PagerDuty (PD) Q1 2027 Earnings Transcript

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DATE

Thursday, May 28, 2026 at 5 p.m. ET

CALL PARTICIPANTS

  • Executive Chair — Jennifer G. Tejada
  • Chief Executive Officer — John D. DiLullo
  • Chief Financial Officer — Owen Howard Wilson

TAKEAWAYS

  • Revenue -- $121 million, representing 1% annual growth, with international revenue up 3% and comprising 29% of total revenue.
  • Annual recurring revenue (ARR) -- $496 million, flat year over year, with ARR from usage-based products nearly 10% of the total.
  • Operating margin (Non-GAAP) -- 25%, up from 20% in the prior year due to cost discipline and AI adoption.
  • Gross margin -- 86%, at the high end of the company’s target range of 84%-86%.
  • GAAP net income -- $10.2 million, the fourth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability.
  • Dollar-based net retention (DBNR) -- 97%, with management expecting gradual improvement throughout the year.
  • Total paid customers -- 15,400, a net increase of 133; total platform users (free and paid) above 36,000, both up 14% annually.
  • Large customer segment -- 860 customers generate more than $100,000 in ARR, up 1% year over year.
  • Cash flow -- $44 million in operating cash flow (37% of revenue), and $41 million in free cash flow (34% of revenue) for the quarter.
  • Total remaining performance obligations (RPO) -- $441 million, up 3% year over year, with $316 million to be recognized in the next 12 months.
  • Share buybacks -- 8.5 million shares repurchased for $63 million, completing the $200 million program; new $100 million repurchase program announced.
  • Usage-based pricing transition -- Customers’ ARR on usage-based pricing nearly doubled sequentially from the previous quarter.
  • AI and automation adoption -- PagerDuty (NYSE:PD)'s SRE Agent and chat-native incident manager highlighted as driving product differentiation and adoption, with AI-native and enterprise customers expanding across new operational use cases.
  • Fiscal second quarter and fiscal 2027 guidance -- Fiscal second quarter revenue expected at $122 million to $124 million (midpoint flat year over year); fiscal 2027 revenue guidance reiterated at $488.5 million to $496.5 million, with net income per diluted share raised due to reduced share count.

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RISKS

  • Management noted, "our customer base is also in transition. We have some segments of the customer base that are under more financial pressure than others. Including, like, midsize SaaS, for instance."
  • Dollar-based net retention declined from the previous quarter, and management acknowledged some customers "potentially needing to downgrade as the result of seat based pressure."
  • Free cash flow in the fiscal first quarter was elevated primarily due to over performance on collections, which is expected to normalize in the fiscal second quarter.

SUMMARY

The earnings call detailed PagerDuty's executive transition, with John D. DiLullo assuming the role of CEO and Jennifer G. Tejada moving to executive chair after a structured succession process. Management emphasized the strategic shift toward usage-based, integrated platform licensing, with early adopters already seeing increased ARR and faster product engagement. Capital returns remained a board-level priority, as demonstrated by buyback activity and the launch of a new $100 million repurchase authorization, while maintaining significant investment capacity for AI and platform innovation.

  • PagerDuty highlighted rapid AI-native customer growth, with product-led growth (PLG) motion credited for over 600 new customers for five consecutive quarters.
  • Fortune 100 and regulated enterprise wins were cited as evidence of expanding penetration into historically slower-to-adopt verticals, such as manufacturing and financial services.
  • A customer using usage-based Operations Cloud and professional services reported over 80% improvement in time to value and 50% higher product engagement compared to those who self-implement.
  • Tejada said, "AI is the new risk layer for enterprise. As the control plane for AI, we are well positioned to support enterprise resilience across our customers' strategic digital, and AI operations."
  • Management clarified that future operating margin expansion is supported by ongoing AI-driven efficiency initiatives and a disciplined approach to capital allocation across R&D and go-to-market investment.

INDUSTRY GLOSSARY

  • Usage-based pricing: A licensing model where fees are determined by the volume of consumption rather than number of seats or users, enabling scalability with customer operational activity.
  • ARR (annual recurring revenue): A metric indicating the annualized value of recurring revenue components contracted or recognized within a specified period.
  • RPO (remaining performance obligations): The total contracted value yet to be recognized as revenue, reflecting future revenue backlog under active agreements.
  • PLG (product-led growth): A business growth model relying on product features and user experience to drive customer acquisition and expansion, often enabling bottom-up enterprise adoption.
  • SRE Agent: PagerDuty's AI-powered automated incident response tool acting as a virtual site reliability engineer for event detection, remediation, and workflow automation.

