PagerDuty, Inc. ($PD)

Earnings Call Transcript · May 28, 2026

NYSE US Information Technology Software Earnings Calls 46 min

Highlights from the call

In the first quarter of fiscal year 2027, PagerDuty, Inc. reported revenue of $121 million, reflecting a 1% year-over-year increase, and exceeded guidance for both revenue and non-GAAP operating margin. The company achieved a non-GAAP operating margin of 25%, up from 20% in the prior year. Despite flat annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $496 million, management maintained guidance for the full fiscal year, projecting revenue between $488.5 million and $496.5 million, indicating a cautious outlook amid ongoing transitions in pricing models and customer dynamics.

Main topics

  • Leadership Transition: PagerDuty announced a leadership change with John DiLullo taking over as CEO from Jennifer Tejada, who transitions to Executive Chair. Tejada expressed confidence in DiLullo's ability to lead the company into its next growth phase, stating, "Now is the right time for this transition."
  • Usage-Based Pricing Model: The new usage-based pricing model has shown promising early results, with ARR from customers on this model nearly doubling from Q4 to Q1. Management noted, "This underscores the large opportunity ahead of us with our new pricing framework as a key driver of ARR growth acceleration."
  • Customer Acquisition and Retention: PagerDuty added over 600 new customers for the fifth consecutive quarter, with total customers growing 14% year-over-year. However, net retention rates have declined, prompting management to express confidence in recovery through improved customer engagement strategies.
  • Financial Performance: The company reported a GAAP net income of $10.2 million, marking its fourth consecutive quarter of profitability. Operating income increased to $30 million, reflecting a disciplined focus on efficiency and operational execution.
  • Product Innovation and Market Position: PagerDuty continues to innovate with new products and enhancements, particularly in AI and automation, which are expected to drive future growth. The company is positioned as a "control plane for AI," which is critical as enterprises increasingly adopt AI technologies.

Key metrics mentioned

  • Revenue: $121 million (vs $120 million est, +1% YoY)
  • Non-GAAP Operating Margin: 25% (vs 20% YoY)
  • GAAP Net Income: $10.2 million (fourth consecutive quarter of profitability)
  • Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): $496 million (flat YoY)
  • Total Customers: 36,000 (up 14% YoY)
  • Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate: 97% (down from previous quarter)

PagerDuty's first quarter results reflect a stable financial performance amid significant transitions in leadership and pricing strategy. While the company has shown resilience in customer acquisition and margin expansion, the decline in net retention raises concerns that need to be addressed. Investors should monitor the effectiveness of the new pricing model and customer engagement strategies as potential catalysts for future growth.

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

Operator
#1

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us to discuss PagerDuty's First Quarter and Fiscal Year 2027 Results. With me today on today's call are Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty's Executive Chair; John DiLullo, PagerDuty's Chief Executive Officer; and Howard Wilson, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that statements made on this call include forward-looking statements based on the environment as we currently see it, which involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our growth prospects, future revenue, operating margins, net income, cash balance and total addressable market, among others and represent our management's beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made, and we undertake no obligation to update these. During today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which are in addition to and not a substitute for or superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures is available in our earnings release, which can be found on our Investor Relations website. Further information on these and other factors that could cause the company's financial results to differ materially are included in filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recently filed Form 10-K and our subsequent filings made with the SEC. With that, I will turn the call over to Jennifer.

Unknown Executive

Executives
#2

Thank you, Christine. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us today. Before we discuss our results, I want to acknowledge the leadership change we announced mid-May. After 10 years as CEO, I've transitioned to Executive Chair. And today, I'm pleased to introduce PagerDuty's new CEO, John DiLullo. We're already partnering well, and the transition is off to a great start. John's appointment is the result of a deliberate and comprehensive succession process that I initiated with the Board some time ago. John stood out as a proven leader with a unique combination of technical depth, operational discipline and go-to-market experience. Prior to joining PagerDuty, he served as CEO of both public and private companies, most recently Deepwatch and previously LiveVox in Lastline. Having been a customer and a partner in the past, he brings firsthand bold of pay-for-Duty's role in our market of our potential as well as an understanding of how our customers operate in increasingly complex mission-critical environments. With the business poised for profitable growth acceleration now is the right time for this transition. The Board and I are confident John is the right leader to build on PagerDuty's momentum towards our next phase of growth. I'll turn it over to John for his brief remarks.

