspective in terms of just coverage and how we should think about that over the balance of the year?

So you're talking about like maybe where is the most initial penetration, is that fair?

Yes. Yes, that's exactly right.

So yes, for sure, it's in the U.S., right, but not exclusively at all to the U.S. I think the bigger more look at our C360 conference, which is mostly a U.S.-based conference, they're saying both formally and informally in our little conversations as our clients help us move faster. We see what you can do. We, like what you're doing, which you told us on stage. How can you help me move faster internally to navigate what I've got to navigate to use these AI tools, not only on your data, but your data combined with our data? So I think they're much more in position as Troy said, with the builder. They're our builders and they're in a position to move quickly. But the pipeline is there in Western Europe, for sure; in Asia, for sure; even EMEA because these tools work. And our data is primed to be able to be used to take advantage of it. And so it's not just in our builder product, but it's also in our Optiq products within Discover, and we're releasing some new capabilities yet this month that people are going to be able to take advantage of if they so choose, and we believe they will. So it's really broad-based. The whole world is dealing with AI, as you know. But as far as the charter things that we've talked about, that's primarily U.S. But the pipeline has plenty of global opportunities as well.

Your next question comes from the line of Alexander Hess with JPMorgan.

Thank you, operator. I wanted to maybe just dive into something maybe to start with the call-outs that CPS, I understand it's the consumer panel business, and then e-com grew north of 30%. As intelligence growing in the mid-single digits, does that imply you have products in sort of traditional measurement and in retail analytics that are maybe growing below that number or notably below that number? Or is that just not the right way to think about it? Just want to clarify how you guys bucket that call out specifically.

So the core business, what we call our RMS business, is primarily in intelligence. I think the number is the number there. And of course, CPS and e-com are portions that are growing faster. But as a percentage of the total revenue, they're much smaller, right? And so I wouldn't think of it that way, Alex. I would say that the number you're seeing stands on its own, and it reflects what I believe is a good, healthy reoccurring revenue stream. And I'll just remind you that none of that number -- while there's a little of our AI-based revenue in that number, none of our guidance forward is really reflecting that yet. We're being cautious to see how fast the stuff is kicking up. But that will just -- we consider that intelligence revenue, by the way, for the most part. That will just pick that number up.

Awesome. And then can you give us an update on a full view measurement, client count, any recent traction? Obviously, you guys put out some press releases about integrating some more Amazon 3P data in certain categories. But just anything on full view measurement in 2Q and your outlook for beyond Q2?

Yes. So I don't have the exact number in front of me, but we know that it's more than 200 clients now have taken up the full view measure. And that strategy, which we've embarked on 5 years ago, is much more expansive than just Amazon sales and share or Costco or whatever. And so strong -- it's the foundation of what we do, not only driving -- we're getting more adoption but it also helps us with our annual renewal cycle, and it's proving to be quite good. I think the insight behind that question is we have our foot in that world, and it's important that we always have what we call the full view, so the most holistic view of this consumer shopping behavior. If we lose that, we lose what is the essence of who we are. That is what enables AI. So we have our foot in the other world firmly now. I think trying to demonstrate that the full view plus these AI capabilities that are going to keep us super relevant to our clients and also allow us to grow. And our route of that is we're now in more -- even more use cases. I think there was a theory we'd be in less, no, we're in more use cases and there are obvious use cases now. And we're also kind of getting access to more budgets within our clients. So we're not arguing over the same dollar. So I'd like to talk about both those things together now.

And we do have multiple product enhancements that are coming for full view measurement. You referenced one like there's many more coming in the back half of this year.

Your next question comes from the line of Kyle Peterson with Needham.

Nice results. Wanted to start off on the data consumption disclosure to get to plus 25% year-to-date, It's really good to see. I guess how can we think about this over the medium term? Is this something that drives higher consumption across the product base and then push revenue higher? Or is this like a more highly correlated things from the AI products? I'm just trying to, I guess, parse through the link between consumption and revenue over the medium term.

Sure, Kyle. First, thanks for noticing our results and a good question. So what it really does is, in my view is, measure our relevance with our clients. And any notion that it's not relevant. I think it's just proven by that, they're only consuming more and more because the more granular the data, the more depth in the data or breadth, I should say, on the data, the better any tool is going to work. And so they continue to use Discover and it's, let's say, the more traditional analytics, which are quite powerful. But they are also experimenting in some cases, are actually doing in some cases and using our data points inside their world, they're sophisticated enough to do that. So I think it's an overall measure of how our relevance continues to grow within our clients. And I don't know if we measured that thing that far in the past, but I can tell you that, that number hasn't been that high. So I think it's just showing how in the double digits or kind of high double digits. I think you'll see that trend continue because it's like this insatiable demand for what we have. And as they're seeing their results get better, especially combined with some of their own assets only they have for themselves with our data at a granular level, they're seeing that they can make pretty profound changes either making themselves more cost efficient or innovating more quickly and driving the top line.

Great. That's very helpful. And then I guess maybe if we could switch gears over to kind of how some of your client conversations are evolving, are you guys seeing any change or growth in budget for demand-based solutions may be away from traditional marketing or kind of SKU-based placement? Obviously, it seems like agentic commerce and data-based product development decisioning is definitely becoming increasingly prevalent. So I guess like how are you -- is that playing out at all in your kind of client discussions? And if so, how is that potentially translating into conversion or demand?

Yes. So yes, for sure. And I'll -- gives me a chance to mention Irina Stoian that we just recently brought in. She's -- the work for Palantir doing a lot of the same things is going to work with us on. And that's a direct reaction/anticipation of the demand for what's now being called for deployed engineers, but engineers who are in our clients' world helping them use our core services in new ways integrated with theirs. So that conversations are new, they're new budgets. I've been in many, but Troy has been even more than I have, maybe, Troy, you can elaborate on 1 or 2.