Full Conference Call Transcript

Jennifer G. Tejada: Thank you, Christine. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us today. Before we discuss our results, I want to acknowledge the leadership change we announced mid-May. After 10 years as CEO, I have transitioned to executive chair. And today, I am pleased to introduce PagerDuty's new CEO, John DeLullo. We are already partnering well, and the transition is off to a great start. John's appointment is the result of a deliberate and comprehensive succession process that I initiated with the board some time ago. John stood out as a proven leader with a unique combination of technical depth, operational discipline, and go to market experience.

Prior to joining PagerDuty, he served as CEO of both public and private companies most recently DeepWatch and previously LiveVox and Lastline. Having been a customer and a partner in the past, he brings firsthand knowledge of PagerDuty's role in our market, of our potential, as well as an understanding of how our customers operate in increasingly complex mission critical environments. With the business poised for profitable growth acceleration, now is the right time for this transition. The board and I are confident John is the right leader to build on PagerDuty's momentum towards our next phase of growth. I will turn it over to John for his brief remarks.

John D. DiLullo: Thank you, Jennifer. I am very excited to join you today. As Jen mentioned, I have known and followed PagerDuty for years. As both a customer and as a partner. And I have long admired the role that the company plays at the center of modern digital operations. That perspective has only deepened in the weeks since I joined, as I have spent time with Jennifer, the board, and the broader team What stands out to me is the strength of the foundation a trusted brand, an enviable customer base, and a platform that sits at the core of real time mission critical operations.

As digital environments become more and more complex, and the pace of innovation accelerates with AI and automation volumes climbing. We expect platform usage to continue to grow. With our transition to usage based pricing underway, usage growth should translate to revenue growth over time. And I believe PagerDuty is exceptionally well positioned to extend its leadership. In my past CEO and leadership positions, I focused on scaling organizations, strengthening execution, and aligning closely with customer needs. That experience has illuminated for me a clear opportunity to build on the momentum already underway at PagerDuty. In the near term, my priority is simple. Listen learn, and engage.

I am spending time with employees, with customers, and with partners to deepen my understanding of our market and our business. I am incredibly excited about what lies ahead and confident in our ability to capture the opportunity in front of us. I look forward to spending time and partnering with our analysts and shareholders frequently in the quarters ahead. Jane, you are on mute.

Jennifer G. Tejada: Thank you. Thank you, John. I look forward to connecting John to our shareholder community and callbacks and at our next investor conference. With this leadership transition, I have reflected on my time at PagerDuty. Over the last decade, we have evolved from a company with a single product less than $50 million in revenue, and a few thousand customers to the leading AI first operations platform generating nearly $500 million in profitable revenue. We strengthened our core franchise, digital operations management, by embedding AI and automation into the platform driving greater customer outcomes and increasing differentiation. In doing so, we have become a strategic partner in the AI control plane for our clients.

In Q1, PagerDuty delivered results that exceeded the top end of guidance for both revenue and non-GAAP operating margin. Quarterly revenue was $121 million, up 1% year over year, and annual recurring revenue was $496 million, flat year over year. We grew non-GAAP operating margin to 25%, through consistent discipline structural efficiency initiatives, and AI adoption. We see a clear path to our long term target of 30% non-GAAP operating margin as we increase our own operational AI leverage and drive customer usage of our AI platform. We are confident that our product enhancements and pricing improvements initiated last year, notably the introduction of the new usage based operations cloud and PagerDuty advanced pricing and packaging, will accelerate revenue growth.

As a reminder, we have offered individual products, enterprise incident management, customer service operations, and runbook automation via seat based licensing. While we sell event intelligence and AI products through a usage based model. Our full suite of products are now available through an integrated platform with usage based pricing. Usage based products, include AIOps, PagerDuty Advance, and Operations Cloud, now account for nearly 10% of our total ARR. To date, early customer adoption of the new operations cloud plan has unlocked more value for customers and grown ARR because it incentivizes the use of multiple products. This underscores the large opportunity ahead of us with our new pricing framework as a key driver of ARR growth acceleration.

