The Sage Group plc (SGE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello. I'm James Sandford, VP and Head of Investor Relations at Sage. Welcome to our webinar on Innovating for Growth Through AI. Before we start, there are a few housekeeping points. Firstly, there will be a Q&A session after today's presentation. So please submit your questions, and the panel will be happy to answer them. You can do this at any time via the Ask a Question tab on your viewing platform. Secondly, we will not be giving a trading update as part of today's presentation, and no new material financial information will be provided. And finally, the event is being recorded and will be available for replay on our Investor Relations website afterwards. And with that, I'll hand over to our CEO, Steve Hare.

Thank you, James, and a warm welcome to you all. Now we're coming today live from our offices here in London, and this is the fourth in our series of investor webinars since we started them 3 years ago. Through these events, we aim to provide deeper insights into our strategy and progress and for you to hear directly from some of our key leaders. Now the purpose of today's webinar is to explain how we're innovating to enhance our products, our platform and our go-to-market approach. And the catalyst for this is AI. Through Sage Copilot, AI is already starting to transform our solutions and our business and to revolutionize our customers' lives. So throughout today's presentation, we're going to cover how we will be leveraging AI, both to deliver productivity and insights to our customers and to operate more efficiently within Sage. Now I'm delighted to be joined here today by 4 of my key leaders, who are going to lead you through today's content and take part in the Q&A session. So on today's panel, we have Dan, who is the EVP of Financials and ERP Division; Walid, who's our Chief Product Officer; Amy, our Chief Brand and Corporate Affairs Officer; and Derk, our Chief Commercial Officer. But before we start, it's important to ground all of this in our strategic framework. This is our North Star. It guides our choices and shapes our investment decisions. Now some of you may recall that we evolved this framework at the end of last year to simplify our strategy and to better reflect the 2 key drivers of success on network and Sage Copilot. So our purpose is enduring. It remains unchanged, and that's to knock down barriers so that everyone can thrive. And we do that every day, starting with our customers. Our ambition is to create the world's most trusted and thriving network for small and midsized businesses powered by Sage Copilot. Now this ambition is key to our success because it underpins the efficient delivery of advanced integrated AI-powered solutions driving the value of Sage for all of our stakeholders. Our strategy is centered around 3 focus areas: connect, grow and deliver. And I'll say more about each of those on the next slide. We aim to align our activities with the interest of all of our stakeholders, and we do all of that in line with our values, the most important of which is we do the right thing. So on to our strategic focus, starting with connect. The Sage network is our platform. It's a platform of cloud products and services that digitally transform workflows. By connecting customers to our platform, we can streamline their interactions, for example, in accounts payable, accounts receivable and payments, saving them time and money. The scale and the reach of the network also create a powerful innovation platform for Sage and an attractive market for third-party developers enriching the Sage customer experience. The next focus area is grow. Now our overarching aim is to expand revenue across all of our products and services and in particular, to scale Sage Intacct across our markets, with a focus both on the in-life growth of existing customers and new customer acquisition. And we're doing this whilst integrating our products into a more customer-centric tailored package or suite. And finally, deliver. Our AI-powered solutions are helping to make our customers and Sage more productive and effective. Sage Copilot is our new human-centric Gen AI productivity assistant, which streamlines routine tasks, saving customers' time and providing actionable insights when they need them. And it's already live with customers across 5 products in markets across the group and receiving great feedback. Now in a moment, the team will present to you on how we're delivering on this strategy to create long-term value with a focus on product, platform, brand and go-to-market. And what I hope you'll take away from today is the following key messages, which each presenter will cover in turn. Firstly, we are leveraging our scale through integrated global solutions. Secondly, we're leading the market in specialist AI innovation through Sage Copilot. Thirdly, we are building on our brand strength to expand customer value throughout our markets. And finally, we're optimizing our sales approach to drive growth. So now let me hand over to Dan, who's going to take you through how we're leveraging our scale through integrated AI-powered global solutions.

