Teneo AI AB (publ) (TENEO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Let's kick off. So a very big thank you all, all our shareholders for participating in our capital raise here in the beginning of the year. We're very thankful for that, and we'll make sure to use these funds responsibly in our continued growth. Three major things that we're reporting today. Our Q4 report is delayed because of the capital raise. So for all sorts of legal issues, it had to be today rather than when it usually would have been, but at least now we are happy to present it and happy to present what's happening in the company. So 3 major things have happened in Q4. First of all, our strategy to focus on growth in existing customers is really paying off. We have solid growth, and this has also spawned a solution on top of our platform. And as you may see, I have a different background than Fredrik, and I'm going to get into that a bit more as we move into the call. The second big thing is the launch of ChatGPT. Now ChatGPT has really raised awareness about our area. It's moved from something that is discussed in -- with people that are in the know or directly responsible for these type of solutions to something that the CEOs are talking about as well, which is very, very good for us. Now you may or may not know that Microsoft is now a 49% owner of chat -- or of OpenAI, which is the parent company of ChatGPT. And as such, given that we put all our bets on Microsoft as a partner in the cloud space and became independent software vendor of the year last year, we also have access to the technology behind ChatGPT, the GPT model, the large language models behind it. That means that our customers can now implement even faster than before because it's a complementary solution to what we do and is one of the services that we can use within the Microsoft universe. So now our customers can implement even faster than before. The third thing is that Telefonica O2 passed the 1 million calls per month mark in Q4 after less than 1.5 years of implementing the solution. Now we have several 1 million-plus calls per month references. But the interesting with this is also that it has moved very, very quickly. And if we look across the globe, there are no other solutions with the same type of speed and volume. So there's no other 1 million plus picking up the phone references out there, so not from Google, Amazon or anybody else, but also the speed at which this has happened is also quite incredible. And talking to the executives has led us to some of the other things, the solution set that we've been managing to produce during Q4 as well, which is quite exciting. So I'm going to just back up the tape a bit, talk a bit about -- sorry, I forgot -- presenting today is Per and Fredrik. You probably met us before. If you haven't, here we are. I would say now our legacy is mostly formed by what we've accomplished here. So you'll judge us more on what we are talking about today than what we've done before. This is the area we are in. We're in the area of managing the conversational flow between the human and the machine, so understanding what the machine says and then taking action on that. This is called conversational AI. That's the general area. This -- the market segment that we are in is called digital contact center, and the digital contact center is going to be one of the biggest software markets in the world, which is why companies like Microsoft is putting a lot of focus on this, but also Amazon and Google and many other companies are focusing on this particular area. We have the largest references in this space today. And the space that we are in there is called virtual assistance. So the virtual assistance is when the phone is being picked up by a bot or a piece of software rather than being picked up by a human. So when you call somebody, we answer the phone for you, but it's the software doing the work. The interesting thing with this market is that it's growing with a 48% CAGR. Maybe even more interesting is that we have 15% of the total interactions in this market today. So there's a small portion of this that is software today. A lot of this is consulting, but it's growing more and more software. And as the volume grows, we see also in our customers, our revenue is growing. So quite exciting development there. OpenAI, of course, again, really has changed the dynamics of this market because now executives are talking a lot about using this type of technology in their ecosystem. Very brief introduction to Artificial before we move into talking a bit about the exciting news, both the numbers and the exciting solution news for the quarter. You can see here at the top, that's our most important number. The SaaS model that we introduced in 2021, which is a pure Software-as-a-Service with a shared code base of multi-tenant is now generating an ARR in Q4 of SEK 25.1 million. So ARR, obviously, forward-looking. So it's the last month times 12, but this is a key focus for us. Also, our recurring revenues are growing quite well. So we have total recurring revenues growing, which includes then the legacy, where the legacy used to be license, maintenance and PS that now has also been transformed to be just license, so recurring revenue on the software side. So very solid growth, as you can see from this. So our ARR growth year-over-year, 167%. And that, of course, shows our market leadership here. We have a lot of really solid customers, which we spent most of last year taking good care of so that they will grow, but also that enabled us to develop the solution, which has enabled us to really expand our partnership base. So we have lots of new partners, but we also have lots of more momentum in the partnerships today because of the solution set. So -- and that's -- I'm going to move into that. Another very important thing is that we, during Q4, received our ISO 27001 certification. And that, of course, means that we are free to sell to things like health care, banks and others so that more companies can use our solution as well. We did a large cost-reduction program in 2020, 2021 and reduced our costs quite aggressively at that point. And then we have been building up the organization during 2022, and we're now going to be flattening out that curve going into 2023. So