We are reviewing Q1 2026 SaaS company earnings calls. So far we’ve gone through 14 which includes: Zeta,Freshworks, Procore, Amplitude, Cloudflare, Datadog, Sprout Social, Waystar,Health Catalyst, Klaviyo, Alkami, Certara, DoubleVerify, and Dropbox. Below arethe most salient quotes from their respective CEO’s about AI. We will be updating this blog frequently aswe get through each Q1 earnings call for all the publicly traded softwarecompanies. At the end are keytake-aways.
Dorpbox CEO – Drew Houston
Nosoftware company is standing still. “We areevolving from file storage to AI-powered content management. Dash bringscontent from Dropbox and other cloud applications into a single experience —and we've built a context engine that gathers context across content and appsand connects it to AI models for faster and more accurate results”
Existingcustomer base gives incumbent SaaS a huge headstart on AI product rollouts. “18 million subscribers is our home-fieldadvantage. We are investing heavily in deeply integrating Dash into the coreDropbox experience — and that's where we have the most leverage.”
Butsome AI rollouts are not going great. “Morethan 30% of weekly engaged users used Dash's AI features again the followingweek, and more than 50% of monthly engaged users used them again the followingmonth. Retention patterns have been stable as we expand access to new cohorts.”
Openinga new market for old school SaaS. “Protectpositions Dropbox in the security and governance conversation for the firsttime. In the AI era, where employees are sharing sensitive content withexternal AI tools in ways that IT cannot see or control, content governancebecomes a security imperative — and that's a new budget category for us.”
DoubleVerify CEO - Mark Zagorski
AIopening new markets for incumbent SaaS. “Slop Stopper is now being applied on themeasurement side to about 40% of all of our impressions — one of the fastestscaling attach rates we have seen.”
Againon more markets. “AI isdriving demand for our solutions in three distinct ways: it is generating morecontent that requires verification, it is powering more sophisticated fraudthat requires detection, and it is enabling more efficient advertising thatrequires measurement. Every AI development that creates risk for our customerscreates opportunity for DoubleVerify”
AIis driving more fraud, fast. “AI-poweredbot scheme variants increased 140% in the first quarter of 2026 compared withthe first quarter of 2025”
Certara CEO - Jon Resnick
TheAI use case is velocity. “AIdoesn't replace biosimulation — it supercharges it. Our models are built on 30years of validated pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic science. An LLM trainedon general scientific literature cannot replicate that. What AI can do is makeour scientists dramatically more productive, reduce the manual steps betweensimulation runs, and allow us to explore more of the design space in a fractionof the time. The result is better drug development decisions, faster — and thatis what our customers are paying for.”
AIopens a new market. “We want todemocratize biosimulation. Today, the most sophisticated quantitativepharmacology is accessible only to large pharmaceutical companies with deepscientific teams. AI-assisted biosimulation can make those capabilitiesavailable to biotech startups and smaller organizations that currently cannotafford or staff a full modeling and simulation function”
AIalso is forcing a restructuring. “Regulatorywriting and medical writing are areas where AI-assisted tools are advancingrapidly. By divesting those businesses, we are reallocating resources to ourcore biosimulation platform — the part of our business that AI cannot replicateand where our validated scientific models create the most durable competitiveadvantage.”
Alkami CEO – Alex Shootman
Incumbentsare trusted. “Onceon the Alkami platform, our investments in service and reliability, themission-critical nature of our platform, and high switching costs drive grossretention rates 8 to 10 points above typical SaaS companies”
Thedata moat. We havehad 39 client meetings since February where AI has been on the agenda, andevery one of those clients has a specific, concrete use case they want topursue. This is not exploratory conversation anymore. These are financialinstitutions that have identified workflows they want to automate, complianceprocesses they want to accelerate, and member experiences they want to improve— and they want to do it on our platform because their data is already here.”
Softwareside is still wonderful. “Every fiveyears, our clients grow by more than 100% of their original platforminvestment, with our 2021 through 2023 cohorts spending above 2x their landingARR and clients 2016 and older spending close to 4x their landing ARR”
Klaviyo CEO – Andrew Bialecki
Data-lessAI is useless. “Deliveringmeaningful customer experiences at scale requires AI grounded in real data.Agents are only as good as the systems beneath them, and we've spent 14 yearsbuilding exactly that foundation”
WhatAI means for software. “Wehave entered the era of agents and infrastructure, at least so far as softwareis concerned.”
Softwarethat is revenue facing always wins. “Unlike mostenterprise software, we are focused on revenue generation. If you can help growtop line and profits, there is insatiable appetite to spend more, and we seethat constantly.”
AImakes the software customer smarter. “Whenwe think about Composer, ultimately what we are providing is intelligence,delivered in the form factor of tokens. Customers are using it to review whotheir customers are, the effectiveness of their marketing, and then figure outwhat to do next. Those sessions are incredibly valuable — generating thousands,even hundreds of thousands of dollars in incremental revenue. We can go muchdeeper because our agents have access to internal benchmarks and best practicesthat are not publicly available. That intelligence is an entirely new revenuestream.”