Well, thank you, Steve. As Steve shared, we are leveraging our scale, our expertise and our technology to deliver [indiscernible] powerful solutions for our customers across the globe. Today, I want to cover a couple of key areas to give you a bit more color on how we're doing this. First, I want to show you an overview of our portfolio, which at its heart, is about financial management for small and midsized businesses. Next, I want to show you how AI and specifically our approach to AI is transforming the customer experience in our portfolio, creating value for our customers and for Sage. And finally, I want to show you how suites are enabling us to broaden functionality, the functionality that we offer to customers and go even deeper into chosen verticals, driving competitive differentiation. So let's start with our product portfolio. Some of you will have seen this slide before. It shows how Sage solutions are anchored on finance for small and midsized businesses, and how they scale to meet customer needs based on their size and their sophistication. We've continued to build automated workflow, such as HR and payroll, accounts payable automation, accounts receivable automation, for businesses across industries and business complexities. And for midsized businesses, we've invested in industry-focused solutions to meet their specific vertical needs that evolve with them as they grow. Building on this, our strategic approach to innovation and product development in the portfolio is designed to provide our customers with deeper value and more time-saving automation, which really allows them to focus on what matters most to their business. From a solution standpoint, we have consistently delivered differentiated capabilities in financials. And now we're expanding into integrated -- and integrating into our footprint in HR and payroll as well as in operations. So for example, in HR and payroll, we offer robust capabilities powered by ADP for our midsize customers and for smaller businesses, which have less complex needs, we offer our own Sage HR and Sage Payroll solutions. So we provide a broader footprint of financials and HR and payroll with deeply integrated workflow. We're also expanding solutions across geographies, for example, launching Sage Intacct most recently in France and Germany. Overall, companies are now using Sage Intacct in over 80 countries and over 160 currencies. And finally, we continue to build out industry-specific capabilities for service-based industries like nonprofits, financial services, health care, SaaS and construction as well as in product-based industries like retail, distribution and manufacturing. These industry solutions have AI at their core, delivering time-saving productivity and insight for our customers. Next, I want to talk to you about our approach to AI. As we anchor our innovation in finance, AI is at the heart of that innovation. So over the last 6 years, we've fueled efficiency and insight for our customers as they transform their workflows. Here are some specific examples. Take what we're doing with Sage Copilot to automate the monthly close process. The Copilot close assistant provides proactive monitoring of all closed tasks. It gives at-a-glance visibility into the status of standard closed tasks like unposted transactions in accounts payable, accounts receivable and the general ledger. It simplifies the navigation so you can easily review bank reconciliations and cash management. It delivers insight into closed status across all of the company's entities and their subledgers in one clear summary view. This helps customers save time every single close period. And with Copilot variance analysis, we can help customers compare budgeted amounts with actuals by flagging variances for review. Looking at variances and adjustments, as they occur, eliminates the waiting game for reports to be manually generated and reviewed. Finance and business managers can partner to get early visibility, which enables them to work on resolution prior to the close. And Copilot is being deployed across the entire portfolio. So now let's take a look at how it transforms the experience of our Sage 50 customers. Reporting in Sage 50 is really powerful, and Sage Copilot is enhancing the experience and insight for our customers. For example, Sage 50 has over 900 pre-built reports designed to answer specific customer questions right out of the box. However, with that many options, finding the right report and the insight that they're looking for can take time. That's why we're introducing a new Gen AI powered feature report with Sage Copilot. The natural language search and intelligent summarization in this feature allow you to instantly find the most relevant report just by simply asking a question. Get AI generated summaries for profit and loss and balance sheet reports. So customers don't have to comb through business data. And it helps them identify trends and insight across the business in just seconds. Report with Sage Copilot makes accessing business reports faster and smarter, which saves customers' time in their everyday activities. We're also embedding AI into the day-to-day workflow in areas like accounts payable and accounts receivable. In the example we're showing here, we've extended our AP automation solution into purchasing. We use AI technologies to bring documents in and code them automatically. AI captures the invoice information and then codes the transactional nuances that are specific to each individual business. This provides insight into the purchasing spend and our automatic vendor matching capability removes a major workflow pain point. This means for the AP staff, the job of the accounting team is really just a review. This automation also powers compliance capabilities, ensuring our customers are ready for new requirements, like e-invoicing, soon to be mandated for millions of businesses across Europe. These capabilities are getting industry recognition. Most recently, IDC named Sage as a major player in their latest MarketScape report on automation for small and midsized businesses. So our entire portfolio is accessing our AI. And in a moment, Walid will say more about that. But the way we enable customers to grow their usage within the products and to access more services is also critical here. So my third topic is suites. Suites are integrated solutions designed for businesses of different sizes and different industries. This makes it easier for customers to transform their business processes and their technology over time and add the solutions that are most relevant for their industry. This approach also streamlines the sales and the customer onboarding processes, which shortens their time to value. So let me show you a few examples. First, for small businesses, as we've learned more about the common workflows, we've evolved our approach. We've moved away from thinking about individual products such as Sage Accounting, Sage Payroll, Futrli and Sage HR. And instead, we use suites to organize around the needs of different kinds of users. The Sage for small business suite becomes the single solution for each type of user. What used to be separate applications with separate navigation and different experiences appears as features within the workflow designed for that specific type of user, users move seamlessly between the workflow as their tasks change. For example, moving from creating customer invoices to finishing the payroll run. This means our small business customers where one person can often have many different roles, they don't need to think about moving in and out of applications. They're always within one suite that they can use to solve problems as they need to in order to run their business, which saves them time and effort. And as their needs expand, different tiers of that suite, provide them with more functionality, and it provides us at Sage more opportunity to monetize the value we provide. For industry-based suites, let's take a look at the solutions we've designed for construction firms. Here, we have suites that bring financials, preconstruction, operations and payroll together. Our construction financial solutions have led the market for 40-plus years and are trusted by 50,000 customers. They provide real-time visibility into true financial health of construction projects. So our customers can make confident and data-driven decisions. Our acquisition of Corecon and BidMatrix turbocharged our preconstruction and bid management capabilities, which allows us to provide them rich functionality that a construction business need across their multiple workflows. Construction payroll is more complex than in other industries because of the need to manage multiple locations, time tracking, unions, compliance and more. And we solve for those needs. And within construction, there are unique needs across 5 distinct sub industries from specialty contractors, to real estate developers, to general contractors, homebuilders and heavy civil construction, Sage has purpose-built solutions designed to serve the specific needs of these kinds of businesses. So now let's look at our strategy for product-centric businesses. This revolves around how we serve manufacturers, distributors and retailers based on their complexity and their business need. Our ERP solutions serve that first solution graduate all the way up through large complex businesses. Our Sage distribution and manufacturing operations, or SDMO solution serves manufacturers and distributors that are typically smaller and rely on industry best practices for quick time to value. Think about a smaller discrete manufacturer with mostly component-based assembly and smaller distributors of durable goods who have outgrown their manual or their very first solution. Sage X3 delivers deep customization capabilities and is designed for larger customers with complex use case and scenario support. For example, a distributor using X3 can handle highly complex supply chains across regulated industries. What's innovative about our development approach for these industries is our use of shared services, like our AI services, our Shop Floor Control, which can be used in both SDMO and Sage X3. In SDMO, using the shared service, best practices are prebuilt. They're preconfigured and ready to use out of the box. In Sage X3, that very same shared service has configuration options that allow it to best match each unique customers' needs. With this approach, we've maximized the pace of product delivery as we've delivered new ways to save our customers' time through workflow automation. I want to take just a moment to call out a few accolades that the Sage X3 product has recently received from industry analysts and research firms. IDC research, ISG research and ElevatIQ have ranked X3 as exemplary or a leader in the space. And Constellation Research has named X3 to their shortlist in 2 different categories. So that's the reminder of the product portfolio and how it's rapidly being enhanced all the time by Sage Copilot and AI, and how our deep expertise has enabled us to present this to our customers as suites, helping them access more specialists in industry-specific functionality when they need it. Later, Amy will show you how this shapes our brand strategy, and Derk will talk about how it streams line in-life customer growth and new customer acquisition. But for now, here's Walid to tell you about the technology that makes it all possible.

Thank you, Dan. Hi, everybody. It's fantastic to be here today. My name is Walid, and I have the privilege and honor to be leading our technology and development organization at Sage. I'll be talking to you about the Sage Network platform and Copilot. Now as Steve said, the Sage network is our platform. It's one unified platform that connects all Sage ecosystem solutions and it enables the full power of AI to benefit our customers. This approach is important because it allows our products to be greater than the sum of their parts. The platform means we can bring our products together under one umbrella and create a unified experience regardless of which product to use. And it means that in the future, all, and I mean all our Sage products will be connected to AI and network services, and we will have Sage Copilot in every single product. This gives us a competitive edge in the market. So our mission is simple, is to ensure that every user and every product gets connected to the platform and has the benefit of the intelligence that sits in that layer. This is actually my favorite slide. I love this slide. This slide shows you that the structure of the platform. As you can see, the architecture breaks down data silos. This enables us to monetize value-added services, improve customer experience and be more efficient in our development. We can also execute on innovation more quickly through our repeatable Copilot factory development process. This platform architecture means that we can connect every product in Sage to the platform within 12 to 18 months. And every product will have Copilot and network services as part of the commercial model. So what does this mean in practice? In a minute, I'm going to show you a demo of how the platform allows us to seamlessly integrate several Sage products. This creates a unified experience and transforms customer workflows. This example looks at an end-to-end sales process from order generation to fulfillment, all orchestrated by Sage Copilot. The demo shows the platform, enables the user to app switch seamlessly and without any interruption to the workflow. Let's see the demo. [Presentation]