Matthew Swanson

Analysts
#3

Thank you, John. I am very excited to join you today. As Jennifer mentioned, I've known and followed PagerDuty for years. as both a customer and as a partner. And I've long admired the role that the company plays at a center of modern digital operations. That perspective has only deepened in the weeks since I joined, as I spent time with Jen, the Board and the broader team. What stands out to me is the strength of the foundation, a trusted brand and enviable customer base and a platform that sits at the core of real-time, mission-critical operations. As digital environments become more and more complex and the pace of innovation accelerates with AI and automation volumes climbing, we expect platform usage to continue to grow. With our transition to usage-based pricing underway, usage growth should translate to revenue growth over time. And I believe PagerDuty is exceptionally well positioned to extend its leadership. In my past CEO and leadership positions, I focus on scaling organizations, strengthening execution and aligning closely with customer needs. That experience has illuminated for me a clear opportunity to build on the momentum already underway at PagerDuty. In the near term, my priority is simple, listen, learn and engage. I'm spending time with employees, with customers and with partners to deepen my understanding of our market and our business. I'm incredibly excited about what lies ahead and confident in our ability to capture the opportunity in front of us. I look forward to spending time and partnering with our analysts and shareholders frequently in the quarters ahead.

Unknown Executive

Executives
#4

Thank you, John. I look forward to connecting on to our shareholder community and callbacks and at our next investor conference. With this leadership transition, I have reflected on my time at PagerDuty. Over the last decade, we've evolved from a company with a single product, less than $50 million in revenue, and a few thousand customers to the leading AI-first operations platform, generating nearly $500 million in profitable revenue. We strengthened our core franchise, digital operations management by embedding AI and automation into the platform driving greater customer outcomes and increasing differentiation. In doing so, we have become a strategic partner and the AI control plane for our clients. In Q1, PagerDuty delivered results that exceeded the top end of guidance for both revenue and non-GAAP operating margin. Quarterly revenue was $121 million, up 1% year-over-year and annual recurring revenue was $496 million, flat year-over-year. we grew non-GAAP operating margin to 25% through consistent discipline, structural efficiency initiatives and AI adoption. We see a clear path to our long-term target of 30% non-GAAP operating margin as we increase our own operational AI leverage and drive customer usage of our ad platform. We are confident that our product enhancements and pricing improvements initiated last year, notably the introduction of the new usage-based Operations Cloud and PagerDuty Advance Pricing and packaging will accelerate revenue growth. As a reminder, we have historically offered individual products, enterprise incident management, customer service operations and runbook automation via sea-based licensing, while we sell event intelligence and AI products through a usage-based model, our full suite of products are now available through an integrated platform with usage-based pricing. Usage-based products, which include AI Ops, PagerDuty Advance and Operations Cloud, now account for nearly 10% of our total ARR. To date, early customer adoption of the new Operations Cloud plan has unlocked more value for customers and growing the ARR because it incentivizes the use of multiple products. This underscores the large opportunity ahead of us with our new pricing framework as a key driver of ARR growth acceleration. The new Operations Cloud offering deployed with professional services and support plays a critical role in helping expand customers' use of the full platform. Customers who choose the Operations Cloud, gain new access to all of our products via a more flexible platform license. Removing the friction related to adding users across departments. This leads to new operational use cases, which ultimately drive increased usage. Our usage-based model is also predictable for customers. They start with a level of usage across the integrated product line, which can increase the value realized during the term of the contract. Usage elements include events, AI actions and automated workflows. As customers automate more work, PagerDuty scales with the value delivered through AI, event intelligence and automation, while mitigating the risks associated with the customer needing to reduce user count. In addition, customers who deploy the operations Cloud with our new professional services model see an over 80% improvement in time to value and 50% higher product engagement compared to those who self-implement. We are encouraged by these results and the initial customer conversions this year, which are leading to larger multiyear more strategic commitments. The customers who have adopted the new Ops Cloud offering experienced broad platform engagement. The majority of our early cohort are actively using more capabilities across