The new operations cloud offering deployed with professional services and support plays a critical role in helping expand customers use of the full platform. Customers who choose the operations cloud gain new access to all of our products via a more flexible platform license, removing the friction related to adding users across departments. This leads to new operational use cases which ultimately drive increased usage. Our usage based model is also predictable for customers They start with a level of usage across the integrated product lines which can increase the value realized during the term of the contract. Usage elements include events, AI actions, and automated workflows.

As customers automate more work, PagerDuty scales with the value delivered through AI event intelligence, and automation while mitigating the risk associated with a customer needing to reduce user count. In addition, customers who deploy the operations cloud with our new professional services model see an over 80% improvement in time to value and 50% higher product engagement compared to those who self implement. We are encouraged by these results and the initial customer conversions this year which are leading to larger, multiyear, more strategic commitments. The customers who have adopted the new Ops Cloud offering experienced broad platform engagement.

The majority of our early cohort are actively using more capabilities across incident management, incident workflows, event intelligence, and agents with teams broadening both the breadth of features they rely on and the number of users operating within the platform day to day. These customers are integrating the operations cloud more deeply into how their organizations work, reflecting the value of a deliberate customer first approach to migration and onboarding. 1 of the clear signals of customer momentum in Q1 came from a Fortune 500 automotive manufacturer previously a customer on a seat based plan that migrated to the operations cloud offering. Within weeks of closing, the customer realized the value of their initial purchase with expansion into a subsidiary.

We expect that customer to purchase even more usage during their contract term. Leading growth indicators continue to underpin momentum. Giving us confidence in both ongoing demand and increasingly successful traction with our strategies to accelerate growth including refining our enterprise sales motion, flexible usage based contracts, and significant new platform feature releases like our chat first incident manager and our SRE Agent. Recent product innovation has led to strategic wins as more established highly regulated businesses like banks operate more like tech companies. A Fortune 100 financial institution expanded with us to support a new SRE model deployment.

PagerDuty's ability to support the company's high efficiency operational goals and the bank's shift towards a modern SRE model led to a 6-figure early renewal and enterprise wide expansion. Strategic wins like these underscore why we continue to win new customers. For the fifth consecutive quarter, we acquired over 600 new customers. And total customers on the platform grew 14% year over year. We continue to see progress in our international markets, specifically Asia Pacific and Japan, where enterprise focus has led to a marquee land of a television broadcasting and media company which we expect will expand over time.

In the North American and EMEA markets, our efforts to stabilize retention and accelerate new and expansion business are bearing fruit. Large enterprises in the retail and the automotive sectors as well as fast growing native AI and defense tech companies like CoreWeave and Anduril are benefiting from the value and resilience that PagerDuty provides. A long term strategic retailer in North America executed a renewal and expansion with us on the operations cloud and runbook automation with a multiyear, 7-figure agreement. This win was also a total competitive displacement. PagerDuty aligned its integrated automation platform with the customer's executive leadership and corporate initiatives to support their objective of advanced operational efficiency.

A leading global automotive manufacturer in EMEA turned to PagerDuty as they standardized incident management across their global IT operations. This expansion is critical as the company transitions to a fully electric vehicle range requiring always on reliability to avoid costly plant disruptions. Previously, their incident response was fragmented across siloed teams which created operational blind spots. With PagerDuty, the customer benefits from standardized incident response, 24/7 global coverage, and clear accountability for faster resolution times. The adoption of PagerDuty by native AI companies as new lands and expansions demonstrates how our platform meets the evolving needs of the AI era. Innovative AI startups who join the platform during the quarter included Lightspin, Drop Zone AI, and Semblance AI.

AI is the new operational risk layer for enterprise. it is accelerating software development and deployment at unprecedented velocity leading to a new magnitude of complexity in the production environment, In addition to being higher in volume and more complex, AI driven failures can be less predictable and less visible. And no customer segment is immune. AI failure in large can become major operational failures due to automation. Even AI native firms are vulnerable to disruptions eroding the trust in AI products. This creates more demand for the PagerDuty platform, drives increased event and incident volume, and ultimately increases usage.

There is no platform better positioned than the PagerDuty Operations Cloud to resolve these operational failures and even prevent them before the disruption happens. PagerDuty is at the forefront of autonomous operations. The 3 pillars of our platform strategy are AI and automation, full life cycle incident management, and platform ecosystem extensibility. Our SRE Agent launched in October highlights our focus on AI and automation, acting as a virtual responder the SRE Agent gathers signals across the tech stack performs approved remediations, and maintains an operational shared menu. Memory to learn from past incidents.