What you've seen in this demo is how our platform approach is accelerating our vision. We've been able to equip these products with AI and package, and package them as part of the suites in a matter of months. Without the platform, this would have taken us much, much longer time. So you've heard a lot about Sage Copilot, its use cases and how it automates workflows across the platform. But what are the characteristics that makes Sage Copilot different. As a network service, it's been built in a way that allows Sage software developers across all of our products to access and integrate AI services. This effectively enables them all to be AI developers and Copilot has been built with 4 main benefits in mind. First, it's architecture. It enables rapid development and deployment. It has already been made available to over 40,000 customers. Let me repeat this. 40,000 Sage customers have access to Sage Copilot. It generally is available to see -- and right now, it's available in Sage Accounting plus customers, Sage 50, Sage Active and very soon, it will be able for Sage Intacct. Second, it's context relevant. Sage Copilot understand context, delivers tailored solutions and automation that is relevant to each individual user and a customer. Third, North Star use case-driven UX provides a single integrated experience for any Sage product. Last, user confidence and trust. This is super important. We place accuracy and reliability at the center of development process as we understand how critical it is for our AI to be trusted and accurate. So what do our customers make of it so far? This slide shows -- and I'll love this Slide too, actually, I'll love all the slides. This slide shows a selection of quotes and the impact that Sage Copilot is having on their businesses. We know that Copilot is saving our customers' time because we hear it from them regularly. Though the insight that our AI provides -- through the insight that our AI provides, we are realizing the value that customers need to their -- in their own specific circumstances to save time and be more productive. The way we are building our domain-specific large models, it also gives us a key advantage against our competition. We train our models to speak the language of accounting better than off-the-shelf models. This means that Sage Copilot can understand customers' accounting questions with high accuracy and precision. We have partnered with AWS, where we are training custom LLMs, and this is a key driver as to move into agentic AI. Agentic capabilities in our customer workflows means that we can offer significant time savings to customers with Copilot, remaining the North Star of customer experience. In February, Sage was recognized by CB Insights as a leader in the accounting AI agents and Copilot market, recognizing our strong progress and market position. The expertise in a critical part of how we are positioning ourselves for further market expansion across our region, including U.S., U.K. and Europe. Now I'd like to hand over to Amy and she is going to talk about how our innovation show up in our brand positioning to the market and how it is going to enable us to deliver more and more value to our customers. Amy?

Thanks, Walid. I am Amy Lawson, and I lead Brand and Corporate Affairs. So reflecting on what you've heard from the team so far, our strategy is anchored by a clear ambition to be the most trusted and thriving network for SMBs. Our investments are delivering value to customers with Copilot rapidly deployed across the portfolio. I want to talk about how this innovation comes together with our trusted reputation through our brand and how we are reflecting the changing behaviors of SMBs. And then finally, I'll take a quick look at each market. So firstly, our brand is built on the core values that Steve mentioned at the start. Now these values guide everything we do, but they've become even more critical in this fast-changing world, in particular, trust. Trust is the foundation of everything. SMBs and accountants expect AI-driven insights and productivity gains, but they also need to know that their tools are accurate, secure and built by a credible provider. Now our brand heritage helps here, as does our ability to work with governments to shape proportionate regulation, and our data shows that we are seen as the most trusted in our category. As Walid just explained, we've invested in targeted use cases for AI, calling on our years of experience of this sector. Our customers are looking for AI with accuracy and efficiency, not chatbots with personality and poems, and you'll see that coming through in our brand communications. Our strategy reflects the evolving needs and behaviors of our customers. The way that businesses buy software has changed. A huge proportion of the buying journey has shifted online with digital content, forums, social media and peer reviews increasingly influencing decisions, particularly for the next and newest generations of business owners and finance professionals. Even in the mid-market, buyers are around 60% of the way through their decision-making before they speak to a Sage colleague or a partner. And we know that on average, they consume around 13 pieces of content before choosing a software provider. Now that could be a blog, a review, a podcast or a white paper. And this is why the analyst accolades that Dan and Walid mentioned and our owned media coverage are all critical components of our brand strategy. We need to show up where our customers are doing their research with bold creative campaigns and content that resonates throughout the entire sales journey. So let's take a quick look at how that comes to life in our key markets, and we'll start with the U.K. Sage has a well-established brand presence here. Our job is to ensure that this also translates to strong preference. We have a long-standing role supporting British SMBs through change, and we have a unique position to influence the government's digitization agenda, encouraging policies that reward SMBs and accountants for adopting digital tools and embracing AI. Now the economic and business benefits of this are clear. For example, our report with the ACCA revealed the accountancy practices with the most ambitious hiring plans are also those with the most advanced in AI adoption. So we've done things like building an industry coalition around e-invoicing in the U.K., leading to the launch of the government consultation. We've reinforced our commitment to a free making tax digital for income tax solution for the simplest businesses ahead of the rollout next year. Now in practice, what this rollout means is an expansion to Sage's TAM with nearly 3 million sole traders and landlords filing taxes digitally for the first time. Now Derk is going to talk more about how we leverage these compliance moments. But from a brand perspective, we're investing in really smart awareness plays that position us for this next wave of digital adoption. We do this through all of our channels from digital, social and PR through to our sponsorships. These play a key role in amplifying our brand and connecting with our key audiences with Sage Copilot as the star of the show. Sage proudly sponsors the Hundred, an innovative cricket format, which is attracting a new generation of fans, delivering brand awareness with a diverse and growing audience. In summary, our history is deeply rooted in the U.K., and we will maintain our brand presence as the FTSE's leading tech company owning the category of AI accounting. Now let's move on to our European region, where Sage also has a trusted heritage and brand strength in many of our markets. For example, in France, Sage leads the way here amongst small and midsized businesses for awareness and consideration. And sponsorships like the Six Nations Rugby reinforced that, with France delivering the highest broadcast figures of all regions. As you've heard from Dan, the rapid expansion of AI solutions across Europe positions us as technology leaders, ready to support SMBs, responding to waves of EU mandation like e-invoicing. And whilst our ability to shape policy with the European Commission is relevant here, too, the demand is not just coming from government mandates. At the Global AI Summit in Paris, we presented new data showing huge appetite for AI solutions in Europe amongst SMBs, and this has dramatically increased in the last 12 months. So to capture this demand, our new brand campaign will soon launch across France, Germany and Spain on TV, radio, digital, social and outdoor channels. We'll highlight our customers' big ambitions, emphasizing that financial management with the support of Sage can be a springboard for growth. This activity builds on years of preparing customers for change and once again combines trust with innovation to give us a leadership position in this new era of AI accounting. So finally, let's focus on North America, where we have strong brand momentum. Now to succeed here, we don't need to be a household name. Our strategy is to invest in smart and targeted initiatives, building a passionate community of advocates who feed the recommendation engine I mentioned earlier. That's starts with mid-market. Leveraging Sage's growing reputation with CFOs across key industries. Take Operation HOPE, for example, a financial education nonprofit. Michael, who you see here on stage with our CTO, Aaron, helps us reach his nonprofit peers by talking about how AI has addressed his pain points or moving to another industry, this is one stream, a SaaS finance platform. They IPO-ed in July with the help of Sage Intacct and a powerful evangelist for Sage, telling others how Intacct help to solve manual accounting challenges, supporting growth in committed monthly recurring revenue by 800% so it could position for success as a public company. Now this is where our deep understanding of mid-market CFOs really makes a difference. These are highly ambitious, performance-driven professionals, and they know that every marginal improvement can create a competitive edge for their company and their careers. Sage helps them get this edge through our solutions and our AI, but also through events, content and professional development, so they can become the catalyst of growth for their businesses. Now we want to land this message with this group when they're at work, but to truly build brand salience, we also need to land it when they're not. Around 10 million of Sage's target audience in the U.S. are baseball fans. So that's why we're incredibly proud to be an official partner of Major League Baseball. And back to investing wisely, we target our activation in priority states and cities. This partnership is increasing awareness with audiences that matter. 39% of finance decision-maker MLB fans are aware of Sage, and that's up by 7% year-on-year. Another critical pillar of our strategy is strengthening our roots in our U.S. hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, a city with a rich legacy of innovation. Relationships with leading universities like Morehouse College and Georgia Tech are positioning Sage for the next generation of engineers and business leaders. This month, we celebrated the opening of our new North American headquarters at Ponce City Market. And all of this will come together with Sage Future, taking place in Atlanta in June, an event for over 5,000 attendees showcasing our innovation. In summary, Sage is building strong brand momentum in North America, and we see significant opportunities ahead. So that's a little bit about how Sage is bringing trust and innovation together through the brand in our key markets. And here is a brief video that I really hope brings it to life. [Presentation]

