We reviewed 67 SaaS earnings calls of the most prolific publicly traded SaaS companies. 15 themes emerged. In summary, nearly every company that reported has beat or raised guidance, is enjoying improved growth and margin profiles, or some combination of the aforementioned. AI is the best thing to happen to SaaS since the cloud. Below are the themes.
Theme 1. SaaS product has AI embedded. AI is a core requirement in nearly all large enterprise deal discussions. Freshworks, Klaviyo, and Atlassian’s all reported that some form of their AI infrastructure, vision, or interoperability was a factor in deals. From Atlassian’s CEO: “The Teamwork Graph and AI come up in every single conversation I’ve had. It’s one of the top two reasons quoted by our customers for their reason to upgrade to the cloud and to upgrade to the Teamwork Collection.” At FIVN, every million-dollar deal that goes out the door has 100% attach of AI. Over half Workday’s new bookings in the quarter included their AI offering. Kaltura signed 14 AI deals in Q2, double its previous record. Asana’s AI products crossed 25% of net new ARR ahead of schedule. At DocuSign, their AI product grew from 12.6% to 15.1% of total ARR in a single quarter. SailPoint’s AI-driven ARR crossed $70 million, representing more than 30% of net new ARR.
Theme 2. The model is a commodity. The context, workflows, data, integrations, and trust are the moat. At Shopify, Catalog-powered AI searches convert at 2x the rate of scraped data from generic AI. At Atlassian, for agents grounded in the Teamwork Graph, customers realize up to 44% more accurate answers while consuming 48% fewer tokens. “It’s thanks to context, not the model.” Zeta’s CEO: “Nothing you rent can be a moat around your business.” Palantir’s Karp: “An organization’s data is its treasure. In its richness is the alpha. We are fully aligned with our customers, building a stack that enables the compounding of their alpha.” From Kalviyo: “Delivering meaningful customer experiences at scale requires AI grounded in real data. We built the ability to understand the structure of data, the ontology, and semantics into Composer to improve our agents’ reasoning abilities.” Doximity’s anecdote was also striking: “our winning model demonstrated a 4.8% error rate, while others like Anthropic’s best model finished with a 13.6% error rate. We believe our outperformance is due mainly to our unique built-in drug reference, a model within the model, which is 100% expert verified, and our over 12,000 physician PeerCheck editors.” Alkami stated “Our advantage is not access to a model. It’s our understanding of regulated banking workflows, our integrations, our data, and the trust created through relationships.” Dropbox’s CEO had the most complete quote: “As AI makes intelligence more abundant, trusted content becomes more valuable, not less. Every AI application ultimately needs content to reason over, permissions to respect, governance to reinforce, version history to rely on, and infrastructure that scales globally and securely.”
Theme 3. Historical data is a moat, but that data must be constantly updated to be relevant. MongoDB’s CEO said the following about the real-time data advantage argument: “The data an agent actually needs is live operational data, not a stale copy sitting in a warehouse.” That converts the data moat from a training corpus argument into a data freshness argument. Samsara made a similar comment: “This is proprietary time series data captured by sensors operating in the physical world. It can’t be replicated or found on the internet. Each year of operating history compounds its value.” SaaS companies that have the historical data but also add to that dataset and refresh it will maintain the moat.
Theme 4. Data must be protected from models. Palantir’s CEO was combative (again): “People sign up for token self-pleasurings, paying for the right for them to migrate your IP, your know-how, your expertise to their model so that they can build a competitive business that doesn’t require your business, your people. They deserve to colonize your enterprise. You deserve to be colonized.” Zeta’s CEO was less dramatic but clear: “OpenAI powers the voice component of Athena. No large language models ever see the data in our Data Cloud. The decisions run on our models.” Doximity disclosed that nearly 30% of clinical AI prompts include protected health information. Health systems cannot allow PHI to flow to unauthorized AI systems without an enterprise privacy agreement. Data security and confidentiality is becoming a customer requirement. Netskope’s Beri added what we’ve all learned recently: “An agent does not need to be prompted to be a bad actor. Instead, a stated task, enough autonomy, and an environment that can be circumvented can be enough to do damage.”
Alex Karp yelling at the hatersTheme 5. Agents are a new customer or market for software companies. Datadog’s CEO sited numbers: “MCP tool calls quadrupled again quarter-over-quarter and grew more than 22x when compared to Q4 2025.” Every MCP call is an AI agent executing a tool that requires monitoring, governance, and security. Dynatrace’s CEO: “AI workloads do not simply add volume. They behave differently. They can operate perfectly and still produce incorrect results. That’s a problem observability has never had to solve before.” Agents have also dramatically increased the attack surface; ServiceNow says there are 2.2bln agents entering the workforce globally, and every ungoverned agent increases the blast radius for cyber attacks. CrowdStrike’s Kurtz: “AIDR grew more than 5x in its first weeks and nearly tripled sequentially in Q2. AI DR could be bigger than EDR because agents create seven attack surfaces instead of one.” EDR built CrowdStrike’s first $5 billion in ARR. If Kurtz is right, AIDR represents a larger category than the one that got them here. AI is generating its own demand for the governance, observability, and security layers that enterprise software provides.