The chat native interface in Slack and Microsoft Teams directly integrated to AI agents and post incident reviews creates a full life cycle experience and modernizes the responder experience. Our AI ecosystem supported by marquee partnerships including Anthropic, Claude, Cursor, and LangChain enables PagerDuty's agents interact across whatever AI enabled surface a developer chooses. PagerDuty has fast become the new control plane for AI. Helping customers to orchestrate and manage agents with context, clarity, and fidelity that made us the category leader first for incident management and then for digital operations. Those agents are now running at machine speed where they can reason and act or without human involvement.

According to PagerDuty's recent research, expensive cascading failure scenarios can cost enterprises more than $1 million an hour. PagerDuty is paving the way for unprecedented business continuity and resilience for customers moving towards autonomous operations. The operations cloud connects everything from developer tools, monitoring, and systems of record. Then it intelligently orchestrates resources with AI to drive faster, smarter decisions so issues are identified even before code ships. If and when a problem does arise in production, the platform analyzes the context, and resolves issues expeditiously. It automatically updates systems of record for compliance and reporting. In this era of fast moving technological disruption, intelligence and automation work together to keep operations running smoothly, protecting revenue, and reputation.

This product innovation and our new pricing combined have been key to attracting new customers and encouraging existing customers to expand. Australia's leading digital bank became a new major customer in the quarter on a platform with on the platform with a 7-figure multiyear deal. This engagement underscores PagerDuty's position as a strategic operations partner. Prior to deploying PagerDuty, the customer experienced several major outages unmanageable with a homegrown incident management system. By adopting PagerDuty incident management, AI ops, and runbook automation, the customer is reducing systemic risk. A leading not for profit financial services organization in North America expanded its relationship with us in a multiyear, multimillion dollar contract for the PagerDuty Operations Cloud.

Access to the full PagerDuty platform via the Operations Cloud offering enabled the customer to align its operational maturity goals to the platform's capabilities. The breadth of the platform gave the customer the confidence to consolidate multiple point to spend with PagerDuty. A global consulting company and customer since 2018 renewed a 6-figure expansion this quarter. PagerDuty's best of breed bidirectional interoperability with their system of record was the winning competitive advantage over an observability vendor. PagerDuty is improving the end user experience by reducing downtime and driving operational transformation. Our platform mitigates systemic risk not only for enterprise customers but also for our over 650 not-for-profit customers. In turn, helping them to amplify their mission driven impact.

In Q1, we announced our latest impact cohort, including grants to 8 nonprofits focused on health care, humanitarian aid, and crisis response. PagerDuty again was recognized for its workplace culture and industry leadership. Inspiring Workplaces named PagerDuty as an employer of choice. 2026 GigaOm Radar for incident response platforms named PagerDuty a leader and outperformer for the fourth consecutive year. For teams dealing with noisy observability, coordination breakdowns, or inconsistent response, this acknowledgment is a clear signal that PagerDuty is leading the market in the evolution to AI first operations. In Q1, we improved gross retention sequentially demonstrated ongoing new customer acquisition momentum, and delivered strong expansion in our key markets, large enterprise, and AI natives.

Our disciplined execution and product innovation led to consistent margin expansion. Before I hand it over to Howard, I want to thank all of our current and past coverage analysts and investors for your support and counsel. This is my 20-ninth and likely last earnings call with PagerDuty. And while it has not always been easy, it has always been professional, constructive, even fun. You have held us to a high standard, and I have learned enormously from this community. I appreciate your investment in PagerDuty, and both your past and ongoing support of our team. Leading PagerDuty for the last 10 years, has been an honor and a joy.

We have navigated countless market transitions while continuing to innovate for our customers, expanding our customer base from less than 5 thousand when I started to more than 36 thousand strong today. Together, we have shaped the industry. First is a leading voice for DevOps, then defining the digital operations category and most recently, leading the market in AI first operations. We grew the company more than 10-fold while expanding our profitability and we became the definitive category leader, 1 that evolved from a single cloud app to an AI first platform the most important and innovative companies in the world trust and rely on. I am incredibly proud of our people. Past and current, and grateful to our customers.