We've strategically invested in strengthening Sage's presence globally. We've built the foundations for us to adopt tailored, customer-centric approaches in key regions. And all of this sets the stage for go-to-market success. And that's why I hand over to Derk.

Thank you, Amy. Hi, everyone. I'm Derk. I'm our Chief Commercial Officer at Sage. So I'll start today with a quick recap on how we're structured as a go-to-market organization and why that matters as we build efficient scale. After that, I'll review a number of the key growth opportunities that we see ahead of us, capitalizing on the amazing innovation that you've just heard about earlier. But let me start with our go-to-market structure and why that matters. As you know, we operate in 3 core regions: North America, UKIA and Europe. Now the structure of these regions is based on their convergence in terms of competitive dynamics, commercial opportunities, product portfolio and strategic focus. This means that we can effectively operate sales, marketing and support in 3 layers to balance customer proximity and agility with the benefits of scale and expertise, country, region, global. So what does that mean in practice? Well, for example, our direct and channel sales, our field marketing and support teams are primarily country-based. More specialized crafts, such as digital marketing and sales operations, they run regionally. And then we have global teams across sales, marketing and support that focus on our tools and technology, execution blueprints, enablement and so forth. Now whilst the top line regional structure has been in place for a few years, we have now implemented this model consistently in all regions across sales, marketing and support. So why does that matter? Well, this setup allows us to apply the optimal combination of local, regional and global expertise to our go-to-market activities. And given how fast both our external and internal context is changing from the emergence of AI to the simplification of our product portfolio, this is a really critical part of ensuring we can capture the potential efficiencies and opportunities that emerge from this change. For example, it means that as we scale intact in Europe, we can do that with all the knowledge, capabilities and learnings from the other regions. And critically, we can build consistency into how we execute and this consistency build simplicity and simplicity underpins our ability to move at pace, be more efficient and ultimately, of course, to beat the competition. So we've made good progress in our go-to-market organization and structure. But we're also driving productivity and efficiency by standardizing and upgrading our go-to-market processes and technology. There are a number of factors at play, which allow us to accelerate in this area. First, our strategy and our growth opportunity and in particular, the simplification of what we sell and how we show up globally. I'll come back to this later in the presentation. Second, our execution capabilities. As I said, we now have dedicated experienced global teams focused on harmonizing and optimizing go-to-market processes across the group every day. And third, just like we're using AI to deliver automation for our customers, AI is transforming the impact of our technology investments internally as well as enabling us to automate what we already have today in very cost-effective ways. As an example of what harmonization can deliver, let's look at customer support. We already created a single support organization a few years ago, operating very much along the country, region, global model. Since then, our support teams globally moved onto a single technology stack, adopted standardized metrics, processes, training and enablement. And as you can see, the results have been pretty impressive with a significant decrease in cost whilst our support Net Promoter Score, which is already really good, has risen markedly and is now truly outstanding, above 85% for our U.K. teams, for example. And there is much more to come. We recently started the deployment of a new AI support agent, which is coming to all of our products. We're seeing some fantastic results with reduction, resolution rates of up to 70% as well as high customer satisfaction scores. Now our customer support is already world-class and is a real differentiator for Sage, and we've been able year after year to both improve the customer experience and to lower the cost for Sage. So there is our North Star for our transformation in the broader go-to-market organization. So I hope that provides some useful insight onto how we're set up to scale and how we're going to do that more efficiently over time. Now as I mentioned, I'll come to some of the key opportunities ahead of us in terms of driving and accelerating growth. The first, as Dan also touched on earlier, we're evolving how we take our solutions to market. We're making it easier for customers to buy from us and to buy more from us to increase deal velocity, improve our win rates and take a higher share of wallet. Enabled by the investments we have made in the Sage Network platform, we have an opportunity to provide customers with end-to-end automation that crosses the traditional boundaries of categories like accounting, finance and payroll at incredible value for money. And from Sage's perspective, we not only expand our share of wallet and average contract value, but we also know that customers who use Sage across multiple solutions stay with Sage for longer and buy more. You can think about this expansion, both horizontally across financials, HR and payroll as well as by industry and subindustry, where we might previously have sold as construction customer, for example, Sage Intacct, and then work to cross-sell Sage Construction Management or Sage budgeting and planning, now we offer them Sage for Construction, an integrated proposition with a range of preconfigured suites that are tailored to the needs of their business and that can grow as they grow. Now we started this change with Intacct in the United States this year, and we can see significant customer take-up. For example, over half of our not-for-profit and 1/3 of our SaaS NCI direct deals are now on an industry suite. It's like solution selling, but at scale. The focus is on our customer and their needs rather than our specific products, which then leads me neatly onto AI and Sage Copilot because another compelling reason for customers to buy a broader horizontal or industry solution from Sage is that Sage Copilot will drive workflow automation throughout the solutions, increasing the value to the customer of working with Sage end to end. Sage Copilot is a significant opportunity for Sage. Of course, there are direct monetization opportunities, charging customers for Sage Copilot. Our AI strategy, as Amy said earlier, has from the start, been centered on workflow automation, solving real customer problems and saving them time and money. No gimmicks, no clippy. So we expect to get real and significant value exchange from customers, and this is reflected in how we have priced the first manifestations of Copilot, but the broader impact is potentially more significant. This includes, of course, Sage Copilot as a compelling USP for a new customer acquisition, but it is even more important to the potential growth opportunity for existing customers of our connected franchises. By using Sage Copilot, these customers will not only see a transformation in how they use the product, the automation capabilities it offers and the value they get from working with Sage, but they will also be fully connected to the Sage Network platform. So for all intents and purposes, they will be working in the cloud, just using an app rather than a browser. This means, for example, that we will be able to deliver them value continuously rather than via periodic updates and make their data available to them real time in mobile apps or in other cloud solutions. And from a commercial perspective, products that sit on our platform can now integrate with and be sold with our connected products in the same way as our native cloud products. Now let's go back to my construction example. We will be able to migrate a Sage 50 customer to a Sage for Construction suite with Sage 50 powering the financials, but with the rest of the cloud-based part of the solution at their fingertips. And on top of that, for those customers who wanted and migrate to a fully cloud-based solution, being connected to the platform will also make migration easier. Next, I talked just now about how -- about our experience of rolling out Intacct in Europe. We continue to see a great opportunity in deploying our global cloud solutions across different geographies, and this is contributing significantly to our growth today. We would expect Sage Intacct, the Sage Intacct business outside the U.S., as an example, soon to exceed the size of the business in the U.S. when we acquired it, and it is growing much faster. And this contribution will only increase as we expand in Europe. But this is not just a story about Sage Intacct. We're also seeing great traction, for example, with Sage HR, which we expect to accelerate as we launch more integrations with local payroll solutions in more markets. And let's not forget, of course, X3, which continues to show strong growth across all of our regions. Something we're looking to accelerate on the back of significant and exciting innovation. And we're also building and scaling new products for the next waves of growth like Sage Active, with thousands of customers already today across Europe, and SDMO, which has live customers in 5 countries today. Importantly, our business partners are also following us and supporting us on this journey. As an example, one of our largest U.S. partners, Baker Tilly, is now also building a business with us in the U.K., bringing their know-how and their capital to fuel continued growth in this region. Now last but not least, we also have some compliance-related events that will create new market opportunities for Sage. As like Amy just mentioned, they drive digitization in SMBs, and these types of events have historically been significant growth drivers for our business. The first is MTD for income tax in the U.K., which, as Amy mentioned, will require just under 3 million sole traders and landlords to keep digital records and make digital filings to the tax authorities using compliance software. With the breadth of our offering and Sage Copilot capabilities, we are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. We're also seeing signs that this creates a potential reconsideration moment about technology choices for accounting practices that might be focused on competitor products today. The other important compliance event is the rollout of e-invoicing mandates across our European region, which creates a similar drive to adopt digital tools for smaller businesses not using software today, but we also anticipate increased interest in our accounts payable and accounts receivable solutions for our mid-market customers as they reconsider their full finance automation requirements. Again, as Dan said earlier, we are well positioned to capitalize on this market growth opportunity, having made significant investments in our capabilities. So those are our key growth opportunities. And to conclude, I hope you will take away 2 key messages. One, that the opportunity ahead of us is significant both in terms of growth, but also in terms of our ability to continue to deliver that growth more efficiently; and two, that we are better positioned than ever to deliver on these opportunities. The choices we have made over the last number of years whether that's in our investment, in the Sage Network Platform, AI and Sage Copilot or in how we've realigned our go-to-market organization to accelerate and adapt will stand us in good stead in the coming years. Thank you for listening. We're going to end with a short video, celebrating the 1-year anniversary of Sage Copilot before we begin the Q&A. [Presentation]

