PagerDuty, Inc.

PagerDuty, Inc.

PDยทNYSE

$9.30

-8.3%
TechnologySoftware - Application

PagerDuty, Inc. operates a digital operations management platform in the United States, Japan, and internationally. Its digital operations management platform collects data digital signals from virtually any software-enabled system or device, and leverage powerful machine learning to correlate, process, and predict opportunities and issues. It serves various industries, including software and technology, telecommunications, retail, travel and hospitality, media and entertainment, and financial services. PagerDuty, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

At a Glance

Live Snapshot
Market Cap$848.27M
EPS1.9100
P/E Ratio4.87
Earnings Date06/04/2026

Earnings Call Transcript

PD โ€ข 2027 โ€ข Q1

Jennifer 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've transitioned to Executive Chair, and today I'm pleased to introduce PagerDuty's new CEO, John DiLullo. We're 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.
Jennifer Tejada
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'll turn it over to John for his brief remarks.
John DiLullo
Thank you, Jen. I am very excited to join you today. As Jen mentioned, I've known and followed PagerDuty for years as both a customer and as a partner, and I've 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've spent time with Jen, 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.
John DiLullo
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've 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'm spending time with employees, with customers, and with partners to deepen my understanding of our market and our business. I'm 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.
Howard Wilson
Jennifer, you're on mute.
Jennifer Tejada
Thank you. Thank you, John. I look forward to connecting John to our shareholder community in callbacks and at our next investor conference. With this leadership transition, I have reflected on my time at PagerDuty. Over the last decade, we've 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 and 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.
Jennifer Tejada
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 Advance pricing and packaging, will accelerate revenue growth. As a reminder, we have historically 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.
Jennifer Tejada
Our full suite of products are now available through an integrated platform with usage-based pricing. Usage-based products, which 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.
Jennifer Tejada
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, multi-year, more strategic commitments. The customers who have adopted the new Ops Cloud offering experience broad platform engagement.
Jennifer Tejada
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. One 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.
Jennifer Tejada
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 management 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 six-figure early renewal and enterprise-wide expansion. Strategic wins like these underscore why we continue to win new customers. For the 5th consecutive quarter, we acquired over 600 new customers, and total customers on the platform grew 14% year-over-year.
Jennifer Tejada
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 multi-year, seven-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.
Jennifer Tejada
A leading global automotive manufacturer in EMEA turned to PagerDuty as they standardize 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 by 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 joined the platform during the quarter included Lightsfund, Dropzone AI, and Simile. AI is the new operational risk layer for enterprise. It's accelerating software development and deployment at unprecedented velocity, leading to a new magnitude of complexity in the production environment.
Jennifer Tejada
In addition to being higher in volume and more complex, AI-driven failures can be less predictable and less visible. No customer segment is immune. AI failure in large enterprises 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 three pillars of our platform strategy are AI and automation, full lifecycle incident management, and platform and ecosystem extensibility. Our SRE agent, launched in October, highlights our focus on AI and automation.
Jennifer Tejada
Acting as a virtual responder, the SRE Agent gathers signals across the tech stack, performs approved remediations, and maintains an operational shared 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 lifecycle experience and modernizes the responder experience. Our AI ecosystem, supported by marquee partnerships including Anthropic, Claude, Cursor, and LangChain, enables PagerDuty's agents to 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 with or without human involvement.
Jennifer Tejada
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. 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.
Jennifer Tejada
Australia's leading digital bank became a new PagerDuty customer in the quarter on the platform with a seven-figure multi-year 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, AIOps, 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 multi-year, multi-million 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 solutions to spend with PagerDuty. A global consulting company and customer since 2018 renewed a six-figure expansion this quarter.
Jennifer Tejada