Theme 6. Agentic product built by software companies is very popular. Atlassian’s “Rovo-assisted actions grew 50% QoQ, MCP calls grew 400% QoQ. MCP and CLI users passing 1 million now, I think it’s one of the biggest MCP servers that exist. More than doubling in the quarter.” Klaviyo: 95,000 Composer users in the first month of GA, credit consumption growing 30% week-over-week, nearly a quarter becoming recurring weekly users. Customers that are using Composer are the ones that end up being more successful with Klaviyo literally in the first few weeks.” Datadog: $115 million sequential revenue add, a record by a wide margin, with 58% of customers now using four or more products.” Zeta: “AI super users growing four times faster than other customers, accounting for 70% of revenue, with NRR 400 basis points above the company average.” Shopify’s Sidekick handled 34 million conversations in Q2, growing 4.8x in daily sessions year-over-year. Five9’s AI revenue is now 15% of total subscription revenue. Paylocity reported AI interactions nearly doubling quarter-over-quarter. Salesforce’s Agentforce ARR reached $1.5 billion up from $1 billion last quarter. At SentinelOne, AI security ARR tripled year-over-year in Q2, on track to be the company’s fifth nine-figure ARR category. At Workday, 5,500+ customers are using organic agents, up 35% from last quarter. AI drove more than $100 million of new ACV which was 25% of all new ACV in the quarter. Asana’s AI products crossed 25% of net new ARR ahead of schedule. At DocuSign, MCP active accounts quadrupled in Q2, with the AI offering growing to 15% of ARR. AI product from software companies is driving measurable financial acceleration.
Theme 7. AI is really accelerating product velocity. At Zeta, “90% of our new code generated was automated. Development cycles that would have taken years are now months, and new products inside ZBI to hours. We added engineers. We did not eliminate engineers. We increased operating margin by 170 basis points.” Freshworks is experiencing “30% faster cycle times. We are shipping on a two-week cycle now. We implemented our AI email agent internally and saw about 30% of billing inquiries completely handled through AI when we turned it on.” At Salesforce, “our engineering teams are shipping faster than ever. Our sales teams are using AI to identify and close deals.” Their operating margin reached a record 34.8% while simultaneously launching Claudeforce and raising guidance. At ServiceTitan, “features previously estimated to take quarters are being delivered in months with escaped defects meaningfully down and bugs identified and resolved automatically.” Velocity and profitability are improving simultaneously thanks to AI. The best SaaS companies are not using AI to cut costs, they’re using it to ship more product faster.
Theme 8. The financial results this quarter are exceptional, a trend which started in Q4 2025. Palantir’s revenue grew 93% year-over-year and 19% sequentially to $1.935 billion. Zeta had its 20th consecutive beat-and-raise quarter. Freshworks beat the high end of guidance with 16% year-over-year growth. Klaviyo beat revenue expectations, raised guidance, and signed it’s largest deal ever. Atlassian’s adjusted EPS was $1.87 against a consensus of $1.50, a 24.67% beat, on revenue of $1.77 billion growing 28% year-over-year. Dynatrace exceeded the high end of every single guided metric simultaneously while delivering the fourth consecutive quarter of organic net new ARR acceleration. Datadog had its best growth quarter in four years; revenue was $1.12 billion, up 36% year-over-year. Cloudflare’s revenue was $696.1 million, up 36% year-over-year. Large customers reached 4,698, up 27% year-over-year, with 986 net additions, a record by a wide margin and the most ever added in any 12-month period. ServiceNow beat guidance on nearly every metric and raised full-year subscription revenue guidance raised to $15.755-$15.770 billion, implying 21% constant currency growth. Jfrog’s revenue was $163.8 million, up 29% year-over-year, beating the top end of guidance. When OpenAI had a sandbox breach, they contacted JFrog immediately. JFrog remediated fast, confirmed the fix, and maintained transparency throughout. Twilio set records in all metrics and raised guidance. Shopify had its fifth consecutive quarter of GMV growth above 30%. FIVN’s revenue beat the high end of guidance and their full-year AI growth outlook was raised from more than 40% to at least 60%. Procore revenue was $375 million, up 15.8% year-over-year, beating the high end of guidance by 2.5%, while achieving profitability and raising guidance. Paylocity’s revenue accelerated for the second consecutive quarter to ~12% while EBITDA margin expanded to 37%. Doximity’s revenue and EBITDA beat the high end of guidance. Salesforce’s Q2 was the most commercially spectacular in the company’s