Thanks, everyone. I hope this has given you a good insight into how we're innovating through AI to enhance our products, our platform and our go-to-market approach. So now it's time for the Q&A session. And please do submit your questions. As I said at the beginning, you can do this by clicking on the Ask a Question tab on your viewing platform, typing into the box and pressing submit. Thanks for all the questions you provided so far. We'll ask the panel as many of these as we can in the time available.

So let's get going. And we're going to start with quite a general question here. What excites you most about the potential for Sage Copilot?

Yes. I think the most exciting thing really is what we can do for our customers. So kind of real time-saving solutions whenever you ask a small or medium-sized business, owner or someone who works in the small business, what's the most valuable thing to them, they all say time. So anything you can do to give customers back time is something that's really, really powerful. So I think these kind of automation of workflows, automation and repetitive tasks so that we can just really elevate the work of our customers so that they can really focus on growing their businesses. I think that's just very exciting. I mean, what do you think Walid?

I agree with Steve. The most precious thing we own is time. And given the customers and users time back is the most important thing. Keep in mind that our AI approach actually not just gives you time and give you a deep insight, but it's very trusted. We have -- the way we architected the platform, we basically eliminate hallucinations in this area because of the way we deploy our technology. In accounting, I learned very quickly that accuracy is not just important, it's the most important thing that you could do, and our AI gives you that kind of insight.

We also know, Amy, from a lot of the work we've done, the feedback we get all the time is that trust is a very important part of AI. Isn't it?

Yes, absolutely. And that means different things to different people. So it means is it saving me time, but it also means is it accurate? You're absolutely right, Walid. In our industry, people don't find errors kind of a bit funny. They find them career defining, day defining. So it's very, very important. Is it secure? Is it reliable? All of those things are incredibly important. And I think what's great is that in a lot of our markets where we have a really, really strong brand equity, that also then correlates to trust. That's not unique to our industry. That's true in many other sectors. But yes, I think it's absolutely critical for AI adoption, particularly amongst SMBs.

Great. Thank you. On the subject of trust, we've had a few questions come in on this topic. And one question has come in is, so along exactly the lines you've been saying, trust is a huge deal using GenAI in a financial setting. What technical guardrails do you have in place to minimize hallucinations in our systems?

Do you want to take that Walid?

In our architecture and our layer that we did, we have actually 3 things that we did to actually guard against it. Number one is our orchestration layer. Our orchestration layer, what intercepts the question, we are very precise on how we interpret and get feedback from the user about what that means and how do we actually go ahead and broker which answer that goes to the right place. So that's a very important layer intelligence. Second is the LLM we use. This is really, really a competitive advantage for us. Instead of using just generic LLM or generic models, we use our highly tuned models that we train with our partner, AWS, to create a really trusted environment. Third one is our knowledge base and our 40 years plus of compliance rules. We are the company of the compliance rules. I mean we know about compliance more than any other company on the planet and sometimes better than governments in a lot of ways. So we actually take this information, feed it into our GenAI model, create these models, and feed it into our orchestration layer. With this model, we basically become the most trusted financial adviser for -- in the market today.