PagerDuty's best-of-breed bi-directional 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 our enterprise customers, but also for our over 650 non-profit customers, in turn helping them to amplify their mission-driven impact. In Q1, we announced our latest impact cohort, including grants to eight nonprofits focused on healthcare, 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.
Jennifer Tejada
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 29th and likely last earnings call with PagerDuty, and while it hasn't always been easy, it has always been professional, constructive, and even fun. You've held us to a high standard, and I've 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.
Jennifer Tejada
We have navigated countless market transitions while continuing to innovate for our customers, expanding our customer base from less than 5,000 when I started to more than 36,000 strong today. Together, we've shaped the industry, first as 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 tenfold while expanding our profitability, and we became the definitive category leader, one 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'm incredibly proud of our people, past and current, and grateful to our customers, many of whom I've partnered with personally, for their trust.
Jennifer Tejada
In transitioning to executive chair, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be part of an outstanding team, and I'm optimistic for the enormous opportunity ahead. I've had the opportunity to get to know John, and we've already built a strong partnership. He has my complete confidence and support in leading the next chapter for PagerDuty, and I believe he will earn yours, too. Thank you. With that, I will turn it over to you, Howard.
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 Q1 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 show traction. The ARR of customers on this model nearly doubled from Q4 to Q1.
Howard Wilson
Of our customers spending over $100,000 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. In the Q1 of FY 2027, 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.
Howard Wilson
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're 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 $100,000 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 stabilization of DBNR and for it to gradually increase throughout the year. Total paid customers grew to 15,380 in Q1, adding 133 net new customers since the year-ago period.
Howard Wilson
Free and paid customers on our platform grew to over 36,000, 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 and AI product development while maintaining our commitment to shareholder returns. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $444 million in cash equivalents, and investments. On a trailing 12 months basis, billings were $497 million, an increase of 1% compared to a year ago. At the end of Q1, total RPO was approximately $441 million, increasing 3% year-over-year.
Howard Wilson
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. Today, we have announced our latest $100 million share repurchase program. Now, turning to guidance. For the second quarter of fiscal 2027, we expect revenue in the range of $122 million to $124 million, with the midpoint approximately flat year-over-year. Net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty Inc. in the range of $0.29-$0.31. This implies an operating margin of 22% to 23%.
Howard Wilson
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. Net income per diluted share attributable to PagerDuty Inc. in the range of $1.27to $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 FY 2027. 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 demonstrates the rigorous focus on efficiency and operational execution that underpins our business.
Howard Wilson
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. As a reminder, please use
Christian Darrow
Hi, everyone. This is Christian Darrow on for Sanjit. Thanks for taking the questions here. I wanted to ask about the net retention rates. Really nice to see the gross retention rate improvement that you called out. The net retention rate did take a step down from last quarter. Just curious, what gives you that confidence on the recovery and the stabilization on the retention side?
Jennifer Tejada
Sure. Thanks for the question, Christian. I really appreciate it. It's nice to see you. One, we have really started to see good progress with our early cohort in the pricing transition. 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. 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 timeframe. We're 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've opened that up to a much broader set of customers this quarter. In addition, we're seeing very strong demand signals.
Jennifer Tejada
Howard mentioned our fifth consecutive quarter of over 600 new customer logos. Those tend to be early adopters. They're a demonstration that our PLG motion is still a competitive advantage, but also that the most innovative developers and native AI startups are choosing PagerDuty. As we know from history, those types of new customers tend to grow organically as they expand their businesses themselves. Lastly, what we're also seeing is the benefit of improving the way we renew customers offering multi-year, multi-product agreements. We've started to mitigate some of that risk over time. Our customer base is also in transition. We have some segments of the customer base that are under more financial pressure than others, including mid-sized SaaS, for instance. What we are seeing is some really encouraging new demand from really large enterprises in verticals that we hadn't historically focused on.