history. Crowdstrike’s call was also historic: every single guided metric set an all-time record simultaneously. SentinelOne’s revenue was $292 million, up 21% year-over-year, beating the high end of guidance. Adjusted EPS of $0.08 doubled year-over-year, beating estimates. Workday’s subscription revenue was $2.471 billion, up 14% — ahead of guidance. Non-GAAP operating margin was 31.1%, beating guidance. Okta had a record quarter and revenue of $805 million grew 11% year-over-year, beating the $793 million consensus. MongoDB recorded it’s highest revenue growth since 2024 (30% YOY) while operating margin hit 24%, up from 15% a year ago. C3’s revenue of $52.4 million beat guidance. Adjusted EPS loss of $0.20 beat the $0.25 estimate by 20%. Snowflake’s product revenue of $1.49 billion grew 37% year-over-year, the third consecutive quarter of acceleration, and EPS beat guidance. Full-year product revenue guidance was raised. Zscaler reported revenue of $898 million grew 25% year-over-year, beating the high end of guidance. At Asana, revenue of $216.4 million grew 10% year-over-year, the strongest pace in recent quarters, beating the high end of guidance. Docusign revenue grew 9% year-over-year, beating consensus by $8.5 million. Non-GAAP operating margin of 31.6% expanded 180 basis points. They also inked the largest US public sector deal in company history, and the largest LatAm deal in company history. UI Path’s revenue of $410.3 million grew 13% year-over-year, beating the $397.8 million consensus by $12.5 million. Cloud ARR of approximately $1.3 billion grew more than 19%. Dollar-based net retention improved to 109%, up 2 points year-to-date. $1 million-plus ARR customers grew 21% to 387. Rubrik’s revenue of $427.3 million grew 38% year-over-year, beating the $396.3 million consensus by $31 million, a 7.82% beat. Samsara’s revenue beat consensus, and they had quarterly records in both $100K+ and $1M+ customer additions. Veeva’s revenue and earnings beat consensus, and full-year revenue guidance was raised to $3.682-$3.687 billion. Netskope’s revenue grew 29% to $221 million, beating the $215 million guidance midpoint. NRR increased to 114%. GRR hit an all-time high. Braze’s revenue of $227.2 million grew 26% year-over-year and 8% sequentially, beating consensus. Non-GAAP operating margin reached 9.7%, up from 3.4% a year ago. Sailpoint’s total ARR of $1.231 billion grew 25% year-over-year, exceeding the guidance midpoint by $11 million. SaaS ARR grew 36% to $847 million. Lowly PagerDuty beat revenue guidance and improved retention. Gitlab delivered its largest gross bookings quarter in history, net ARR growth of 42% (second highest in four years). Alkami’s revenue of $129.8 million grew 15.9% year-over-year, beating expectations. Figma’s revenue of $370 million grew 48% year-over-year, the third consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. This section could have been longer and at some point we had to stop; but nearly all software companies had some combination of beating guidance, accelerating growth, improving margins, and raising estimates.
Theme 9. AI is expanding the addressable market for software companies. This builds on theme 5, but goes beyond just the fact that an AI agent is a user that needs software. For instance, at Shopify, AI searches are opening the long-tail merchant discovery market that traditional search never reached; long tail makes up a lot of Shopify stores. According to Twilio, less than 5–6% of voice interactions are AI-driven, which means more business for Twilio as that figure climbs. Five9 says AI is converting contact center spend away from labor and toward mission-critical software. Procore’s digital coworkers compete for staffing budget, in an industry with a 350,000 worker shortage. New markets and budget categories are opening up for SaaS, in ways that go beyond just adding users that are agents.
Theme 10. Platforms over point solutions. From Five9’s CEO: “Being early with a feature is not the same as being trusted as an operating platform.” That’s putting it simply, but more succinctly, enterprise class customers are not interested in bolting things on and taking risk with new vendors with shiny AI. From Workday’s CEO: “I have yet to meet a single customer that wants to do things in a lawless way.” AppFolio’s Trigg named the consolidation argument most directly: “Many in real estate are attaching bolt-on AI products built for tasks. Real performance requires a platform that combines an AI-native architecture with interconnected systems of record, action, and growth.” Bolt-on AI gets you task-level results whereas platform AI gets you performance outcomes. Enterprises want to standardize on platforms they trust, and the platforms with the most proprietary context, the most integrated governance, and the most proven production deployments (incumbent SaaS) are winning.