The thing I would add is I think when we started sort of a year ago, we very deliberately started narrow really. So a lot of what's currently happening in the world of Gen AI starts very wide. So it starts with a very, very big, large language models where they're basically a kind of enhanced version of search. And we started very narrow. We started with what is it -- what is it that our customers, what issues, what problems do our customers want resolving. And so we perfected that before we then started to broaden out. And I think that's a very, very important distinction because in financial accounting, HR, payroll, et cetera, you need to get things right. It's important to focus on that, let's get things right and then let's get broader as we prove it out.

Great. So on to pricing, what is your pricing strategy for Sage Copilot? Are there different pricing models depending on customer tier and level of usage? That's part A. And then there's part B. In the future, would Sage simply embed natively these GenAI features into the suite and charge the whole package with an uplift rather than price GenAI features separately?

So there's quite a lot in that question. So I think the way to think about it is, first of all, it's early stages. And so it's in the very early kind of embryonic stages of exactly how things like Sage Copilot, but agents more widely how will they be deployed and therefore, how will pricing mechanisms work. We've launched here in the U.K. where we have charged on a per user basis. Now we've, in some cases, embedded that into a suite and increase the price of the suite, but included a user license, but if you want additional users, then you have to add those. And that's pretty consistent with what other people are doing in the industry. But I think we have to see how the agents and how the skills evolve because as you get more and more capability, it's a bit like adding the equivalent of a human skill and exactly how that gets charged for and how we charge for workflow automation, I think, is an evolving story.

Okay. Thank you very much. Obviously, we have said that we're building our own domain-specific LLM in partnership with AWS. Can you share the advantages and challenges of this? And then sort of linked to this, will you provide customers with tools, say that they can build their own agents and if so, what would be the time frame?

Okay. First of all, what we are building is we're using our data and the customers' data that is trusted, that is approved by our customers to work with AWS to train a model. The math and the training is from us. They provide the compute and some knowledge about that environment. That gives us a really competitive advantage in that. We understand GL. We understand what the customer is doing with that GL. We understand the workflows. Because of also the network, we understand the interactions between that data and the suppliers and the providers in that information and the banking system. So we are the only company who could triangulate between the supplier, the banking institutions and the transactions and what happens at the GL across all of it, payroll and human resources. So that's an area we're working, very excitingly working with AWS on that model. That gives us a lot of value. Now there is always technical challenges in that environment. But we have a tremendous team that was built over many, many years of a fantastic engineering background and also with the help of AWS, we are really kind of knocking these barriers down in terms of our challenges in the product line. What is the last part of your question about agents? Agentic AI?

The question was, yes, will we be moving to more of an Agentic AI framework?

We are already in the Agentic AI framework. So let me just distinguish between Copilot and Agentic AI. The Copilot is basically a commercial and a technical manifestation of UI. So this is the first step. The second step basically building agents in all our workflows and applications. Those agents will be working with sometimes the Copilot and the UI, and we were working across other agents, as Steve described, or as Derk actually was talking about how the agents will work. So you could imagine an agents in the product calling another agent in the support or a Copilot in the support organization, calling actually an agent in the product to help them, for example, in a support model or 2 agents working across different groups or different applications across outside. From making this available, that's a decision we are debating right now within Sage, how and when we make these things available from a commercial. We're still in early stages, and then we'll figure out how that will be provided.

Thanks, Walid. A general question about the commercial impact. Would you expect the new innovations you've talked about today to materially change your renewal rate by value beyond the current 100% to 101% range?

Yes, maybe I'll start and then can follow up. I think -- I mean, the short answer is, yes, because what we're doing with the platform strategy is making it easier for us to be able to offer additional services to all of our customers, whether you're a cloud native customer or whether you're a cloud connected customer. And so what we're going to be able to do is have a combination of sort of more product-led or in-product growth combined with continuing through our customer success model to help our customers understand what's available to them, which is a key part of what Derk and his team will do to kind of promote what's available.

Yes. Maybe just to build on that, they're all -- these things build on each other, right? The ability to sell suites is part of how we can expand value with customers. AI and Copilot build on that because it creates the potential for in-product messaging and in-product sales, product-led growth. And on top of that, AI obviously enables our sellers to be more efficient, right? It enables them to have the right information to talk to the customer about their usage of the product, what else they need in a very intelligent way. We already use quite a bit of AI in our sales tech stack today. But the use cases of that are increasing exponentially. So I think all of these different factors mean that this will have a major impact on our renewal rate by value.

I think, Amy, maybe a few words on -- we often get asked about sort of new customer acquisition and how our brand impacts new customer acquisition. But of course, when it comes to our existing customers, also changing their perceptions and helping them understand actually what is now available versus what they thought was available or maybe what was available when they first bought our products is also equally important, right?

Yes. I think there's a couple of parts to that. So I talked in the presentation about content and this demand for content that we're seeing now. So I think particularly in medium where there's a lot of content that gets consumed along the way, I think it's really, really important that we keep engaging our existing customer base with vertical industry-based content that helps them be better at their roles as finance professionals, super important. And our brand shows up all the way down that. It's really, really high-quality content. And then in small, I think in the past, you've been using a solution and then there have been other solutions available to you. But if you're not a finance professional and you're a business owner or somebody in a small business who's doing lots of roles, that kind of array of options can feel quite intimidating. Whereas actually, if you're in the solution every day or every few days and then you're seeing through the suites that actually those options are starting to become available to you or even Copilot is suggesting that you use them, that's a much more intuitive customer journey, and I think, again, will help us with renewal rate by value.

And maybe, Dan, as Amy said in medium, maybe, could you comment on just how you see the kind of difference between our existing customers and new customers in terms of the attractiveness of using Sage Copilot. I mean is it kind of equal? Or do you see volume?

Actually, we're hearing a lot of interest from both our customers who are first -- they are graduating from their first solution or they're improving their core infrastructure and they're looking at what we're doing there -- as they have built that knowledge and gone and done that research, they know that they're -- they need to understand how AI is going to help them. And so in many cases, they're looking at it for the first time and trying to figure out what that looks like. In the -- for our current customers, it's been part of our story that we've been telling for the last number of years and how we can automate that close for them and how we can get to really continuous accounting with finance being our core, really, how do we get to how we can automate those processes. And we now have the technology to be able to do that as our customers have been hearing that from us, and they're now seeing those fruits come to life.

Great. Thank you. In terms of data usage across the group, how much can we share data and best practice across customers? And is it a limitation that some of our solutions remain on-premise?

That's what the network platform is all about. So I talked right in the beginning, and I'll let Walid just explain it in a bit more detail. But I talked at the beginning about connect, and it's not just about connecting our customers onto the platform so that we can deliver more services to them. It's connecting them onto the platform so that we can create connectivity between the workflows. So what we want to do, whether you're Sage 50 connected customer or whether you're a Sage Intacct native customer is to be able to bring your workflows into that environment so that you can interact with your customer digitally, you can interact with your suppliers digitally, and that data is flowing across the platform because what we can then do is the pace at which our agents and in particular, Sage Copilot can learn and therefore, offer you a more kind of tailored bespoke experience rapidly accelerates because you need the data pool to be able to drive the learning, right?