incident management, infinite workflows, event intelligence and agents with teams broadening both the breadth of features they rely on and the number of users operating within the platform day-to-day. These customers are integrating the operations Cloud more deeply into how their organizations work. reflecting the value of a deliberate customer-first approach to migration and onboarding. One of the clear signals of customer momentum in Q1 came from a Fortune 500 automotive manufacturer. -- previously a customer on a fee-based plan that migrated to the Operations Cloud offering. Within the lease of closing, the customer realizes the value of their initial purchase with expansion into a subsidiary. We expect that customer to purchase even more usage during their contract term. leading growth indicators continue to underpin momentum, giving us confidence in both ongoing demand and increasingly successful traction with our strategies to accelerate growth, including refining our enterprise sales motion, flexible usage-based contracts and significant new platform feature releases like our chat-first incident management and our SRE agents. Recent product innovation has led to strategic wins as more established, highly regulated businesses like banks operating more like tech companies. a Fortune 100 financial institution expanded with us to support a new FRE model deployment. PagerDuty's ability to support the company's high-efficiency operational goals and the bank shift towards the modern SRE model led to a 6-figure early renewal and enterprise-wide expansion. Strategic wins like these underscore why we continue to win new customers. For the fifth consecutive quarter, we acquired over 600 new customers and total customers on the platform grew 14% year-over-year. We continue to see progress in our international markets, specifically Asia Pacific and Japan where enterprise focus has led to a marquee land of a television broadcasting and media company, which we expect will expand over time. In the North American and EMEA markets, our efforts to stabilize retention and accelerate new and expansion business are bearing fruit. Large enterprises in the retail and the automotive sectors as well as fast-growing native AI and defense tech companies like CoreWeave and [ Inderal ], are benefiting from the value and resilience that PagerDuty provides. A long-term strategic retailer in North America executed a renewal and expansion with us on the Operations Cloud and -- running automation with a multiyear 7-figure agreement. This win was also a total competitive displacement. PagerDuty aligned its integrated automation platform with the customers' executive leadership and corporate initiatives to support their objectives of advanced operational efficiency. A leading global automotive manufacturer in EMEA turned to PagerDuty as they standardize incident management across their global IT operations. This expansion is critical as the company transitions to a fully electric vehicle range retiring always on reliability to avoid costly plant disruptions. Previously, their incident response was fragmented across silo teams, which created operational blind spots. With PagerDuty, the customer benefits from standardized incident response, 24/7 global coverage and clear accountability for faster resolution times. The adoption of PagerDuty by innovative AI companies as new lands and expansions demonstrates how our platform meets the evolving needs of the AI era. Innovative AI start-ups who joined the platform during the quarter included [ Lifespan, Dropdown AI and Signal AI ] is the new operational risk layer for enterprise. It's accelerating software development and deployment at unprecedented velocity, leading to a new magnitude of complexity in the production environment. In addition to being higher in volume and more complex, AI-driven failures can be less predictable and less visible. And no customer segment is immune. AI failure and large enterprises can become major operational failures due to automation. Even AI native firms are vulnerable to disruptions eroding the trust in AI products. This creates more demand for the PagerDuty platform drives increased event in instant volume and ultimately increases usage. Their in-sell platform better positioned than the PagerDuty Operations Cloud, to resolve these operational failures and even prevent them before the disruption happens. PagerDuty is at the forefront of autonomous operations. The 3 pillars of our platform strategy, our AI and automation, full life cycle incident management and platform and ecosystem extensibility. Our FRE agent launched in October highlights our focus on AI and automation, acting as a virtual responder, the FRE agent gather signals across the tech stack performs approved remediation and maintains an operational shared memory to learn from has incidents. The chat native interface in Slack and Microsoft teams directly integrated to AI agents and post infinite reviews creates a full life cycle experience and modernizes the responder experience. Our AI ecosystem supported by marquee partnerships, including Anthropic, can, cursor and line-chain enables PagerDuty agents to interact across whatever AI-enabled surface a developer chooses. PagerDuty has fast to come the new control plane for AI, helping customers to orchestrate and manage agents