ON24, Inc. (NYSE:ONTF) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And at some stage, when demand generation and partner enablement and we have a little more assist from the macro, that will lift all the boats. So that’s what we are focused on.

Rob Oliver: Great. Really helpful. Appreciate all that color. Thanks very much.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please state your question.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. This is Chris on for Arjun. Congrats on the quarter. Two for me, the first one is, I just wanted to touch on – so as we are coming up on the anniversary of kind of when your focus and attention started shifting towards being more efficient, where do you see the biggest incremental opportunities to continue to drive operating leverage going forward?

Steven Vattuone: This is Steve. Let me go ahead and take that one. So, first off, we have achieved adjusted EBITDA breakeven for the past two quarters and expect to exit 2023 in the same place with Q4 having breakeven adjusted EBITDA. Our cost reduction efforts have spanned all areas of the company. We aligned our go-to-market resources accordingly and that was more than half of the cost reductions that we have made. We lowered our annual cost run rate, and as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, $56 million from Q2 of 2022, which was a high watermark. As we enter 2024, we have got a streamlined cost structure and operating leverage in the business. The goal is to get – to sustain EBITDA profitability. We are not giving any specific guidance on 2024 until our next earnings call.

So, I can’t put a timeline on 2024 profitability targets at this point. But I can say the goal is to get back to profitable growth as soon as we can and the steps we have taken have put us on the road to do that. Now, improved top line performance would of course be helpful if we are moving in the right direction now. But we are committing to getting there in a variety of top line scenarios in the future.

Sharat Sharan: Just to add to what Steve just said. To drive top line growth, I mean the three core things that we are focused on is, one is the retention profile. We expect to do better sequential improvements in gross retention, so that’s important. Second is our progress on go-to-market for regulated industries, which I talked about, which in aggregate grew high-single digits from an ARR point of view year-over-year in Q3. And the launch of our next generation of our AI-powered ACE platform, which includes segmentation and hyper-personalization, automated content creation and key moments and nurture sequences. So, top line growth will also help us improve our profitability, and that’s our focus.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. That’s all really helpful feedback. And that kind of segues pretty nicely into the other question I had. I just wanted to kind of circle back on the AI suite. So, last quarter you talked about 200 initial customers in the beta program for that. Has that cohort grown at all? I was kind of curious to hear some of the feedback you might be getting from customers that are in the program. And if there are any specific verticals or use cases where you have seen good traction early on? Thanks.

Sharat Sharan: Yes. Let me take that. So, we talked about it. In Q1, we had launched the Smart Text, an AI copywriting assistant tool. In Q2, we launched the ability turn live webinar experiences into AI generated written content like transcripts, summary and e-books. And since our last earnings call, we have doubled our customer adoption of these capabilities, and we have learned a lot. And based on the learnings from these – from the customer adoption, Chris, we are now including these features as part of the larger AI-powered ACE platform. And just to kind of give you a little more perspective on that. AI-powered ACE is currently in beta. We are currently working on a pricing and packaging plan that we will share on our next earnings call.