Absolutely. As Steve said, It's a very key part of our architecture. If you look at the way we're architecting this, our agents and our copilot lives in the cloud, lives kind of everywhere, okay? So the reality is that the fact that you have a general ledger sitting at your desktop or in the cloud kind of becomes irrelevant in a lot of ways. So all we have to do is we have to connect you there through Sage ID, okay? And then we have to connect you through our experience platform. And then all of a sudden, you have access to all the data and information you would have had, whether you are a native cloud application, desktop application or an ISV application in this matter. So we opened this up to everybody to participate. So the old model of ways of doing software where this is a software on the desktop, software in the cloud, those barriers go away with this now Agentic way of actually writing software overall.

Great. We've just got a question on sort of general feedback on the product so far. So we recently announced that we were including Sage Copilot as part of the Sage Accounting plus here in the U.K. So obviously, many active users in that area. How is the pricing versus sort of value exchange feedback from customers so far? And then also, what's next in terms of sort of product SKUs, regions, customer profiles that kind of...

Yes. So maybe I'll start. I think, first of all, I mean, before we launched the full pricing model, we spent quite a lot of time, many months interacting with early adopters, so that we could make sure that the use cases that we were choosing so that the things we were automating with the things that our customers would find valuable. And so we had a lot of early feedback before we move to pricing. Now it's very early stages. And so we've only just started charging for Sage Copilot. Early feedback is very good, but it's very early stages. And I guess I don't know if you've had more, how many people have we had calling the customer service team, congratulating us on Sage Copilot versus what's this?

I do know who the customers are. Yes. I mean this -- not only are they using this in the product, but also it showcases the level of innovation that Sage is putting into our products generally, right? So -- and I think that's something that they're seeing us do increasingly. Now Copilot is not the only example, but this is where we're really leading everybody else and customers are very impressed. But as you say, early days, but -- this is all about iterating and learning. It's not one thing. It's many -- automation of many workflows across many products over -- basically, that's our business model in many ways.

I think we learned quite a lot in the beginning as well. So we say very specifically, it's productivity and insights. But actually, what we learned, for example, from the early customer testing is, I really, really want the productivity. And then I'm open to the insights. So don't give me lots of insights when I just want to task automated or a workflow taken away from me. So that was, I think, a really important point. And then in terms of customer feedback, as ever, the best way to understand it is the words of our customers ourselves. So we heard the accountant on the video saying, it's like a week of time that saved me. What other people have said things like, it's like having another person in my business. And I think that's the best way to really understand the difference it's making.

Okay. How have you engineered Sage Copilot to keep the operating cost down?

It's multiple ways. I mean, initially, when we started the project with Steve's direction and Steve's actually guidance was, cost important, but not the most important thing, go innovate first. Let's figure out all the engineering roadblocks. Let's figure out what matters to customers, like saving time, like innovation in that area. Then we figure out engineering. Then all of a sudden, we start looking at the cost structure, and we start figuring out because of architecture, the way we architected our platform and our copilot, we recognize that we don't have to do a lot of things like round tripping to these big models. This is the other thing we did. This is because we also had a deep expertise for many years building some of these models ourselves. We have very -- and some of it is, to be honest with you, it's an engineering -- it's a kind of a competitive advantage. So we built a lot of these orchestration layers in there to allow us to be deterministic when we need to or to be probabilistic when we need to. That means we go either 2 big LLMs when we absolutely need to or to go to some things that we built internally and bring that cost. So our cost there is incredibly competitive. I'm not going to tell you the price in there, but we are super happy where we are from a cost and a competitive advantage.

Fantastic. And on the same theme of kind of cost effectiveness and shifting perhaps to an internal lens, what sort of productivity benefits are we seeing from using AI internally and which parts of the business are seeing the biggest benefits?

Well, maybe each of you can sort of comment on, maybe you want to start with Walid, because I think we've seen some quite big productivity benefits in engineering.

So I'm going to give you two stats that will really highlight this. First of all, as Sage in our entire development organization, I'm talking about all the way from the PM organization, product management, all the way to release and any big in between, we've seen 30% productivity gain. That means we added literally physically to our organization, 30% capacity of writing code. This is why I was able to claim -- not claim, but I was able to tell you that we will have Copilot in all our products within the next 12 to 18 months because of our freeing up so much time and ability across the entire spectrum. This is not only coding part of it, but the entire spectrum. So our usage -- today, we cannot actually do our work without using AI. I'm going to give you another stat that is really amazing. Last quarter, not this quarter, last quarter, we checked in 749,000 lines of code that were generated by Copilot, and we had -- that is an amazing stat to take it in there. And that just shows the power of that element. Derk, do you want to talk about sales?

Yes, obviously, we're competing on this. So let me start with -- I talked about support before, and what we're seeing with having an AI agent in our support journey, we take millions of customer interactions, whether that's by phone or whether that's chat every year from our customers. Our ability to automate a significant percentage of that through an AI agent is incredible. But more than that, this AI agent technology and what we're seeing in terms of innovation, it means that we're not only answering the question, we're also delighting the customer through that experience. If you are using a chat bot in 5 years ago or even 2 years ago, that might not have been a very good customer experience. But this technology that we're seeing now allows us to create great experiences, great customer feedback and NPS scores from agents. We have spent a long time building the knowledge bases and blueprints for those answers -- for those standardized answers. And so we're able to leverage that and move very quickly across our support organization and very quickly across all of our products. And that will have a very material impact on our ability to support our customer, again, at a lower cost than we did before, but with a better experience. So that's support. In sales, as I said, we're already leveraging AI and some of our sales technology, for example. You could think of automating data entry into the CRM, right, from a conversation with the customer, we showed some of it in our own products in Sage sales management. We have similar capabilities for the systems we use internally. And obviously, that saves our colleagues' time, but it also makes their job a lot more fun, right, because they can focus on their interaction with the customer, driving actions, speedy follow-up, getting that deal closed as opposed to data entry into the CRM, which is no salesperson's favorite task, I tell you. So I think this is absolutely going to be a big benefit for productivity across the organization. I would also -- you talk to colleagues all across Sage. A lot of us use Copilot to maybe help us with preparation for meetings, et cetera, again, that like every company, I'm sure, across the globe. But Sage colleagues have really embraced using AI and using Copilot across the board to drive productivity.

Follow-up for you, Derk, and this may be difficult to quantify precisely, but perhaps you can give a little bit of color. To what extent was AI used to reduce the customer support cost by 16% since FY '23?

It's a great question, and the answer is this predated -- the investment we're making now into AI, the AI agent. So again, it's not like we didn't have bots, but those were not bots based on the AI technology that is available today. So that doesn't include that impact. That is really the impact of standardizing processes, the rigor around how we train people, the discipline, the systems which we have in place, the core telephony platforms, that's been a much bigger part of the journey so far. But the next part of the journey is a lot of that is going to be about AI.