still quite a large cost reduction vis-a-vis the sort of 2020, 2019 run rates. So with that, I'm going to dive into what we feel is the biggest news for the quarter except for the great growth and that is that we have launched a solution on top of our platform. So with the implementations at Telefonica but also Swisscom, we saw that what the management really care the most about. So in meetings with these customers, what they really care most about was the fact that their customers no longer needed to do a key press when they moved in -- when they called the customer hotline. So when you call to Swisscom today, you no longer press 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or you no longer need to understand the keyword that you need to say like invoice or something like this. And 90% of the enterprises in our target markets, which is Europe and U.S., are still using keypad navigation. So large call centers still using keypad because it still hasn't really been possible to implement a true OpenQuestion-type solution. So what is the OpenQuestion? Well, instead of having keypad when you call and we're all been frustrated with this, you call Apple, you call any large company today, you're going to have to listen to what they say, understand what they're saying and choose the right choice with a keypad selection. And once you've done that, you probably have another few keypad selections. In fact, in average, 122 seconds are spent pressing keys before you get service. So customers hate experience. Our customers still use experience because it's very difficult to implement. But no longer. So if you see Swisscom, you see Telefonica official references for this technology, you see that this is also now quite easy to implement and provide that service. So the solution is there. I really recommend you to look at Roger on YouTube as he talks about the solution and the frustration with keypad, but also the Swisscom management and the Telefonica executive management really love that we managed to get rid of the keypad navigation. And the solution we have in this space called OpenQuestion is going to route 90% of calls correctly in 90 days. And this is today 15% of all calls are misrouted, and this is a large expense because now at least 2 people are talking to the same customer and the customer gets increasingly frustrated. But on top of that, keypad navigation is frustrating customers. So in the traditional IVR space when you have to pay attention before you get lost, 42% of customers are irritated before they even get to state the purpose of the call, the question of why they're calling. So that's no longer the case with OpenQuestion. You can now just call and say, "Hey, my last invoice was just too high, what's going on?" And the system will recognize why you are calling, route you to the right caller, maybe even fix your problem automatically. And if it doesn't understand it, we'll just ask a few questions, so it really understands. No thinking on the part of the customer. All the thinking goes on now in the contact center instead, which is the way it should be to have happy customers. So customers are really, really frustrated, but there's also a large cost for these misrouted calls. The solution that we already have now, we're taking this to market now, and that's part of why our partner base has expanded that much. So we took a lot of care of our customers, managed to build the solution. So we've taken the knowledge from that to build a solution. And now we're going to market with this, and we're pushing that and cultivating partners to also take this to the market since this is a very simple way for them to get into the virtual assistance space. So that's the exciting news. We have a brand that's Teneo.ai. That's the brand. That's our platform. That's what we're taking to market as our brand to make it a bit more clear to our customers instead of having the artificial solutions, which they probably don't know because when they open up the app, it's Teneo. Within Teneo.ai, we today have one solution. That's OpenQuestion, implements in 90 days and gives you a really good effect on customer satisfaction in those 90 days. Nobody else has the same. Nobody else has these references, and nobody else has been able to provide this with that type of speed and implementation. So very proud of the team, very proud of our customers for taking this forward. Let's move into some Q4 operational highlights, and then Fredrik will take over and do the numbers. So it's important to us to have this ISO 27001 certification. We got that at the tail end of Q4, and it's really going to help us with the customers, the large enterprises that have a lot of requests for this type of certification. We launched OpenQuestion, which is this conversational IVR solution. It's a way to get rid of keypad navigation. It's a complete solution. Documentation is there. The prebuilt flows are there. It's very easy to implement. We launched that the O2 Telefonica Virtual Assistant now handles plus 1 million calls. That's after less than 1.5 years of implementation. So very, very rapid pace to scale up. And of course, scaling up in our existing customers is our prime strategy. That's how we make more revenue. We've renegotiated our credit facility with the help of some shareholders, also the help of our investment bank here to -- it's now running at 4% per annum fixed rate, but it's also still a PIK rate, so payment in kind. It's still an interest rate that gets paid at the end of -- and that's now 2026, so end of the period. So very good for us in terms of our cost going forward as well. Of course, very happy that you all participated in our rights issue and that we brought the money in, in Q1. That's going to help us through this financially difficult year, but business-wise, I think this year is going to be absolutely great with the cost focus of our customers. The growth in SaaS API calls, if you compare quarter-over-quarter December to December, 373% and an annual number, 167%. So really, really solid growth in our ARR and in our revenues. And that is, of course, the main highlight of this. Our real -- our model that we introduced in 2021 is really paying dividends. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Fredrik to deep dive a bit into the numbers.