Jennifer Tejada
You heard me talk about two automotive manufacturers. We're seeing something similar in financial services as well as in healthcare. The last thing that I'll 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'd 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. That's when we really see customers start to lean in on their investments. That is still in front of us. That's 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.
Howard Wilson
Chris, just one additional point that I would add is that we monitor closely the growth in usage on our platform. Again, this quarter, we saw that continue to increase. That validates the approach that we're taking around moving to our flexible Operations Cloud pricing model. The early results from that have been strong. We saw from Q4 to Q1, nearly doubling the ARR of customers who were on that model. 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've seen with most of those customers that we've moved into that model, that they, in fact, were able to renew with us at higher values during an expansion at the same time.
Howard Wilson
Right now we're dealing with both of these things in parallel because not every customer in our base is exactly the same. They're dealing with different dynamics. It's really encouraging to see a lot of those native AI companies and a lot of enterprises, as Jennifer mentioned, that are continuing to increase their investment in PagerDuty, even while we might be dealing with some other customers who are in a transitional phase.
Christian Darrow
Got it. That's really helpful. Thank you for that color. Then John, I know it's still early, but what are some of your key learnings so far as you've gone and ramped up here and, any idea around what your key priorities or key changes that you're looking to make at the organization are?
John DiLullo
Yeah, thanks for the question, Chris. It's really early days for me. I'm just starting to get to know the team and to listen and learn to all of the great things that the company's doing. I will say that I was very excited to get the call. I've been a customer multiple times, so I have a good understanding of the product. I think firsthand, I realized what the capabilities of the product and what the platform are, and how deeply integrated it is into the operations of so many leading companies. I think one of the things, and you've 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're in, that we exist in, are very, very favorable.
John DiLullo
AI continues to accelerate that creation of growth and the automation of 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 PagerDuty does better than anybody else. I think to some extent, I think the company's a little bit perhaps underappreciated by investors. I think working together with the team, Jennifer's just been great during the transition, as has Howard and the whole team, I think we have a great opportunity here to unlock value, I just couldn't be more excited.
Christian Darrow
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ngo with Truist. Jonathan, please go ahead.
Jonathan Ngo
Hi, this is Jonathan Ngo in for Miller Jump. Thanks for the question, and congrats to both John and Jen. Wanted to ask a little bit about profitability. You guys have been GAAP profitable for a while now, and you're targeting 30% operating margins. Considering the heavy R&D needed for agentic products, how are you balancing the need for product velocity with headcount growth and commitment to margin expansion? Thank you.
Jennifer Tejada
I'll take a shot at that, and then Howard, you can jump in. One, we didn't just start building our AI products. We have been building AI into the platform for several years. We've 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. We've 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 throughout our own developer community, and our entire development organization uses AI to expedite their and amplify their creativity. That's led us to be able to deploy and deliver more features at a higher velocity than we have in the past.
Jennifer Tejada
We have a high standard for resiliency. We maintain our commitment to security, resilience, and reliability at scale. That hasn't changed. Our ability to unlock new features, whether it's chat first incident management and experience from end to end, or increasing the capabilities of our agentic solution, like our SRE Agent, we're able to do that on a lower cost basis than we have in the past. We're also deploying AI throughout the company and using it in ways to create efficiency. 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&D. I just close my comments and open up to Howard with the fact that we see ourselves as a growth company and as a category leader.
Jennifer Tejada
We know that the market expects us to innovate, and that's not changing. That's something that John and 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've seen in the past few quarters.
Howard Wilson
I would just add to Jennifer's comments, we've always taken a balanced view on capital allocation. That sometimes means that you have to change the places where you invest within an organization. The one strength that we have that stands out as PagerDuty is our gross margins. We're 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 expand the services that we deliver while still maintaining best-in-class gross margins. 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've created a lot more capacity, and that capacity has allowed us to increase our pace of innovation.
Howard Wilson
It's 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 in a different space?