Great. Thank you. Shifting gear a little bit. Questions come in saying, I recall from previous conversations with Sage, how excited you are about the opportunity presented by industry suites. Today's presentation seems to reinforce this. In terms of industry win rates, where are we most happy with our standing and which industries present an opportunity to dramatically improve win rates?

So I'll let both Dan and Derk talk about that. But maybe just kind of overall comment first. We've introduced suites across a number of the verticals, which Dan will talk about. But it is quite early days in terms of leading with those predominantly. So Dan will explain it, but I just want to kind of preface it with -- it's still quite early days in terms of seeing the impact particularly across the installed base. But do you want to talk too?

Yes, happy to. So we have launched suites in nonprofit construction and in software and are in the process of launching them in financial services, health care, hospitality, professional services. And we're going to be continuing to do that into our product-based or product-centric verticals as well. As Derk shared, there's some really good results from the nonprofit and software spaces in the U.S. as we've done that. As we kind of -- the more -- the broader question around that vertical focus, that's actually been part of the DNA for quite some time that we do make sure that we know the characteristics that are unique to a particular industry. So we can -- we speak their language. The products are designed around them. We chose a couple of examples to share with you today. But we do the same thing we're doing in construction in the nonprofit space, where the language is quite different, and the functionality needs to adjust. We're not talking about managing projects, we're talking about managing funds and making sure your restrictions are set up correctly in the nonprofit space. And industry by industry, that changes and we make sure that we have the right set of capabilities in the core that's built into the suite, and then have the things that are real value add to a smaller subset of the customers available as great add-ons that build the average contract value for that customer.

That's great.

Only to add, I don't think I'll ever be happy with any win rate in any vertical because I think we can always win more. We have incredible heritage across particular verticals like construction and not-for-profit and other verticals that we're newer into and building. But I don't think we would expect in the long run to have dramatically different win rates across different industries because we're going to build the portfolio of capabilities that is required to win across one of our industries.

Great. Thank you. And then staying on suites. So in terms of existing customers who perhaps may have already purchased part of the suite, how will they over time benefit from the full potential of suites? Or how will we cross-sell the other elements to them?

So I'll come back to that sort of Sage 50 example, right? You're a Sage 50 customer, you're happy, but you might be using some construction management or other tools that maybe are not Sage or you're using older products. If you're a Sage 50 customer and you're on the Sage platform, then we can make this -- we can take you into the suite in a seamless journey where you can use all the capabilities that are available across construction management, across budgeting and planning, but continue to work on your Sage 50 product. And when you're ready to replace that with Sage Intacct, for example, we can make that journey more and more feel like an upgrade rather than a migration because sure, you're changing some parts of the solution and of your workflow and the thing that you're looking at every day. But many of the things that you're using already feel the same, right, because they will be the same across our products because they're tapping into the same network services or they're even the same product. So I think it will really help us both to sort of create footprint expansion in our customer, but also to ultimately take them to the product that they might need for the very long term in a much more seamless way than we do today.

Thank you. Just shifting -- actually another one for you, I think, Derk, to something that you said. What do you mean when you said some accounting practices might need to reconsider the use of competitive products as making tax digital for income tax becomes enforced? And how is Sage kind of differentiated in this area?

I think the word I used is that it creates a reconsideration moment, right? So obviously, all accountancy practices across the U.K. are looking at, well, what am I going to use for MTD for income tax. How am I going to solve these problems for my customers? And how am I going to deal with all these millions of customers that are suddenly going to want my services in a way that still allows me to make money. And so we've not only been investing in a solution for MTD, but we have acquired a number of businesses and built a number of things over time in Sage for accountants and go proposal and Futrli that solve workflow for accountants across the board. Now you need an opportunity to go talk to accountants about the technology they're using. Now we're seeing accountants go right. I need to talk to someone about the solutions that I'm using. And I want to look across the spectrum for many of our competitors, including Sage. And obviously, they're then seeing products from Sage that they've maybe not seen before and not heard of before, and they're seeing us deliver a level of innovation with Copilot, which will also come to Sage for accountants that they've never seen before. So then makes them think twice about whether Sage is not just a solution for solving MTD for income tax, but may be a solution for a broader part of the problems that they're solving for their existing customers.

I think the volume point is really important here. If you think about people that are in that first cohort, you've got a small percentage of those are landlords and then the rest are sole traders. These are not people that are finance professionals, who are doing this day in, day out. So that is a huge volume of work for accountants that is not done by experts. So it's not all going to present itself in the form of kind of neatly filed documents ready to go after HMRC. So I think what we're seeing in the early testing is showing us is that accountants is exactly as you say, it forces a bit of a kind of reconsideration because they're going, I can really see how Copilot is going to help me process this huge volume in Sage for accountants.

Great. Thank you. I think we've got time for one last question, and this is another -- a general one in a way. Do we think that all of the innovations that we talked about and the changes that are happening in technology at the moment, will these lower our R&D costs in the future?

So I think I'll let, obviously, Walid answer, but I'll give a shape first, because we've talked a lot about the kind of shape of our SaaS P&L. And I think what's important is that we're very committed to investing the appropriate amount of money in order to continue to drive the level of innovation that we think is appropriate over the coming years. And therefore, I think what Walid will say is that there's a lot of things we're doing, which are increasing capacity in a more productive way, not just adding extra heads, but I want to make sure that this message to investors is very clear. We're not using that productivity as an opportunity to kind of create an R&D cost saving, we have a shape and we are trying really hard to continue to drive this innovation.

No, I agree with you. I mean we're very happy with the shape of the P&L as it relates to R&D. However, this actually -- this innovation gave us capacity. This is why I was able to say 12 to 18 months, we're going to have Copilot across all our product lines. And it's -- when we say all our product lines, we operate in all these geographies that Derk showed you, and we're going to go by product, by geography and by language, by a compliance area. So those things are very, very important. One other thing that this allows us to do, the shape of the workforce for us is going to start changing a bit. So our hiring profile today or in the last few months, I would say, a year, has been graduates, college graduates, AI expertise, people who are not afraid to be an AI engineer or AI developer, versus the 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago, what do you hire industry experts, people with 10, 20 years' experience. So most of our hiring today is focused on those type of resources. So that still will give us a little bit more capacity. But we're going to deploy this capacity for more innovation to give Derk more products and services that he could take to our customers.

Thank you. Well, we're just about at 90 minutes now, so we don't have time to take any more questions, I'm afraid. But many, many thanks for participating and for all the many questions that were submitted, made it a good session. If you do have further questions, then please to get in touch with us, and I'm now going to hand back to Steve to wrap up.

Thanks, James, and thanks to the whole team for today. And thank you to all of you for dialing in and spending the time learning a bit more about Sage. And we look forward to connecting with you again when we do our half year results in May. Thank you.