Thank you, Per. So a bit kind of continuing on where Per left us. I mean our SaaS business model is clearly ramping up. And this is, of course, I mean, very significant or very clear when you look on the graphs on the key KPIs that we use. One of the key KPIs is obviously the SaaS API calls, which is, I mean the variable component related to how much the platform is used by our customers. So -- and since we have a variable kind of fee for these interactions, that is obviously -- immediately paying off in the SaaS ARR metrics as well. And really satisfying is, as Per said, I mean we are growing 373% year-over-year, December versus December '21. And also when we look on January numbers, we can also see that the growth is continuing. So we also see a 14% increase December '22 versus January '23. So the growth trajectory is continuing basically, and that is also at 343% year-over-year growth. So very pleased to see that development in our existing customer base. And this, of course, then translates into SEK 25.1 million as Per already mentioned on the SaaS ARR. So 167% year-over-year growth. Next slide, please, Per. This is also, I mean, just to -- I think we have shown this for our shareholders now for the last 24 months. But it's a bit to showcase our business model where we have -- on the one hand side, we have subscription fees, which is the license part on the SaaS model. So customers pay per month based on the number of seats that they are using in the platform. And the other component is API calls. And that's fully variable. So we charge customers $0.008 per API call. So as we grow the volume, it's times this $0.008 number that we get the revenues for. Then we also have data as a limited part of our revenue kind of contributions. And then we're also on top, even if we are not focusing on the peer side, we still have some legacy contracts, which we need to honor. And I think on a quarterly basis, it's SEK 1 million only. But I think the more important part is, of course, the graph to the left where we have put this in the context of type customers. And for a small customer with not as high volumes that we perhaps want our customers to have, the main part of the revenue piece is the subscription fee, but of course then, as part of our strategy is to focus on OpenQuestion but also customers with significant customer center operations, we are focusing on customers that have more than 500 operators in their call centers. That is our targeted group of customers. And for those kind of customers, the variable part is very, very important. So that's why we are emphasizing so much on the API call growth, which clearly also then is something that is benefiting our gross margin. When we take a customer into our platform, initially, we don't have that high gross margin, but on the high-volume API call that we have on a handful of really big customers, we also see that the margins on those revenues are in excess of 90%. So that's why we are also targeting the large customers. Next slide, please, Per. And to a bit kind of continue on sales numbers, we are very pleased with our sales development. And I think it's a bit kind of a crowded slide here. But overall, we can see that we are growing the recurring revenues year-over-year from SEK 8.8 million in Q1 '21 to SEK 12 million in Q4 '22, so 36% growth. But also then, as we have also said, I mean, SaaS revenues are growing even at a higher pace, which is the most important ones. But overall, also then, I mean, the recurring revenues from all our customers is growing at a speed of 36%, and that's very pleasing, I would say. Then on the kind of turquoise line and then also on the yellow line, we showcased both the rolling 12-month number, which is increasing from SEK 30 million up to SEK 41 million. And on the ARR for the total, not just SaaS, we are growing from SEK 36 million up to SEK 50 million, so a steady growth in that part. And as we have already said, I mean, the SaaS ARR is growing at 167%, so clearly, much -- at a much higher pace than our legacy customers -- customer ARR. Next slide, please, Per. I think we already mentioned most of the metrics here. So I will just try to focus on the parts which I think are essential. The first one is if we focused on the slides, 2 graphs, we are showcasing some KPIs that we are tracking in the company, and that's basically to increase the percentage of SaaS recurring revenues. And we see that we continue month-over-month and then also quarter-over-quarter to grow this part due to the higher growth rate in SaaS. And now in this quarter, it constituted 52% of total recurring revenues. And then the other part is, of course, to emphasize as we have gone from this hybrid model with significant parts of professional services, a key part has been to translate more or less up to close to 100% of the revenues coming from recurring valuable revenues. Now we are at 92%, and I think that is the highest level we have ever experienced. So that is also very pleasing to see that we are also growing this part or this ratio as well. Then we can also -- I mean, we haven't touched up on net sales, including the recurring revenues of SEK 12 million, and then we have SEK 1 million in professional services fees, as already mentioned. We're growing at 32% year-over-year in the quarter. So very good. And then overall, I think we do see only, I mean, positives in all the revenue metrics that we look at. So a very pleasing quarter, I would say, overall. So we are very pleased with the numbers that we are showcasing. On costs, as Per mentioned, I think we're flattening out, and we also had an EBITDA -- adjusted EBITDA of close to minus SEK 19 million, increasing somewhat, but that is also part of what we have guided for in the past quarter as well as we are also building out or have built out the sales and marketing front-end functions in order to enable growth. But this is, going forward, will be kind of flattening out. And then also on our cash position, end of the year, we had SEK 18 million in cash position. And then we closed the SEK 96 million rights issue in Q1, adding SEK 96 million gross in proceeds from the rights issue. And then we have also recouped SEK 5 million of tax credit from the Spanish government basically for R&D work that we do in Spain. So more or less SEK 100 million plus in Q1 from additional contributions from external sources. And next slide, please, Per. Very briefly on OpEx. So we do have -- the OpEx that we showcase here is excluding non-extraordinary items or nonrecurring items and also cost of sales. And we can see that we have increased the run rate from SEK 119 million to SEK 126 million in Q4 '22. And this is a delta of I mean SEK 600,000 on a quarterly basis, and that's the increase that we have had in the quarter. But also going forward, as many other companies, we are also a bit, of course, reviewing our costs, and we don't foresee any cost increases going forward. Per, I leave the floor to you.