with context clarity and fidelity that made us the category leader first for incident management and then for digital operations. Those agents are now running at machine speed, where they can reason and act with or without human involvement. According to PagerDuty research, expensive cascading failure scenarios can cost enterprises more than $1 million an hour. PagerDuty is paving the way for unprecedented business continuity and resilience for customers moving towards autonomous operations. The operations cloud connects everything from developer tools, monitoring and systems of record. Then it intelligently orchestrates resources with AI to drive faster, smarter decisions to issues are identified even before code ships. If and when a problem does arise in production, the platform analyzes the context and resolve issues expeditiously it automatically updates systems of record for compliance and reporting. In this era of fast-moving technological disruption, intelligence and automation work together to keep operations running smoothly, protecting revenue and reputation. This product innovation and our new pricing combined have been key to attracting new customers and encouraging existing customers to expand. Australia's leading digital bank became a PagerDuty customer in the quarter at on the platform with a 7-figure multiyear deal. This engagement underscores PagerDuty's position as a strategic operations partner. Prior to deploying PagerDuty, the customer experienced several major outages unmanageable with a homegrown incident management system by adopting pay-for-duty into management, AI Ops and runbook automation, the customer is reducing systemic risk. A leading not-for-profit financial services organization in North America expanded its relationship with us in a multiyear, multimillion dollar contract for the PagerDuty Operations Club. Access to the full PagerDuty platform via the Operations Cloud offering enables the customer to align its operational maturity goals to the platform's capabilities. The breadth of the platform gives the customer the confidence to consolidate multiple point solutions to spend with PagerDuty. A global consulting company and customers since 2018, renewed a 6-figure expansion this quarter. PagerDuty's best agreed bidirectional interoperability with their system of record, was the winning competitive advantage over an observability vendor. PagerDuty is improving the end user experience by reducing downtime and driving operational transformation. Our platform mitigates systemic risks not only for enterprise customers, but also for our over 650 non-for-profit customers, in turn, helping them to amplify their mutant-driven impact. In Q1, we announced our latest impact cohort, including grants to nonprofits focused on health care, humanitarian aid and crisis response. PagerDuty was recognized for its workplace culture and industry leadership. Inspiring Workplaces named PagerDuty as an employer of choice. 2026 [ give-your-own ] radar for incident response platforms and PagerDuty a leader and outperformer for the fourth consecutive year. For teams dealing with noise observability, coordination breakdowns or immediate response, this acknowledgment is a clear signal that PagerDuty is leading the market in the evolution to a first operations. In Q1, we improved gross retention sequentially, demonstrate an ongoing new customer acquisition momentum and delivered strong expansion in our key markets, large enterprise and AI native. Our disciplined execution and product innovation led to consistent margin expansion. Before I hand it over to Howard, I want to thank all of our current and past coverage analysts and investors for your support and counsel. This is my 29th and like the last earnings call with PagerDuty. And while it hasn't always been easy, it has always been professional, constructive and even fun. You held us to a high standard, and I've learned enormously from this community. I appreciate your investment in PagerDuty and both your past and ongoing support of our team. Leading PagerDuty for the last 10 years has been an honor and a joy. We have navigated countless market transitions while continuing to innovate for our customers, expanding our customer base from less than 5,000 when I started to more than 36,000 strong today. Together, we've shaped the industry. First is a leading voice for DevOps then defining the digital operations category and most recently, leading the market in AI first operations. We grew the company more than tenfold while expanding our profitability and we became the definitive category leader, one that evolved from a single cloud app to an AI-first platform the most important and innovative companies in the world, trust and rely on. I'm really proud of our people, past and current and grateful to our customers, many of whom I partner with personally for their trust. In transitioning to Executive Chair, I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be part of an outstanding team, and I'm optimistic for the enormous opportunity ahead. I've had the opportunity to get to know John, and we've already built a strong partnership. He has my complete confidence and support in leading the next chapter for PagerDuty, and I believe he will earn yours too. Thank you. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Howard.

