Appian Corporation (NASDAQ:APPN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Sanjit Singh of Morgan Stanley.

Sanjit Singh: I was wondering if you could walk us through the rationale for the insurance policy, maybe go through like some of the terms, and when would you expect a potential payout from the policy? Any sort of detail there would be super helpful.

Matt Calkins: I appreciate the question. I’m going to have to direct you to our 8-K, which is our full statement on this matter.

Sanjit Singh: Then, looking at maybe just your core verticals, whether it’s banking, life insurance, health and life sciences, government, how do you see the demand trends and the spending trends and the priority of like sort of automation as you go into Q4 and how does that sort of set up for 2024? Any sort of color around the industry verticals?

Matt Calkins: I think that when we settle into realization, the real value of the theme of the year, which of course is AI. We and our buyers are going to understand that AI is an incomplete solution that it’s a part of a team, not a solo act. It’s going to require a lot of cross actor coordination. It’ll require a lot of low code workflow, right, routing and partnership with other forms of automation. And as such, I see it complementary and enhancing the demand for automation. Even though right now, I’m not sure the market understands that. That’s where I see it going. And so, what we see here, I think it’s a multiyear lift coming from AI, which brings with it technologies that are naturally complementary to AI.

When I think of technologies that are naturally complementary to AI. Number one is data, data like Appian’s Data Fabric that creates a virtual database across the enterprise and allows you to address data from anywhere as if it were local. That’s essential to AI, to training, to provisioning, to answering questions well. And then the other technology that would be naturally complementary and should arise with the AI economy would be process. And process automation in this case, because process includes the technologies that do the work in addition to the technology throughout the work. So that’s my belief about where automation is going. I don’t have that differentiated by sector. I think that’s going to be true across the sectors.

But, that’s what I anticipate.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Kevin Kumar of Goldman Sachs.

Kevin Kumar: Curious on the performance of the government sector in terms of bookings. How do that maybe compare to prior quarters? And also can you talk a bit about the new case management solution for the public sector and what type of use cases do you expect with the end of the solution?

Matt Calkins: Yes. All right. Public sector is one of our best — one of our best growing, one of our best already in size. And the government acquisition management solution has added a spark to that sector that I — and it’s going to add spark next year as well. We’re getting good growth out of that, successful uptake and have good prospects. With regards to case management, case management — if you look at our use cases, what Appian has bought for, at least half of it is case management. You can look at a lot of the things we do as a case. A case passes through workflow and it reaches a resolution. We do a lot of cases. And so what we’ve done here is enhanced the way we handle cases and configure it specifically for some federal use cases.