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Thanks for everyone for joining. My name is Billy Fitzsimmons. I cover application software here at Piper Sandler. I cover everything from the hyperscalers, SMIDCAM software, vertical software. Really excited to have Aziz Negji, the CFO of Asana. Thank you for joining us today. Yeah, thanks for having us. I think maybe a great place to start is just kind of a quick overview of AsANA and the problem it solves for customers. And a lot's changed in the past year to year and a half. Dan's come in as CEO. You've joined as CFO. And it seems like the product innovation has accelerated. Yeah, absolutely. So for those who don't know Asana or don't do it well, we were founded about 18 years ago. And really the mission was to help drive better coordination and management of work. So Dustin Moskovich, who's the founder of Facebook, founded Asana, really on the premise of this idea of the enterprise work graph. I'm going to connect the who, what, where, why of work and be the really living brain and context source of work. And as we fast forward today, in an agentic world, in a agentic enterprise, that same architecture is exactly what agents and humans need to coordinate and execute work in this next era of work, and it's really an all-around context. So the work graph providing the context, the living brain of an organization, it enables the right governance, the persistence memory, a multiplayer environment, and that's where we're really driving the product roadmap. So we've been a company that's really been focused on seats and subscriptions, and now the new Asana is really around both seats and submissions and consumption and outcomes. So just this week, we'll release Agentic Work Management, where we'll bring together collaborative work management with our AI products, AI Studio, our workflow automation tool, AI teammates, our agents that work alongside humans in workflows, and then AI Dash, our chief of staff. So super excited about that, as well as rolling out additional Gentic apps, which are bringing us into new buying centers and personas and really expanding the aperture of who we serve and our TAM. I have a lot of questions on AI and the product roadmap. I want to start on the financials because you guys reported just a couple weeks ago. 10% revenue growth, some of the AR metrics, or sorry, I should say NRR metrics, both for all customers and your largest customers, improved. metrics are pointing in the right direction. Can you kind of unpack the drivers of that between retention, cross-sells, AI, contrasted with some of the factors you called out as kind of modest headwinds like the PLG motion? Yeah, so Q2 was a strong quarter. I mean, I think the headline for us was really improving health of the business, and you called that out. We report three cohorts for our net retention rate, all three improved, with the most dramatic increase occurring with our largest customers, who went from 96% net retention to 98%. And that's a four-quarter average. So if you back into actually what the quarter was, it's much better than that. And we also see that same trend with our 5K-plus customers. And so what we attribute that improving health and improving net retention with our larger customers is really the adoption of AI. So now 25% of our 100K-pluss customers have an AI product, And we see when they engage with those AI products, better retention and expansion trends from those customers. You know, our upmarket continues to perform well. America has returned to double-digit growth for the first time in two years. You know we look at the balance sheet metrics as a leading indicator and good proxy for upmarket growth. So CRPO accelerated to 11% in the quarter from 7% last quarter. So really encourage what we're seeing upmarket. a lot of it's driven by better AI expansion, but also seed expansion and much better gross retention as well. And then you contrast that with some of that goodness is being masked by what's happening down market. So if we look at our PLG business, which is mostly comprised of sub 5K, that continues to be a drag on both overall growth and NRR. So our 5K plus cohort and our 100K cohort in the quarter are trending or at or above 100%. What's dragging that down to 97% overall, which has still improved five straight quarters, is that sub 5K. And so what we've seen there is the ICP mix has shifted a bit to smaller customers outside of our target industries would tend to be a little bit more churny and have lower expansion. And we're all over tackling that product, that problem. And then you add on, you know, as we shift to this AWM and new packaging model, there's a little Bit of rev rec timing that's being pushed out at Q3 and you for, into next year. And so we called that out as well. So we beat the quarter on the top line by $2.4 million, 10% growth, $2,4 million beat on our guidance. We rolled about 1.5. And then if you factor in that push out from a RevRec perspective about 1,2, we would have rolled the whole thing. So it's a little bit complex this quarter, but there's a lot changing and we think it's the right strategy for the long term. One of the other things I want to ask you about is if I rewind the clock and think about, like, the start of this year. I think one of the biggest questions I got, not just for Asana, but all the seat-based names I cover, is kind of the potential for AI to lead to muted seat growth or AI layoffs to impact companies and hurt seat- based businesses. And I think the fear was that that would hit the kind of tech vertical, which is a large customer base for you guys. But it actually seemed like on the 2Q print that the metrics were kind of pointing in the right direction there. Can you talk about, like, your progression of conversations with the tech vertical specifically? Yeah. So the tech protocol is the third quarter of improvement in the tech critical, so second short quarter of growth, and improving not only growth, but improving growth. And a lot of that is attributed to they've been early adopters of our AI products. So, you know, 25% of our net new ARR last quarter was from our AI product. That's up from 17% in Q1. They've been a heavy adopter of that. Both what we call new tech, kind of AI modern, AI native companies that we called out last quarter. CoreWeave is expanding with us. We've got both the labs we count as customers. They continue to expand with