Many of whom I have partnered with personally for their trust. In transitioning to executive chair, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be part of an outstanding team and I am optimistic for the enormous opportunity ahead. I have had the opportunity to get to know John, and we have already built a strong partnership. He has my complete confidence and support in leading the chapter for PagerDuty, and I believe he will earn yours too. Thank you. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Howard.

Owen Howard Wilson: Thank you, Jennifer, and good day to everyone joining us on this afternoon's call. Before I dive into the financials, I want to thank Jennifer for her exceptional leadership partnership, and stewardship of PagerDuty over the years. I share her enthusiasm in welcoming John to the executive team. Unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses and operating results on this call are on a non-GAAP basis and are reconciled to our GAAP results in the earnings release that was posted on our Investor Relations website before the call. Before reviewing our first quarter financial results, I want to highlight a meaningful inflection point in our business model transformation.

The Operations Cloud Pricing and Packaging completed its first full quarter in limited general availability. Early results showed traction. The ARR of customers on this model nearly doubled from Q4 to Q1. Of our customers spending over $100 thousand a year, over 15 have transitioned to the model, which gives us confidence in the business model transformation to usage based pricing. Moving to results. The first quarter of FY25, we delivered solid performance exceeding our revenue and operating margin guidance ranges. We continue to see strong demand signals in particular, new customer acquisition, existing customer expansion, and platform usage growth. Our customer success and product initiatives contributed to an improvement in our gross retention from Q4 to Q1.

And we expect this to gradually improve through the year. Revenue for the quarter was $121 million up 1% year over year with international revenue increasing 3% annually, contributing 29% of total revenue. Q1 gross margin was 86% at the high end of our 84% to 86% target range. Operating income was $30 million, or 25% of revenue, compared to $24 million, or 20% of revenue in the same quarter last year. This margin expansion reflects our rigorous focus on efficiency and operational execution. GAAP net income was $10.2 million, our fourth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. We are continuing our progress on the path to sustained GAAP profitability.

Annual recurring revenue exiting Q1 was $496 million in line with the amount in the year ago period. Customers spending over $100 thousand in annual recurring revenue was 860, up 1% year over year. Dollar based net retention was 97%. We expect our continued customer success and renewal initiatives along with our operations cloud pricing to result in stabilized stabilization of DBNR and for it to gradually increase throughout the year. Total paid customers grew to 15.4 thousand in Q1, adding 133 net new customers since the year ago period. Free and paid customers on our platform grew to over 36 thousand an increase of approximately 14% compared to Q1 of last year.

In terms of cash flow for the quarter, cash from operations was $44 million, or 37% of revenue, and free cash flow was $41 million, or 34% of revenue. This strong cash generation gives us the financial stability and flexibility to continue to invest in our go to market transformation, AI product development while maintaining our commitment to shareholder returns. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $444 million in cash, cash equivalents, and investments. On a trailing 12-month basis, billings were $497 million increase of 1% compared to a year ago. At the end of Q1, total RPO was approximately $441 million, increasing 3% year over year.

Of this amount, approximately $316 million, or 72%, is expected to be recognized over the next 12 months. $100 million or 23% over months 13 to 24 and the remainder thereafter. During the quarter, we repurchased 8.5 million shares for $63 million and completed the authorized $200 million share repurchase program. We view our current valuation as a compelling opportunity. Looking ahead, our strong balance sheet provides us significant flexibility to execute on our priorities while returning capital to shareholders. And today, we have announced our latest $100 million share repurchase program. Now turning to guidance.

For the second quarter fiscal 2025, we expect revenue in the range of $122 million to $124 million with the midpoint approximately flat year over year. And net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty Inc. In the range of $0.29 to $0.31 This implies an operating margin of 22% to 23%. For the full fiscal year 2027, we expect revenue in the range of $488.5 million to $496.5 million with the midpoint essentially flat year over year. This is the same range as previously provided. And net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty Inc.

In the range of $1.27 to $1.32, an increase based on the reduced share count as a result of the completion of the buyback program. This implies an operating margin of 24% to 25%. Before moving to questions, I would like to provide assistance with modeling FY27. On cash flow, Q1 free cash flow was elevated primarily due to over performance on collections, which we expect to normalize in Q2. On operating margin, part of the Q1 over performance was due to marketing program spend which we expect to deploy in Q2. Our Q1 performance reflects the we expect to deploy in Q2. rigorous focus on efficiency and operational execution that underpins our business.