Serviceproviders have a place. “Whatyou can do with Klaviyo and the infrastructure that we built is actually a lotmore than our customers and businesses are taking advantage of. Our agencieshave always helped close that gap. Now, with our agents — Composer and CustomerAgent — agencies are accelerating the adoption of both”
Agenttiming. “Thecompany anticipates that AI agents will become standard and ubiquitous withinthe year, creating a positive feedback loop where agent usage generates datathat further improves the underlying infrastructure.”
HealthCatalyst CEO – Ben Albert
Moredata moat arguments. “Wehave 18 years of proprietary healthcare improvement data — the largest suchrepository in the world — and we are building AI models on top of thatfoundation that no competitor can replicate. AgenTeq is not a generic AI layer.It is intelligence built from the specific clinical, operational, and financialpatterns of healthcare delivery at scale.”
Internaldev performance is doubling. “Ourinitial pilots using new development pods and proprietary AI agents resulted inup to 100% more story points delivered per developer. We are applying the sameintelligence we are building for clients to our own engineering operations.”
GenericAI won’t suffice. “Generic AIcan tell you what the literature says about reducing readmissions. Our modelscan tell a specific hospital which interventions have worked for patients withtheir specific case mix, in their specific market, given their specificoperational constraints — because we have seen those patterns play out acrosshundreds of health systems over 18 years”
AImakes incumbent software even more powerful. “Health Catalyst exists to be theintelligence layer of the American health system. AI makes that mission moreachievable than ever — and more urgent than ever.”
Waystar CEO – Matt Hawkins
Somesoftware companies see an expanding TAM with AI. “That shift unlocks a much larger opportunity— the approximately $100 billion in annual revenue cycle labor servicesperformed across the industry today. We believe we are well-positioned toautomate a meaningful portion of this labor pool through new AI-poweredcapability launches like denials, prior authorization, and recoupment. We'rebuilding toward what we believe is the future of this industry: the autonomousrevenue cycle platform.”
AIis increasing bookings velocity. “AItraction is accelerating. AI-powered capabilities drove roughly 40% of newbookings in Q1. Our clients leaned into the platform for prevention,automation, and visibility rather than downstream rework.”
AIwill lead to tool consolidation. “I waswith a CIO of a very large system not long ago — very impressive lady. Shesaid, 'Matt, can you help us? I currently use more than 12 point solutions justto manage our revenue cycle process.' And of course, that's where the platformapproach really comes to play.”
SproutSocial – CEO Justyn Howard
Onwhy Sprout Social is doing a $50mm share repurchase: “Wehave a meaningful disconnect between current valuation levels and the long-termvalue we expect to create....We are seeing customers making longer-termcommitments to Sprout with multiyear contracts now representing nearly half ofour contract mix, up from about a third two years ago. This reflects growingconfidence in Sprout as a strategic platform.”
Cloudflare – CEO Matt Prince
Theydid a 20% RIF while achieving 34% YOYG. “Justbecause you are fit does not mean you cannot get fitter. Over the last sixmonths especially, the productivity gains from the people directly talking tocustomers and directly creating code have been incredible, and a lot of thesupport roles behind them are not going to be the roles that drive companiesgoing forward.”
Oninternal use of AI: “internal AI usage increased more than 600% in asingle quarter….97% of Cloudflare's R&D employees use AI coding tools….withproductivity gains of "two, ten, even 100 times"
Softwareis the backbone of AI: "Cloudflare is now processing hundreds ofbillions of agentic requests per month" according to their latest earningscall. Every AI agent calling a tool,querying an API, or taking an action on the internet is generating a requestthat may pass through Cloudflare's network.
Datadog – CEO Olivier Pomel
AItraining is becoming production infrastructure. “AI training was very new a couple of years ago. Itwas something that was only done by very few companies, and it was, in a way,very artisanal — it was not a production workload. It was something thatresearchers were building, and it was very one-off. And now it's turning intoproduction. It's turning into something that many more companies are doing.It's scaling by orders of magnitude, and it's becoming something that has to beon all the time, reliable — and every minute you lose, or every failure youhave in your training round, is a week you give away to the competition.”
Thedual strategy. “We'retalking about our AI efforts in two buckets: AI for Datadog and Datadog for AI.AI for Datadog — these are AI products and capabilities that make the Datadogplatform better and more useful for our customers. Datadog for AI — thisincludes Datadog capabilities that deliver end-to-end observability andsecurity across the AI stack.”
Hoursto seconds. “We'veseen Bits AI Security Analyst reduce investigations that could take hours to aslittle as 30 seconds.”
Thecloud still matters. “Weshowed broad-based acceleration of revenue growth across cohorts, includingboth our AI and non-AI customers. Non-AI customer revenue growth acceleratedagain this quarter — we think this is a sign of strong continued cloudmigration, greater adoption of our products, and customers of all kindsaccelerating their use of AI.”