Thank you, Fredrik. So I'm going to leave this slide up as I try to summarize, and then we'll go to Q&A in a minute or 2. So this last year, 2022, we focused on helping our customers build out. And as you saw with Telefonica O2 very rapidly scaling up. Although Telefonica O2 does lots of automations and many interesting things and so does Swisscom, what they really -- the standout thing that the management really cares about is that they got rid of keypad navigation. So going into this year 2023, we are now going -- together with contact center partners that we also signed up during Q4, we are going to go to everybody that has keypad navigation. The large -- again, it's the 500-plus contact center, so not everybody, but large enterprise that has keypad navigation. And we're going to be selling the solution, which is a 90-day implementation solution done by the partner of the customer. We don't implement, of course. But this way, we have a way in, an easier entry in so we can reduce the sales cycle and also reduces our customer acquisition cost, which was the issue before. So the strategy of focusing on existing customers gave us lots of good revenue growth and also now the position where we have a solution where we can attract new customers. So we have both the reference and the solution, which is something that people want to do. So very exciting to go into this year. And with the advent of ChatGPT, this also gives us a lot of push in the market right now. So very excited to see that Q4 has shown the growth but also very excited that Teneo.ai is launched. If you haven't looked at our new website, please do, which is our platform website. That's the offering. That's our registered trademark, of course. And then OpenQuestion, which is also on the registered trademark, which is the solution built on Teneo.ai. Artificial Solutions, of course, remains as our investor site. But Teneo.ai is what the customers see because that's what the customers are really buying. So very, very interesting development there for us going into this exciting year. So that's what we had to say this morning. So with that, I'd like to hand it over to see if we have some questions. And just go ahead and unmute and post a question or chat your question, if you wish, instead.