Leveraging a solid balance sheet, healthy cash balance, and strong free cash flow generation, we possess the financial agility required to fuel our AI product development and go to market transformation all while supporting a seamless transition of leadership. With that, I will open up the call for Q&A.

Operator: We are ready to move to questions from our analysts. To join the queue. Okay. And our first question, comes from the line of Morgan Stanley's analyst Sanjit Singh, Your line is opened.

Analyst (Sanjit Singh): Hi, everyone. This is Christopher Candelaria on for Sanjit Singh. Thanks for taking the questions here. I want to ask about the net retention rates. Really nice to see the gross retention rate improvement that you called out. But the net retention rate did take a step down from last quarter. So just curious what gives you that confidence on the recovery and the stabilization on the retention side?

Jennifer G. Tejada: Sure. Thanks. Thanks for the question, Christopher. I really appreciate it. it is nice to see you. 1, we have really started to see good progress with our early cohort in the pricing transition. So I spoke about a number of customers in prepared remarks who frankly, had come to us with a view of potentially needing to downgrade as the result of seat based pressure and following their ability to understand the flexibility and access to new products on the platform as well as the flexibility based on usage based pricing, they actually expanded with us in the time frame. And we are quite early in that transition, but it is progressing well.

As a reminder, we kicked off early access in Q3 limited general availability in Q4. And we have opened that up to a much broader set of customers this term and this quarter. In addition, we are seeing very strong demand signals. So Howard mentioned our fifth consecutive quarter of over 600 new customer logos. Those tend to be early adopters. They are a demonstration that our PLG motion is still a competitive advantage, but also that the most innovative, developed and native AI startups are choosing PagerDuty. And as we know from history, those types of new customers tend to grow organically as they expand their businesses themselves.

And then lastly, you know, what we are also seeing is the benefit of improving the way we renew customers, offering multiyear, multi product agreements. So we have started to mitigate some of that risk over time. You know, our customer base is also in transition. We have some segments of the customer base that are under more financial pressure than others. Including, like, midsize SaaS, for instance. But what we are seeing is some really encouraging new demand from really large enterprises in verticals that we had not historically focused on. You heard me talk about 2 automotive manufacturers. We are seeing something similar in financial services as well as in health care.

And then the last thing that I will say is for our customers where AI operations is becoming an important demand driver, many of them are just now starting to move from what I would call the experimentation phase where there is less risk to deploying AI in production at scale. When you start to scale AI into production environments, the risk spikes pretty significantly as does complexity and the potential blast radius of issues. And that is when we really see customers start to lean in on their investments.

So that is still in front of us. that is why we see potentially some short term transition with customers moving from seat based to usage based, but long term AI being a true tailwind for the business.

Owen Howard Wilson: Yeah. And, Christopher, just 1 additional point that I would add is that, you know, we monitor closely the growth in usage on our platform. And again, this quarter, we saw that continue to increase. So that validates the approach that we are taking around moving to our flexible operations cloud pricing model. And the early results from that have been strong. So we saw from Q4 to Q1 nearly doubling the ARR of customers who were on that model. And so we do think that not only will this be good in terms of helping us mitigate some of the pressure around gross retention because of seat based compression, it actually creates a really good foundation for growth.

Because we have seen with most of those customers that we have moved into that model, that they have, in fact, been able to renew with us at higher values doing an expansion at the same time. So right now, we are dealing with both of these things in parallel. Because, you know, not every customer in our base is exactly the same. They are dealing with different dynamics. And it is really encouraging to see a lot of those native AI companies and a lot of enterprises, as Jennifer mentioned, they are continuing to increase the investment in PagerDuty even whilst we might be dealing with some other customers who are in the transitional phase.

Analyst (Sanjit Singh): Got it. that is that is really helpful. Thank you for that color. And then, John, I know it is still early, but what are some of your key learnings so far as you have gotten ramped up here and any idea around what your key priorities or key changes that you are looking to make at the organization are.

John D. DiLullo: Yeah. Thanks for the question for the question, Christopher, it is really early days for me. I am just starting to get to know the team and to listen and learn to all of the great things that the company is doing. But I will say that I was I was very excited to get the call. And, you know, I have been a customer multiple times. I have a good understanding of the product, and I think, firsthand, I realize what the capabilities of the product and what the platform are and how deeply integrated it is into the into the operations of so many leading companies.