Howard Wilson

Executives
#5

Thank you, Jen, and good day to everyone joining us on this afternoon's call. Before I dive into the financials, I want to thank Jim for her exceptional leadership, partnership and stewardship of PagerDuty over the years. I share her enthusiasm in welcoming John to the executive team. Unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses and operating results on this call are on a non-GAAP basis and are reconciled to our GAAP results in the earnings release that was posted on our Investor Relations website before the call. Before reviewing our first quarter financial results, I want to highlight a meaningful inflection point in our business model transformation. The operations, cloud pricing and packaging completed its first full quarter in limited general availability. Early results showed traction. The ARR of customers on this model nearly doubled from Q4 to Q1. And of our customers spending over $100,000 a year, over 15 have transitioned to the model, which gives us confidence in the business model transformation to usage-based pricing. Moving to results. In the first quarter of FY '27, we delivered solid performance, exceeding our revenue and operating margin guidance ranges. We continue to see strong demand signals in particular, new customer acquisitions, existing customer expansion and platform usage growth. Our customer success and product initiatives contributed to an improvement in our gross retention from Q4 to Q1, and we expect this to gradually improve through the year. Revenue for the quarter was $121 million, up 1% year-over-year with international revenue increasing 3% annually, contributing 29% of total revenue. Q1 gross margin was 86% at the high end of our 84% to 86% target range. Operating income was $30 million or 25% of revenue compared to $24 million or 20% of revenue in the same quarter last year. This margin expansion reflects our rigorous focus on efficiency and operational execution. GAAP net income was $10.2 million, our fourth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. We're continuing our progress on the path to sustained GAAP profitability. Annual recurring revenue in Q1 was $496 million, in line with the amount in the year ago period. customers spending over $100,000 in annual recurring revenue was $860 million, up 1% year-over-year. Dollar-based net retention was 97%, we expect our continued customer success and renewal initiatives, along with our operations cloud pricing to result in stabilization of DBNR and for it to gradually increase throughout the year. Total paid customers grew to 15,380 in Q1, adding 133 net new customers since the year ago period. Free and paid customers on our platform grew to over 36,000 an increase of approximately 14% compared to Q1 of last year. In terms of cash flow for the quarter, cash from operations was $44 million or 37% of revenue and free cash flow was $41 million or 34% of revenue. This strong cash generation gives us the financial stability and flexibility to continue to invest in our go-to-market transformation and AI product development while maintaining our commitment to shareholder returns. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $444 million in cash, cash equivalents and investments. On a trailing 12 months basis, billings were $497 million, an increase of 1% compared to a year ago. At the end of Q1, total RPO was approximately $441 million increasing 3% year-over-year. Of this amount, approximately $316 million or 72% is expected to be recognized over the next 12 months. $100 million or 23% over months 13 to 24 and the remainder thereafter. During the quarter, we repurchased 8.5 million shares for $63 million and completed the authorized $200 million share repurchase program. We view our current valuation as a compelling opportunity. Looking ahead, our strong balance sheet provides us significant flexibility to execute on our priorities while returning capital to shareholders. And today, we've announced our latest $100 million share repurchase program. Now turning to guidance. For the second quarter fiscal 2027, we expect revenue in the range of $122 million to $124 million, with the midpoint approximately flat year-over-year. and net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty, Inc. in the range of $0.29 to $0.31. This implies an operating margin of 22% to 23%. For the full fiscal year 2027, we expect revenue in the range of $488.5 million to $496.5 million, with the midpoint essentially flat year-over-year. This is the same range as previously provided. And net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty, Inc. in the range of $1.27 to $1.32 an increase based on the reduced share count as a result of the completion of the buyback program. This implies an operating margin of 24% to 25%. Before moving to questions, I would like to provide assistance with modeling FY '27. On cash flow, Q1 free cash flow was elevated primarily due to overperformance on collections which we expect to normalize in Q2. On operating margin, part of the Q1 overperformance was due to marketing program spend, which we expect to deploy in Q2. Our Q1 performance demonstrates the rigorous focus on efficiency and operational execution that underpins our business, leveraging a solid balance sheet healthy cash balance and strong free cash flow generation, we possess the financial agility required to fuel our AI product development and go-to-market transformation, all while supporting a seamless transition of leadership. With that, I will open up the call for Q&A.

Operator

Operator
#6

[Operator Instructions]. And our first question comes from the line of Morgan Stanley's analysts, Sanjit Singh, your line is open.