us as they grow headcount, not only just with the subscription, but also with AI Studio and AI teammates as well. Our traditional tech customers have been strong adopters of AI Studio and are seeing the benefits there. So it's really having more to expand and to mitigate contraction with those customers is really leading to better outcomes from the tech vertical. If you think about one example, as we call that, wasn't in the tech protocol, it was more in the broader TMT space. You know, this was a customer that three years ago expanded with us. Three years later, when they come up for renewal, they have less headcount. A year and a half ago, we'd be facing a million-dollar churn event because we would have nothing to offset less headcount other than raising prices. And raising prices to offset churn is not really the best kind of lever to be pulling. We seeded them with AI Studio and AI Teammates. We found a killer workflow in marketing. We saved them 30% on a campaign cycle time. When it came up for renewal, they were comfortable making a big bet on Teammate and Studio. They did a million dollar plus TCV deal with us. So instead of contracting a million, we actually expanded that account. And over time, as they see the benefits and continue to see the benefits of those products, we have a consumption and expansion vector that's not tied to headcount and seed. So those types of examples really excite me now with five different products to drive a much more robust deal strategy to not only mitigate churn but create expansion. And as we think about NRR coming off from 100% plus several years ago to where it is today, a lot of that has become because of expansion coming down, not because of retention coming off. I think that's a great segue to a bunch of questions I have on AI. And you kind of teed this up nicely, which is, walk us through kind of your AI product portfolio and how that's kind of evolved. Because there's AI Studio, there's AI Teammates, you acquire a company called Stack AI, and then you talked about this before, but this pivot to this AWM piece. Talk about each of those things and how we should think about the opportunity? Yeah, absolutely. So we are expanded into basically five product families. And actually this week's a big week for us because we launched four of those product families, so the birthday of AWM will be tomorrow, where AWM is really bringing together CWM, AI Studio, and AI Teammates into the core experience. So, we no longer will view AI Studio and Teammate as an add-on to CWN, it's part of the core experience, and so what does that mean? It's really two things. One, it is a pricing and packaging shift where you will now, when you procure Asana or every Asana customer, when they open up Asana and AWM, they will have teammates requests and AI studio credits. So we're able to get them to adoption quicker. Second, it's a different approach in the product experience. So we're going to identify teammates in the flow of work. So as you're working in Asana, and you're building projects, you're build tasks, our Asana Dash Chief of Staff will help recommend, hey, this is a teammate that we think can accelerate your work and drive value, and you have requests built into your package to help go drive and leverage that. We think that will get them to adoption of our AI faster, that will lead to an accelerated rate when they move to consumption and expansion with AI, and improve the underlying seed economics. So we're super excited about the move to AWM, especially as we bring that to our smaller customers who today, one, they don't have that with teammates, and two, having those in-product nudges, that in-product experience will get them to value faster because they don't have the human that larger customers have with AEs and CSMs and other support. The second big piece is three additional agentic apps. So we've seen our customers use us in IT services use cases, in engineering development management use cases in client management use cases. And we were basically coming out with bespoke apps that actually address with workflows and teammates, the problem statements and the opportunities with those ICPs, with those verticals. So we're excited about command, focus on the dev persona, our ITSM product, focus on service management, and Asana client management, focus on professional services and agencies. And then lastly, Stack AI. We acquired it last quarter. Super exciting kind of cross-workflow, cross-system orchestration. It really brings third-party agents, third-parties systems back into Asana And this is all around strengthening the context of the work graph. So each of these products will sit on the same common architecture that is the enterprise work graph, and the work graphic and that content and that context will be strengthened now with new object types, with tickets, with client information, with PRs from an engineering perspective, with other system data, and that really improves the context and ultimately the performance of our AI products and the ROI that they're able to drive. Understanding that AWM launches tomorrow, so there might not be a ton of takes there, and there will be, I'm sure, over time. But for AI Studio and teammates, anything you can kind of share on how the initial cohort of customers are using those tools, how it's increased usage of the platform. I say all this given, if I just rewind the clock, I think one of the interesting things about the industry as a whole is that I think when Dan talked about this kind of work raft piece at the start of the year, Frankly, there was some skepticism from investors there. And I actually think now there's less skepticism. And some of it is also like you've seen a couple of vendors in the space pitch this idea of humans working alongside agents. And, again, it was this idea that that could disintermediate certain vendors. But you are seeing increased usage. And now it's, hey, there's actually a lot of value in providing that knowledge graph. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not only just the knowledge graph because, I mean, I think you'll hear a lot of people using team graph people graph different types of graph right and that's becoming like the the new kind of nomenclature and marketing in in ai it's not just the context graph and that's built over 18 years it's actually how it's architected as well for an organization like we start what we call from this pyramid of clarity it stops starts with the top level goals of an organization and how those flow down to the work at different levels of the organization and that really creates this system of work, kind of the living brain, we call it, of work that's so important to drive that not only context in general, but the right context, the right governance that really maximize that cost per performance of our AI products. And, you know, we're seeing strong traction. I mean, we had a 15% target of net new ARR from AI products to start the year. We did one better and did 17% in Q1. We did even better with 25% inQ2. We raised it 20% for the full year or 220% for the full year. And we're seeing from the data that when our customers engage deeply with Studio and teammates that when that renewal cycle comes up, that they're more prone to renew at 100% and also expand. And that's what was really the driver bringing AWM to our full customer base. And some of the use cases we're seeing the most value out of anything, especially with Studio in particular, anything that has a heavy data intake component, anythingthat has a routing component cross-function. So you think about a marketing campaign or hiring a new employee or onboarding a new vendor. There's a lot of handoffs from department to department and sign-offs and checking against brand guidelines for a content release or a knowledge base for an employee onboarding use case. And so studios helping drive that cross- functional handoff and teammates in sort of the process are doing what humans could be doing and checking and moving things along and following up. So it's a really powerful kind of dynamic. And with teammates, we now have 30 out of the box teammates. And when I say like AWM, I did kind of surfacing those teammates in the flow of the work, identifying what you're doing and saying, hey, we have a teammate for that. If I'm doing a project for a new product introduction, my dash will recognize and say, hey I have a teammate for a product introduction. It can help you do this, this, and this. This is the best practice that could help you set up and help you drive. Why don't you kind of experience it? And Now I have credits to do that. There's no friction and barrier to do that. So we're super excited how it's being used. We're super-excited about, in the small core, because it's still a very small part of our base, the value that is driving and what that's doing to the underlying economics of SEEDS, and getting that to our broader customer base is really the purpose of why we're launching AWM. And then I also want to make sure I ask about, so when you hosted your AI event a couple months ago now, and when you specifically talked about command by Asana, Asana for service management, Asana per client management, I think initially some investors thought, hey, those are different personas, but aren't you going up against established incumbents in some of those spaces, and how do you ultimately compete there? Can you just frame the opportunity and who you're selling into and why you think you can win? Yeah, and so this wasn't really the genesis of it. It wasn't like we want to create a whole new product and a whole New Architecture going to a whole set of customers competing against a whole news set of competitors. We've seen our customers with these use cases on Asana. So we've seen our customers take a ticket from an ITSM platform, move it back into Asana because they want to leverage the context and the work graph to better resolve that ticket. We've seen people move engineering project management work into Asuna to carry out additional steps. We have 25% of our base art agencies and professional services firms who are using us in kind of a clunky way as this client management, client deliverable platform. We wanted to bring those customers first and foremost a bespoke experience that was tailored to their ICP, to the outcomes they were looking to drive with the right teammates, the right workflows, the correct look and feel of the UI and interface and how they engage. And so that was really the core genesis. There is a monetization opportunity today in our base with how our customers use Asana to bring these things in a more tailored way with a common architecture that is the work graph. Now, if that leads to them saying, hey, I can have my system that I love for these things and Asana together, great. If that leads them consolidating, there will be customers that are consolidating. And we've already heard from that. So there's a high barrier to introducing this. We went through a pretty extensive process where we identified design partners, which are existing customers, and they help us design it. And part of the exit criteria of actually launching these products is having the design partner sign up and say, I'm willing to buy it. Right. And these are many of these are very large enterprises are saying what I'm seeing is differentiated. It's AI native. And I love how you're tying in the work graph and work management and agentic work management with the jobs to be done for these specific categories. And for these newer personas, is there anything different you'll have to do going forward in terms of your go to market motion? I know Dan's made a lot of changes to the sales force that he joined. Yeah, so I think, again, like with our customers using it in these ways, our Salesforce at the core has already been trained to drive and sell these types of use cases. Now they have a much better engine to do that with. And so there's investment in enablement. We're augmenting our Salesforce with specialists. For some of the areas like command by Asana, it does take an incubation Salesforce because it's a newer motion and maybe not as a little bit of a greater leap for our core to sell that and sell that with velocity. So we're building incubation. So part of the plan this year, part of our guide includes investments and specialists and incubation teams to help drive that. But vast majority can be sold from our core teams because they've already been selling these use cases. Now we're just giving them something a lot more relevant to their end buyers. And that should increase the level of conversation to CIOs and increase the conversion rate of those conversations. And then changing gears, I want to get your thoughts on capital allocation, margins. I know prior to you becoming CFO, there was a shift in kind of hiring more in CEOs outside of Silicon Valley and San Fran. Just talk about how we should think about capital allocation. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that I think we're fairly proud of this year is, you know when you when you report q4 in march and you set a guide and a plan and in march you know the world is very different you know uh six months later your priorities change the velocity changes uh your perspective and the opportunity gets bigger and we've been able to invest in things like stack ai and absorb the dilution from a high growth team you know ahead of the benefits of revenue that will drive longer term. We've been able to seed our base with AI Studio and AI Teammate Requests ahead of the benefits on retention and expansion. We have been able to invest in these AI go-to-market teams while continuing to expand operating margin. We started the year with a 9.5% target on operating margin, we raised it in Q1 to 9.75%, we raised again to 10% while absorbing all these additional investment areas which are really going to help drive that next layer and wave of growth. So for us, it's really about continuing to expand margins and accelerate growth. And we think we can do both, given the significant operating leverage that we get from our seed base and we'll get from AI consumption products, which aren't as high as gross margin as seed base, but are still attractive. And secondly, we've been doing this, we have the most robust product roadmap in our history. We've beendoing this while keeping our R&D expense is relatively flat, but our R&B headcount has been growing because we've been shrinking the cost per head, arming them with the right AI tools to increase productivity, and it's been really an effective formula. I think just over a year ago, 60% of our employees were in high-cost locations. Fast forward to a year, less than 50% are in high cost locations. And a lot of that is we're building strong presence, strong teams in places like Warsaw, Poland, Vancouver, Canada, giving us the capacity to innovate, but at a lower cost point. And that also flows into SBC, because they have lower expectations on equity. And can you talk a little bit about, this is something we're asking every company at this conference, how Asana is using AI internally to be more efficient? And that could be across the different organizations, but either to kind of defend gross margins or on your R&D. Yeah, so we're using it across the board, both our internal products, teammates in studio, and best-in-class third party. It's a mandate. We govern it. We track the ROI. You know, it's a weekly thing and with a lot of rigor. You know obviously in R&D I think there's probably the greatest propensity of use and value being driven. It's helped augment our teams to do much more and move at a much quicker rate. And we're using our own command product kind of as a harness around things like Cursor and Cloud Code and Codex to do that. We're seeing a lot value. Seeing a lot in go-to-market as well. Like we use, I've been piloting AI SDRs and seeing really good results there and actually making bigger investments there. The way that we're using tools like Clay to enrich our data so that we can make better sense of it and prospect and have greater propensity scoring and next best actions for our sales teams is improving velocity and sales cycles there. In finance, my finance team is using Cloud to help do reconciliations and improve our capitalized software process and create chatbots around payroll, which is like allowing us to support and scale growth without adding commiserate headcount. So it's really an ethos. There's more to do. I think we're in the early innings. But, you know, it's allowed us to invest in our ambitions to be this agentic enterprise leader, this operating system for human agent teams without having to scale headcount and scale expenses at the same rate. And just because we have a couple minutes left, zooming out, and as we think about the business, there's some new products here, metrics seem to be pointing in the right direction. And how should investors kind of think about the building blocks of growth from here for Asana? Yeah, so I think there's a few things. One, the first building block is, you know, that core enterprise mid-market customers are getting healthy. You know, it's important for us to drive that to NR above 100%, five straight quarters of NR improvement. And then within those cohorts, 5K plus, 100K plus. You know the trend is our friend towards 100%. So continuing to drive AI adoption or product adoption, better retention of the underlying seats, cross-sell of these new products is a key driver there. Then we have an intense focus on that sub-5K because if we can get that back to where it needs to be, that's the catalyst for the whole thing to get above 100%. So ideal customer profiles. 100% of our marketing is now focused on ideal customer profile, from our campaigns, from our brand, to our content, to the channels that we use. And also having more surface areas to procure in PLG is a key catalyst there. So really re-accelerating, reinvigorating the NRR and growth in PLD is a part of that growth algorithm. Scaling these agentic apps and stack AI, that's an expansion lever with multiple products that we've never had. It's so critical. And then lastly, our growth has been tied to headcount. It has been tide to head count since the beginning of our company, you know, 17 years ago, now we can grow with both headcount and consumption and outcomes. We're not tied to headcount anymore. And I think that's going to be important as we drive more outcomes with our teammates, with our agentic products, with Stack AI, with these new agentic apps. It's a growth lever we've never had. And we're already starting to see that with the example that I shared on that churn mitigation and creating a million-dollar outcome and consumption-based, you know, mitigation to a seed downgrade. So excited about that. Obviously, like, I think we've got the strategy, we've got the pieces in place. It's now about execution, but we're super focused and, you know, looking forward to sharing next year at the conference kind of our progress. Awesome. Well, we're just about at time here, so we'll wrap it there. Aziz, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thanks. Great to be here. Appreciate it. Perfect.

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