Viktor, go ahead. Let's see, Viktor, you are muted. Maybe I have to unmute you to go ahead.

Per, now can you hear me?

Now we hear you. Yes.

Great. So first off, is there any specific markets, regions that performed strongly this quarter?

Yes. So what we see is that we now passed 50% U.S., 50% EMEA. So U.S. is really performing very well on the customer side. So the customers are really showing growth there, which is quite important to us. It is, of course, the largest market by far for this type of solution. So very interesting that we have a strong position in the U.S. And with the official references we have in the U.S., there's nobody that -- there's no competitor even close to the references we have, like HelloFresh, AT&T, et cetera. So very proud of the U.S. performance during this quarter.

Great. And another one from my side. You recently launched, as you mentioned, the OpenQuestion solution. So could you talk about that a bit? How come you want it now? And how will you work with this going forward?

Absolutely. So the OpenQuestion is really driven by -- so if you look at our platform, our platform has a lot of capabilities. It's like a Range Rover. You can take it off road. You can bring your kids to school. But what people really -- what executive management were really happy about with the platform was that they got rid of keypad navigation. And when I met with the managers during -- the management, so the CEOs and COOs during Q3 and Q4, this really stood out that that's what they -- even though like Swisscom, for example, they have implemented our solution in their TV box. They do all sorts of really cool stuff. What the management layer really cares about is the fact that they [ got rid of ] keypad navigation. So with the data we had and the solutions that we had access to, we could build a pre-configured solution that implements in 90 days. And so this really looks like a really interesting solution to executive management. We felt that this was the right thing to bring to market first as a solution on our platform. So it's the time now a solution is possible, but it's also the fact that this solution seems to be the most interesting one. What customers get is that immediately, they get a cost saving of 8% on average. So this is -- averages from contact table, where -- so let's say you have 1,000-men contact center. Today, you're spending probably 15% of the time in that contact center. You're spending on picking up the phone and finding that you were not the one supposed to talk to the person, and then you transfer that to somebody else. And when you do this, you of course, eat up capacity. So you measure -- in contact center, you measure how many minutes people are engaged on the phone, and we will reduce that with 8% just by routing the calls 90% correct. So this is a very important benefit. It's a cost saving, but it also provides a much better customer experience. So we think that this will really bring down the time of selling the solution. So our sales process will be shrunk so that we can sell much faster to customers. And -- we need partners to do this. That's why we signed up a lot of partners now in Q4, like Neudesic, for example, contact center partner that works with Microsoft products. It's owned by IBM as part of IBM GBS but a very important partner to take this to the market. So it's a really interesting development for us since we now can shorten the sales cycle. At the same time, provide cost benefits, which a lot of customers have been talking about since probably Q3 cost has been on the table again. It hasn't been for the last few years, but now it's really on the table. So really like that.

Great. Very clear. And lastly, now with the launch of ChatGPT, what does that mean for you? I mean would you say that it's positive, negative? Some flavor there would be nice.

So we really like the launch of ChatGPT because it raised awareness about the area. In terms of using ChatGPT, it's integrated into our solutions. Our customers can use it today. It's now the GPT3.5 model that you have access through the APIs which is a very powerful model. Of course, the 4 will be available to our customers during the beginning of Q2. So it's a solution that today is not really ready for use in what we do. So we provide very exact answers to something. So you cannot have ChatGPT generate a response about your invoice or about support question like at AT&T, when you have problems with your home support, your home router. You cannot let ChatGPT do that because it's not exact. But what you can do is use it to generate data. And if you don't have enough data to train your models, you can use ChatGPT to do that, and that's what customers are doing with it as we speak. And then some customers have also implemented it as a sort of funny add-on. So if you ask questions, which are not related to the company, they will have ChatGPT answer. But it's still -- it's uncontrolled AI versus what we provide is controlled AI. So it's getting there, and it's going to be a very useful service in 6 to 9 months. But what it really provided to us is sort of the ground coverage where now the CXO suite are really talking about AI in natural language, which is, of course, what we provide. So to us, it's very positive. It's a complementary technology. It's the same as the CLU that we use in Microsoft, used to be called LUIS. Now we can also use ChatGPT as a part of our solution. So to us, it's a really interesting development in the market.

Great. That was all for me.

Thanks, Viktor. And maybe I misstated. So raise your hand if you wish to answer a question. Apparently, I have to unmute because this is a large team meeting. So if you do want to ask your questions, just shoot your hand up in the air. There seems to be no other questions. So again, I would just like to thank you all for this capital injection. It's really helpful to get us into the next phase of this company. I really think that OpenQuestion is going to help us now attract new customers during this year. Of course, our strategy last year was to develop our existing customers, and this is going to be a very exciting year for the company. So very happy with the position we're in from a technology perspective and very happy with the support from both our lenders and our shareholders. So thank you all and look forward to 2023. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and close the call. Thank you.