Unknown Analyst

Analysts
#7

This is Christian Darrow on for Sanjit. I want to ask about the net retention rates. Really nice to see the gross retention rate improvement that you called out, but the net retention rate did take a step down from last quarter. So just curious what gives you that confidence on the recovery and the deviation on the pension side?

Unknown Executive

Executives
#8

Sure. Thanks for the question, Chris, and I really appreciate it. It's nice to see you. One, we have really started to see good progress with our early cohort in the pricing transition. So I spoke about a number of customers in prepared remarks, who frankly, had come to us with a view of potentially needing to downgrade as a result of seat-based pressure. And following their ability to understand the flexibility and access to new products on the platform as well as the flexibility based on usage-based pricing, they actually expanded with us in the time frame. And we're quite early in that transition, but it is progressing well. As a reminder, we kicked up early access in Q3, limited general availability in Q4, and we've opened that up to a much broader set of customers this term in this quarter. In addition, we're seeing very strong demand signals. So Howard mentioned is our fifth consecutive quarter of over 600 new customer logos. Those tend to be early adopters. There are demonstrations that our PLG motion is still a competitive advantage, but also that the most innovative developers and native AI start-ups are choosing PagerDuty. And as we know from history, those types of new customers tend to grow organically as they expand their businesses themselves. And then lastly, what we're also seeing is the benefit of improving the way we renew customers, offering multiyear, multiproduct agreements. So we started to mitigate some of that risk over time. Our customer base is also in transition. We have some segments of the customer base that are under more financial pressure than others, including like midsized SaaS, for instance. But what we are seeing is -- so really encouraging new demand from really large enterprises in verticals that we had historically focused on, you heard me talk about 2 automotive manufacturers. We're seeing something similar in financial services as well as in health care. And then the last thing that I'll say is, for our customers where AI operations is becoming an important demand driver, many of them are just now starting to move from what I'd call the experimentation phase where there is less risk to deploy AI in production at scale. When you start to scale AI into production environment, the risk spike pretty significantly as the complexity and the potential blast radius of issues. And that's why we really see customers start to lean in on their investments. So that is still in front of us. That's why we see potentially some short-term transition with customers moving from seat-based to usage-based but long-term AI being a true tailwind for the business.

Howard Wilson

Executives
#9

And Christian, just one additional point that I would add is that we monitor closely the growth in usage on our platform. And again, this quarter, we saw that continue to increase. So that validates the approach that we're taking around moving to our flexible operations car pricing model. And the early results from that have been strong. So we saw from Q4 to Q1 nearly doubling the ARR of customers who were on that model. And so we do think that not only will this be good in terms of helping us mitigate some of the pressure around gross retention because of seat-based compression, it actually creates a really good foundation for growth because we've seen with most of those customers that we've moved into that model that they, in fact, were able to renew that at higher values, doing an expansion at the same time. So right now, we're dealing with both of these things in parallel because not every customer in our base is exactly the same. They're dealing with different dynamics. And it's really encouraging to see a lot of those native AI companies and a lot of enterprises, as Jen mentioned, they are continuing to increase the investment in PagerDuty even whilst we might be dealing with some other customers who are in the transitional phase.

Unknown Analyst

Analysts
#10

Got it. That's very helpful. And then, John, I know it's still early, but what are some of your key learnings so far as you've gone to ramp up here? And any idea around what your key priorities or key changes that you're looking to make at the organization are.

John DiLullo

Executives
#11

Yes. Thanks for the question, Chris. It's really early days for me. I'm just starting to get to know the team and to listen and learn to all the great things that the company is doing. But I will say that I was very excited to get the call. And I've been a customer multiple times to have a good understanding of the product. And I think firsthand, I realize what's the capabilities of the product and what the platform are and how deeply integrated it is into the operations of so many leading companies. And I think one of the things, and you've heard it a couple of times already on the call that the number of new logos and the amount of -- the amount of utilization of the platform, the market dynamics that we're and that we exist in are very, very favorable. AI continues to accelerate the creation of growth and the automation workflows, autonomous systems and just more software, more dependent, is more automation means more inference, more compute and that all is going to lead to just greater need for resilience and orchestration and real-time operational response, which is just what PagerDuty does better than anybody else. And I think to some extent, I think the company is a little bit perhaps underappreciated by investors. And I think working together with the team and Jen's just been great during the transition as Howard and the whole team, but I think we have a great opportunity here to unlock value, and I just couldn't be more excited.