And I think 1 of the things and you have heard it a couple of times already on the call about the number of new logos and the amount of utilization of the platform, that the market dynamics that we are in, that we exist in, are very, very favorable. You know, AI continues to accelerate that creation of growth and the automation workflows, autonomous systems. And just more software, more dependencies, more automation. Means more inference, more compute, and that all is going to lead to just greater need for resilience and orchestration. And real time operation response, which is just what pager duty does better than anybody else.

And I think, you know, to some extent, I think the company is a little bit perhaps underappreciated by investors. And I think working together with the team and Jennifer's just been great during the transition as has Howard and the whole team, but I think we have a great opportunity here to unlock value, and I just could not be more excited.

Analyst (Sanjit Singh): Excellent. Thank you so much.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ng with Truist. Jonathan, please go ahead.

Analyst (Miller Jump): Hi. This is Miller Jump in for Jonathan Ng. Thanks for the question, and congrats to both John and Jennifer. To ask a little bit about profitability. So you guys have been GAAP profitable for a while now, and you are targeting 30% operating margins. Considering kind of, like, the heavy r and d needed for, like, agentic products, how are you balancing the need for product velocity with headcount growth and commitment to margin expansion? Thank you.

Jennifer G. Tejada: I will take a shot at that, and then Howard, you can jump in. I mean, 1, we did not just start building our AI products. We have been building AI into the platform for several years. We built a distinct advantage through the proprietary context in our own model that comes from more than a decade of capturing insights and information from workflows, developers themselves, events that we ingest, and how incidents are resolved. So we have been making investments over many, many years to put ourselves in an incredibly strong competitive position.

In addition, Rukmini Reddy our head of engineering, has really been leading the charge in deploying AI in throughout our own developer community, and our entire development organization uses AI to expedite and amplify their creativity. And that is led us to be able to deploy and deliver more features at a higher velocity than we have in the past. Of course, we have a high standard for resiliency. So we maintain our commitment to security, resilience, and reliability at scale. That has not changed.

Our ability to unlock new features, whether it is chat first incident management and experience from end to end, or increasing the capabilities of our agentic solution like our SRE agent, we are able to do that on a lower cost basis than we have, in the past. We are also deploying AI throughout the company and using it in ways to create efficiency. And as you know, Howard and I have been focused for many years on structural programs to make the business more efficient long term.

To support our ability to continue to invest in r and d And I just closed my comments and open it up to Howard with the fact that we see ourselves as a growth company and as a category leader. We know that the market expects us to innovate. And that is not changing. that is something that John and I, I think, are very well aligned on and you should continue to see new products and features coming out of PagerDuty at a similar pace to what you have seen in the past few quarters.

Owen Howard Wilson: Yeah. And I would just add to Jennifer's comments. We have always taken a balanced view on capital allocation. So that sometimes means that you have to change the places where you invest within an organization. And the 1 strength that we have that stands out as PagerDuty is our gross margins. So you know, we are operating at gross margins typically around 85%, 86%. We continue to fine tune the use of our infrastructure and that then creates room for us to continue to invest in the services that we deliver while still maintaining best in class gross margins.

And then the work that our team has been doing internally by deploying AI aggressively in terms of the work that they do, particularly within our engineering team means that we have created a lot more capacity. And that capacity has allowed us to increase our pace of innovation. So it is a combination of factors that we do, but always with that view to saying, like, where are we able to drive or optimize so that we can improve our productivity in other areas to create room to invest. A different space.

Analyst (Miller Jump): Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Sherman with TD Cowen. Andrew, please go ahead.

Analyst (Andrew Sherman): Hey, Jennifer, so and congrats to you. it is been great working with you. And, John, congrats on your on your new role. With the 10% of ARR from consumption was great to get that number. Maybe just touch on the what where do you see that can get to by the end of this year? How what do you have a certain cohort customers that you are targeting? And what is the conversations and their receptive receptiveness to expanding under this new model and comfort with the price and the cost and the usage and all that.

Owen Howard Wilson: Yeah, sure, Andrew. Wow. there is a lot in that question, Andrew, But let me try and cover what I can. So, yeah, look, it is great for us to see that we are nearly at 10% of our ARR coming from those usage based products. We have not put a specific number out there in terms of where we want to get to by the end of the year. But it is clearly an area of focus for us because, 1, it delivers a lot of value to our customers.

