On September 11, UiPath (NYSE:PATH) announced that PLDT, the leading digital services provider in the Philippines, had scaled its use of the UiPath Platform to keep pace with surging demand from 5G rollout, broadband growth, and satellite connectivity. The announcement offers something rarer than another product launch: a real customer showing exactly how business orchestration software changes daily work. For a stock still proving that AI promises convert into paying, renewing customers, that kind of specificity carries weight.
Agents Doing The Unglamorous Work
PLDT built three AI tools on top of the UiPath Platform, and each one targets a specific bottleneck rather than a vague promise of efficiency. KAI, its knowledge retrieval agent, turns a research process that used to take up to five days into answers delivered in one to three seconds, saving an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 hours of manual work a year and creating roughly 12 full-time-equivalent workers’ worth of extra capacity. Ellie, a digital assistant, cuts manual effort by 25% to 35%, saves 18,000 to 25,000 hours annually, and gets customers responses up to 80% faster. ERICA, deployed in February 2026 to handle risk reviews, shrinks evaluations that once took two to ten days down to five minutes to one day, a 97% to 99% cut in manual effort.
Two days earlier, on September 3, UiPath’s second quarter fiscal 2027 results backed up the platform story with numbers: revenue of $410 million, up 13% year over year, and annual recurring revenue of $1.938 billion, up 12%. Non-GAAP operating income came in at $89 million, cash and marketable securities stood at $1.405 billion, and dollar-based net retention held at 109%, meaning existing customers are still spending more, not less. The quarter also brought two new products, Maestro Case for exception-heavy workflows like investigations and approvals, and Maestro Flow, a developer-first orchestration canvas, both aimed at deepening how enterprises like PLDT plug UiPath into more of their operations.
Where The Growth Story Gets Thinner
The same earnings report that flatters UiPath also leaves room for doubt. Net new ARR for the quarter was just $37 million, a modest incremental add against a $1.938 billion base, and a reminder that headline growth rates can mask a slower pace of new business underneath. GAAP operating income of $32 million landed well below the $89 million non-GAAP figure, a gap driven mostly by stock-based compensation that keeps reported profitability much thinner than the adjusted number investors tend to quote.
UiPath also used the quarter to reshuffle its top ranks: Ashim Gupta is narrowing his role to focus solely on Chief Operating Officer duties, Hitesh Ramani was promoted to Chief Financial Officer, and Brad Brubaker picked up oversight of the People organization on top of his legal and administrative duties. A new board member, Yazdi Bagli, joined while on a leave of absence from her role at Kaiser Permanente to pursue a fellowship at Harvard, an unusual moment to add a director who is not currently in her day job. None of this undoes the PLDT story, but it is worth remembering the hours-saved and FTE-equivalent figures in that announcement are UiPath’s own estimates, not independently audited results.
Where Wall Street Stands
Hedge fund ownership of UiPath climbed from 40 funds to 48 in the most recent quarter, a sign that institutional buyers are adding rather than trimming. Short interest still sits at 25.56% of float, a level that reflects a substantial bear camp actively betting against the stock. The forward price-to-earnings ratio is 18.25 as of September 16, a multiple that looks modest for a company still growing revenue and ARR at a double-digit clip. Rising fund ownership alongside that much short interest points to a genuine split in how investors are reading the same numbers.
What Would Settle The Debate
UiPath’s pitch is that agentic automation is moving from pilot projects to production, and PLDT’s three-agent rollout is a concrete example of that shift working at scale. But a $37 million net new ARR add and a wide gap between GAAP and non-GAAP profitability show the business is not yet converting that story into runaway growth. For the bulls, the next test is whether more customers post PLDT-style results and whether net new ARR reaccelerates.
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