Operator

Operator
#12

And our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ingo with Truist.

Unknown Analyst

Analysts
#13

This is Jonathan on from Milena -- I wanted to ask a little bit about profitability. So you guys have been GAAP profitable for a while now, and you're targeting 30% operating margins. considering kind of like the heavy R&D needed for like agented products, how are you balancing the need for product velocity with head -- growth and commitment to margin expansion.

Unknown Executive

Executives
#14

I'll take a shot at that and then Howard, you can jump in. I mean, one, we didn't just start building our AI products. We have been building AI into the platform for several years. We've built a distinct advantage through the proprietary context in our own model that comes from more than a decade of capturing insights and information from workflows, developers themselves, events that we ingest and how incidents are resolved. So we've been making investments over many, many years to put ourselves in an incredibly strong competitive position. In addition, Rukmini Reddy, our Head of Engineering, has really been leading the charge in deploying AI and throughout our own developer community and our entire her development organization uses AI to expedite their and amplify their creativity. And that's led us to be able to deploy and deliver more features at a higher velocity than we have in the past. Of course, we have a high standard for resiliency. So we maintain our commitment to security, resilience and reliability at scale. That hasn't changed. But our ability to unlock new features, whether it's chat-first incident management experience from end-to-end or increasing the capabilities of our genic solution like our SRE agent, we're able to do that on a lower cost basis than we have in the past. We're also deploying AI throughout the company and using it in ways to create efficiency. And as you know, Howard and I have been focused for many years on structural programs to make the business more efficient long term to support our ability to continue to invest in R&D. And I disclosed in my comments and open up to Howard with the fact that we see ourselves as a growth company and as a category leader, we know that the market expects us to innovate, and that's not changing. That's something that John and I, I think, are very well aligned on and you should continue to see new products and features coming out of PagerDuty at a similar case than what you've seen in the past few quarters.

Howard Wilson

Executives
#15

Yes. And I would just add to Jen's comments, we've always taken a balanced view on capital allocation. So that sometimes means that you have to change the places where we invest within an organization. And the one strength that we have that stands out as PagerDuty is our gross margin. So we're operating at gross margins typically around 85%, 86%. We continue to fine-tune of the use of our infrastructure and that then creates room for us to continue to expand the services that we deliver, while still maintaining best-in-class gross margins. And then the work that our team has been doing internally by deploying AI aggressively in terms of the work that they do, particularly within our engineering team means that we've created a lot more capacity, and that capacity has allowed us to increase pace of innovation. So it's a combination of factors that we do, but always with that view to saying like, where are we able to drive or optimize so that we can improve our productivity in other areas to create room to invest in a different space.

Operator

Operator
#16

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Sherman with TD Cowen. Andrew?

Andrew Sherman

Analysts
#17

It's been great working with you, and John, congrats on your new role. The 10% of ARR from consumption was great to get that number. Maybe just touch on the -- how -- where do you think that can get to by the end of this year? Or what do you have a certain cohort customers that you're targeting? And what's resin their receptiveness to expanding under this new model and comfort with the price and the cost and the usage and all that.

Howard Wilson

Executives
#18

Yes, sure. And well, there's a lot in that question, Andrew, but let me try and cover what I can. -- yes, look, it's great for us to see that we're nearly 10% of our ARR coming from those usage-based products. We haven't put a specific number out there in terms of where we want to get to by the end of the year. but it's clearly an area of focus for us because, one, it delivers a lot of value to our customers. the overarching message that we hear from customers as they move to our operations or pricing, is that the access to all of our products, removing that friction just makes it easier for them to mark towards the goal of operational resilience and deliver the best experiences to their customers. So there's a strong customer appeal to being able to have full access to the platform. What we are expecting, though, is we are expecting that growth to be able to help not only mitigate some of the retention that I spoke about earlier, but also accelerate our growth as a company. Because what we've seen, if I just look at 2 quarters of data in terms of operations at pricing is not going to be definitive. But the focus that we've had on a relatively small set of customers compare to our overall customer base has yielded really promising results. And so our expectation is that we will continue, in particular, to have a look at our customers that are spending more than $100,000 a year with that. Those are the ones who stand to benefit greatly from this model, but it's not only going to be that cohort of customers. But certainly, our expectation that we will make meaningful progress with each period as we go through the year. We're not committing to report on this every quarter, but we will be doing periodic updates just so that folks can get a flavor on how that condition is going.