What the overarching message that we hear from customers as they move to our operations cloud pricing is that the access to all of our products removing that friction, just makes it easier for them to march towards a goal of operational resilience and deliver the best experiences to their customers. So there is a strong customer appeal to being able to have full access to the platform. What we are expecting though is we are expecting that growth to be able to help not only mitigate some of the retention that I spoke about earlier, but also accelerate our growth as a company.

Because what we have seen, if I just look at with, you know, 2 quarters of data in terms of operation cloud pricing is not going to be definitive. But the focus that we have had on a relatively small set of customers compared to our overall customer base has yielded really promising results. And so I expect that we will continue, in particular, to have a look at our customers that are spending more than a $100 thousand a year with us. Those are the ones who stand to benefit greatly from this model. But it is not only going to be that cohort of customers.

But certainly our expectation is that we will make meaningful progress with this each period as we go through the year. We are not committing to report on this every quarter. But we will be doing periodic updates just so that folks can get a flavor on how that transition is going.

Analyst (Andrew Sherman): Okay. that is helpful. And maybe for Jennifer, the AI native customers have been a good topic for you. I think you gave a number last year. It was 2% or 3% of ARR. Any update to that? And you named some of them, 1 that just went public. We would love to hear, like, how they came to you and their usage of the platform and kind of your validation of your technology and how that can spread to some other customers in this cohort too.

Jennifer G. Tejada: Sure. Thanks for the question, Andrew, Nice to see you again. Here's the thing that is been really interesting. 1 is, some of these native AI companies are scaling really fast. And, you know, in the old days of, like, software v 2, startup software companies did not have big concerns around product resilience or reliability, because it took them a long time to get to scale. They just wanted to get you know, the minimum viable product out in the market and move. it is very different if you are a fronter LLM or a rapidly scaling agentic company because your product has to work all the time or you erode trust and cannot expand, cannot grow.

So we are seeing the appetite for resilience at scale coming much earlier in the growth life cycle of these native AI companies. And thereby, some of them are expanding faster regardless of what their headcount or, you know, their people size is doing. The second thing that we are seeing is the most demanding developers are choosing the best in breed offering early. And that is happening through our PLG motion.

So we do not talk so much about our PLG product led growth motion so often because we have been so focused on enterprise retention, enterprise expansion, but it is 1 of the competitive advantages that PagerDuty is had for a very long time that we land through the developer community, through the user, and then expand organically on a very simple pricing model until that customer is ready to mature into a multiproduct offering. And so that is also the PLG motion. that is the flywheel you can see working 5 quarters with more than 600 new logos. I mean, that is not an accident.

And we continue to place a lot of focus around the expansion opportunity of those customers through our commercial business, which Katherine Post Calvert leads. And then at the same time, some of these AI natives are moving into enterprise size quickly. So you also have to have the go to market model to support them and the pricing flexibility so that they start applying you to new use cases more quickly. We used to have this very patient growth model where you start out on call, and then you add incident management, then event intelligence. With the Ops Cloud platform, you can access all of those products at 1 time.

And what we are finding with our largest enterprise customers who are using them is it is leading to new use cases faster because they do not have the friction of having to go department by department to get permission or authority to spend on more users. So we have seen manufacturing operations. We have seen security ops. We have seen business ops. We have seen customer support. Lots of things show up with the operations cloud that historically would have taken us many years to get to in kind of a traditional product led life cycle or sales cycle. So that is also been very encouraging.

And then the last thing I would say is that over the last few quarters, we have started to see some of these, you know, call it fortune 100 very large enterprise companies come to us who traditionally were late to the digital operations party. Right? And they are expediting their modernization efforts so that they can benefit from AI transformation. And these are manufacturing, highly regulated industries in financial services and health care. Right? State and local government, etcetera. So some of these traditionally sort of slow-moving verticals as it relates to adopting new products are moving faster. And, again, the operations cloud pricing and packaging is there at the right moment for that to meet that demand.

Analyst (Andrew Sherman): Excellent. Great to hear. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Thanks, Andrew. And thank you for your questions and participation today. Jennifer, we will turn it to you for your final remarks.

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

Thank you so much for joining us today.

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