Theme 11: SaaSpoca-who? That non-sense is over. Revenue multiples are up 35%+ in the span of two months, and for those companies growing above the median it’s even higher. Our favorite quote came from the sherpa of SaaS himself. Benioff said “Skeptics said seats would decline; Agentforce sales grew year-over-year. Skeptics said pricing power would erode; A1E and A4X bookings more than doubled. Skeptics said frontier models would eliminate the need for CRM; instead they depend on it.” MongoDB is also experiencing a dynamic that surprised the haters: the AI tools that theoretically compete with MongoDB’s data layer are actively referring customers to it. Claude and Codex recommending MongoDB’s Voyage product to new MongoDB customers is one more data point that AI proliferation benefits incumbent software. Gitlab was similar: 80% of queries come from external AI agents accessing GitLab’s knowledge graph. The AI tools theoretically competing with GitLab are its biggest source of new platform consumption. Those predicting that AI would commoditize enterprise software were right about the commodity, but they just got the layer wrong. It’s code and the model that’s commoditizing. The design, direction, and judgment layer, which are provided by enterprise software companies, are getting more valuable.
Theme 12: Incumbent software owns every infrastructure layer AI depends on. MongoDB owns the memory layer. UiPath owns the automation execution layer. GitLab owns the source code layer. PagerDuty owns the operations control plane. Rubrik owns the recovery layer. Okta owns the identity layer. Zscaler owns the network security layer. CrowdStrike owns the endpoint and AI detection layer. Snowflake owns the data platform layer. Samsara owns the physical operations layer. ServiceTitan owns the trades operating system layer. Fastly owns the edge infrastructure and AI traffic governance layer. Docusign owns the agreement layer. Braze owns the coms layer. Helathstream owns the clinical workforce intelligence layer. None of these positions were built for AI agents or were replicated/built by agents. All of them are now essential to AI agents operating safely in enterprise environments.
Theme 13. AI replaced nothing. Of the 67 companies we reviewed, three missed estimates or saw meaningful stock declines on the results: Certara, EverCommerce, and Health Catalyst. What’s notable about all three is what the misses were not about. None of them cited AI as a structural threat to their business model. Certara’s problem was services execution, not biosimulation software relevance. EverCommerce’s problem was a specific organic search channel disruption which is actually AI affecting their go-to-market, not their product. Health Catalyst’s problem was migration complexity and balance sheet cleanup. In 67 calls, we found exactly zero companies where AI was cited as a structural threat to the core product. The SaaSpocalypse crowd looking for evidence wont be able to site anything from the Q2 earnings season. The closest they got is EverCommerce’s SEO headwind.
Theme 14: AI is compressing the distance between the customer’s idea and the outcome. This is different from Theme 7 which is about internal productivity. AI is allowing the customer to move faster. Asana said it well: “The hardest part of this industry has never been the idea. It was the distance between having one and being able to ship it. That distance is what the Agentic Harness collapses.” Monday.com’s CEO said “we moved from building software that helps people manage work to building software that does the work.” AI is is collapsing the distance between the customer’s goals and the actual business outcome. Every software company with a strong AI product is selling that compression.
Theme 15: Outcomes based pricing is not replacing seats; it’s supplementing them. Salesforce’s Benioff: “Some customers even want to pay by outcome, a transaction outcome or a business outcome. If I can generate this much more revenue for you, you give me a percentage of it. You could do that at scale now. That is like the next generation of enterprise software.” ServiceNow is pricing AI specialists at $30 per case resolved. Asana is pricing AI interactions by request rather than token, letting Asana handle model selection and optimization behind the scenes. UiPath introduced transaction-based pricing inclusive of all tokens required to complete a workflow. PagerDuty moved to usage-based pricing for AI capabilities. Bill.com is transitioning toward a do-it-for-me model with agents grouped into subscription tiers based on value delivered. Waystar’s anomaly detection delivers $3 million in incremental revenue recovered per 10,000 admissions. The ROI from these AI products is so specific and so measurable that outcome pricing is the natural next step of AI offerings built on top of SaaS products. The seat license was always a proxy for value delivered but agents make the actual value measurable for the first time. When value is measurable, the most aggressive SaaS companies will start charging for the outcome in a way that is accretive to them, not destructive.
Thanks for reading this far. Hopefully these themes from 67 SaaS earnings calls were valuable. See you in Q3.
Thank you for your readership. See more blogs and SaaS data at blossomstreetventures.com. Other resources we’ve built for founders include: SoftwareMultiples.com; softwareMRRcalculator.com; FounderInvited.com, and TwoFoundersTalk.com. Founders are always welcome to reach out to sammy@blossomstreetventures.com as well.