Andrew Sherman

Analysts
#19

Okay. That's helpful. And maybe for Jen. The AI native customers have been a good topic for you. I think you gave a number last year, it was 2% or 3% of ARR. Any update to that and you named some of them, including one that just went public. But would love to hear like how they came to you and their usage of the platform and kind of the validation of your technology and how that can spread to some other customers in this cohort, too.

Unknown Executive

Executives
#20

Sure. Thanks for the question, Andrew, nice to see you again. Here's the thing that's been really interesting. One is some of these native AI companies are feeling really fast. And in the old days of like software V2, start-up software companies did not have big concerns around product resilience or reliability of scale because it took them a long time to get to scale. They just wanted to get the minimum viable product out in the market and move very different if you're a fronter, or a rapidly scaling a agenetic company because your product has to work all the time or you erode trust and can't expand can't grow. So we're seeing the appetite for resilience at scale coming much earlier in the growth cycle of these native AI companies. And thereby, some of them are expanding faster regardless of what their headcount or their people size is doing. The second thing that we're seeing is the most demanding developers are choosing the best-in-breed offering, early. And that's happening through our PLG motion. So we don't talk so much about our PLG product-led growth motion so often because we have been so focused on enterprise retention enterprise expansion. But it is one of the competitive advantages that PagerDuty has had for a very long time that we land through the developer community for the user and then expand organically on a very simple pricing model until that customer is ready to mature into a multiproduct offering. And so that all of the PLG motion, that flywheel, you can see working 5 quarters with more than 600 new logos like that's not an accident. And we continue to place a lot of focus around the expansion opportunity of those customers through our commercial business, which Catherine Calvert leaves. And then at the same time, some of these AI natives are moving into enterprise size quickly. So you also have to have the go-to-market model to support them and the pricing flexibility so that they start applying you to new use cases more quickly. When you have this very patient growth model where you start out on call and then you add incident management, then event intelligence. With the App Cloud platform, you can access all of those products at one time. And what we're finding with our largest enterprise customers who are using them is it's leading to new use cases faster because they don't have the friction of having to go to apartments department to get permission or authority to spend on more users. So we've seen manufacturing operations. We've seen security ops. We've seen business ops. We've seen customer support lots of things. show up with the operations Cloud that historically would have taken us many years to get to in kind of a traditional product-led life cycle or sales cycle. So that's also been very encouraging. And then the last thing I'd say is that, over the last few quarters, we've started to see some of these, call it, 4 to 100 very large enterprise companies come to us who traditionally were late to the digital operations party, right? And they're expediting their modernization efforts so that they can benefit from AI transformation. And these are manufacturing, highly regulated industries in financial services and health care, right, with state, local government, et cetera. So some of these traditionally sort of move verticals as it relates to adopting new products are moving faster. And again, the operations, cloud pricing and packaging is there at the right moment for that to meet that demand.

Andrew Sherman

Analysts
#21

Excellent. Great to hear. Thank you.

Operator

Operator
#22

And thank you for your questions and participation today. Jennifer will turn it to you for your final remarks.

Unknown Executive

Executives
#23

Yes. Thank you, everybody, for your questions. The fundamentals of our business continue to strengthen. We have a durable balance sheet, expanding operating margins and a clear strategy to navigate and win in the AI first world. AI is the new risk leader for enterprise. And as the control plane for AI, we are well positioned to support enterprise resilience across our customers' strategic digital and AI operations. Our focus on a usage-based model is gaining traction, and our product velocity continues to widen our competitive mode. I have the utmost confidence in John as the new CEO and in our people, and I'm energized by the significant opportunity ahead and excited for PagerDuty's next chapter of growth and innovation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

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