Jonathan Ngo
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Sherman with TD Cowen. Andrew, please go ahead.
Howard Wilson
Hey, Andrew.
Andrew Sherman
Congrats to you. It's been great working with you, and John, congrats on your new role. The 10% of ARR from consumption was great to get that number. Maybe just touch on where do you think that can get to by the end of this year? Do you have a certain cohort of customers that you're targeting? What's the conversations and their receptiveness to expanding under this new model, and comfort with the price and the cost and the usage and all that?
Howard Wilson
Yeah, sure, Andrew. Wow, there's a lot in that question, Andrew but let me try and cover what I can. Yeah, look, it's great for us to see that we're nearly at 10% of our ARR coming from those usage-based products. We haven't put a specific number out there in terms of where we want to get to by the end of the year, but it's clearly an area of focus for us because, one, it delivers a lot of value to our customers. 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 the goal of operational resilience and deliver the best experiences to their customers.
Howard Wilson
There's 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. What we've seen, if I just look at with two quarters of data in terms of Operations Cloud pricing, is not going to be definitive. The focus that we've had on a relatively small set of customers compared to our overall customer base has yielded really promising results. Our expectation is that we will continue, in particular, to have a look at our customers that are spending more than $100,000 a year with us. Those are the ones who stand to benefit greatly from this model.
Howard Wilson
It's not only going to be that cohort of customers. Certainly, our expectation is that we will make meaningful progress with this each period as we go through the year. We're 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.
Andrew Sherman
Okay, that's helpful. Maybe for Jen, the AI native customers have been a good topic for you. I think you gave a number last year. It was two or three% of ARR. Any update to that? You named some of them, including one that just went public. We would love to hear how they came to you and their usage of the platform and the validation of your technology and how that can spread to some other customers in this cohort, too.
Jennifer Tejada
Sure. Thanks for the question, Andrew. Nice to see you again. Here's the thing that's been really interesting. One is some of these native AI companies are scaling really fast. In the old days of software V2, startup software companies did not have big concerns around product resilience or reliability at scale because it took them a long time to get to scale. They just wanted to get the minimum viable product out in the market and move. It's very different if you're a fronter LLM or a rapidly scaling agentic company because your product has to work all the time, or you erode trust and can't expand, can't grow.
Jennifer Tejada
We're 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 their people size is doing. The second thing that we're seeing is the most demanding developers are choosing the best-in-breed offering early. That's happening through our PLG motion. We don't talk so much about our PLG, product-led growth motion, so often because we have been so focused on enterprise retention, enterprise expansion. It is one of the competitive advantages that PagerDuty has 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 multi-product offering.
Jennifer Tejada
That's also the PLG motion, that flywheel you can see working five quarters with more than 600 new logos. Like, that's not an accident. We continue to place a lot of focus around the expansion opportunity of those customers through our commercial business, which Katherine Calvert leads. At the same time, some of these AI natives are moving into enterprise-size quickly. 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 one time.
Jennifer Tejada
What we're finding with our largest enterprise customers who are using them is it's leading to new use cases faster, because they don't have the friction of having to go department by department to get permission or authority to spend on more users. We've seen manufacturing operations, we've seen security ops, we've seen business ops, we've seen customer support. Lots of things show up with the Operations Cloud that historically would've taken us many years to get to in kind of a traditional product-led life cycle or sales cycle. That's also been very encouraging. The last thing I'd say is that, over the last few quarters, we've started to see some of these, call it Fortune 100, very large enterprise companies come to us who traditionally were late to the digital operations party, right?
Jennifer Tejada
They're expediting their modernization efforts so that they can benefit from AI transformation. These are manufacturing, highly regulated industries in financial services and healthcare, right, with state and local government, et cetera. Some of these traditionally slower-to-move verticals, as it relates to adopting new products, are moving faster. Again, the Operations Cloud pricing and packaging is there at the right moment for that to meet that demand.
Andrew Sherman
Excellent. Great to hear. Thank you.
Jennifer Tejada
Thank you.
Howard Wilson
Thanks, Andrew.
Operator
Thank you for your questions and participation today. Jennifer, we'll turn it to you for your final remarks.
Transcript from May 28, 2026

Other Transcripts

ย 

pd Earnings Call Transcripts

PD