Amplitude
Themost honest confession from any CEO we’ve seen. “It is much more important to get there with a lotof speed for a lot of different reasons than it is to say, 'Hey, let's try toprotect some existing thing we have.' The existing thing we have, frankly,isn't valued much.”
Thegoal of Amplitude’s AI. “We'reentering a new era of analytics — one where AI can monitor your product aroundthe clock, and free up your team to focus on improving the experience. The realadvantage is how quickly a team can learn, iterate, improve, and automate.Agentic analytics is the key.”
AIgenerated code means you need more software. “AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to buildingand shipping software, boosting productivity for experienced engineers andenabling non-traditional roles to become AI builders. While teams can generatemore code than ever before, the software development life cycle remainsbottlenecked in many other places. AI builders are generating code faster thanthey can understand its impact. The challenge is now evaluating code beforeit's released, tracking what's working after release, knowing when you need toroll things back, and turning behavioral signals into what to build next.”
Ontheir own coding. “Over90% of the code our team ships today is written by AI.”
Onthe internal adoption of AI. “Wepaused normal work across the entire company so that every function could buildand ship AI-powered workflows to reimagine their daily jobs and functions. Theteam shipped hundreds of amazing demos, including automatically creating customdemo websites per customer, automating part of the quarter close process, andautomating how we create new creative assets in marketing.”
Grossmargin is compressing, but that means…“The inference cost growth is a leading indicator ofhow much our customers are actually using our AI tools. That is what we want.”
Zeta
AI’simpact on the market now. “AI isno longer a feature. It is driving a replacement cycle where enterprises aredemanding fewer systems, measurable results, and applied intelligence thatworks today.”
Wecan’t just talk about AI anymore. “Customerswant to invest in applied AI, not road map AI.”
Thedata and software flywheel. “Asadoption increases, Athena learns from more data, outcomes improve and usagedeepens, driving ARPU expansion and ultimately reinforcing the same flywheelthat has powered our growth. That flywheel is powered by more than just Zeta'sAI models. It's driven by the data and infrastructure behind them.”
Thedata moat. “ZetaSuperGraph, our proprietary identity and intelligence graph, unifies dataacross the enterprise and enables a complete deterministic view of the consumerthat we believe is difficult to replicate at scale.”
Freshworks
TheAI conversation is about impact. "AIis not causing sales delays — it has become a core requirement in nearly alllarge enterprise deal discussions. Customers are not asking whether we have AI.They are asking which AI, how it works, and what outcomes it delivers.Freshworks is winning those conversations because Freddy AI is embedded in theplatform, not bolted on."
AIis the last thing listed. "We had our biggest deal ever — a largenutrition company that was a 10-year customer of one of our competitors — thatis moving over to us for all the reasons we have discussed: enterprise-gradescale, much faster time to value, easier to manage the platform, and AIcapabilities."
Procore
Abig advantage of the incumbents. “Procore AI is a reasoning engine purpose-built forconstruction. It understands the language and logic of the project — how an RFIconnects to a submittal, how a submittal connects to a drawing, how a changeorder gets approved. It works as a multi-step system that holds context acrossmultiple steps. It doesn't just answer a question — it understands the thread.”
Thedata moat. “Thisdata and context can only be accessed within a system of record andcollaboration like Procore. Building on our flagship system of collaborationwith nearly 3 million active users and a massive proprietary dynamic data set,Procore AI can deliver outcomes simply not possible with traditional software.”
Areal ROI use case. “Byleveraging Procore AI, Crest has taken a manual process that could span weeksof effort down to an automation that can take as little as 20 minutes. Thisisn't just an incremental improvement in speed. It is a fundamental shift intheir competitive advantage.”
Thereis more to come. “It is still early. As we continue to developProcore AI, going deeper into our proprietary data and broader across projecttypes, the reasoning engine will only become more capable. We expect oursolution to continue to improve with every layer we unlock, and we have a longrunway ahead of us.”
Our big take-aways so far: AI conversations in enterprise software arenow about ROI and performance. Zeta's Steinberg put it well when he said "customerswant to invest in applied AI, not road map AI". The companies winning are winning becausetheir AI sits on top of proprietary data and workflow context that no model canreplicate from scratch. The model is the commodity; the data and the workflowlayer are the moat. As Klaviyo'sBialecki put it: "agents are only as good as the systems beneaththem."
CEOs are also being very candid about AI's impact on their ownorganizations. Cloudflare did a 20% workforce reduction on the same day itreported 34% revenue growth. Amplitude'sCEO said "the existing thing we have, frankly, isn't valued much" andpaused the entire company to rebuild workflows from scratch. Freshworksattributed its 11% headcount reduction directly to AI coding productivity, withover half of all code now AI-originated. Software companies are positioning fora structurally lower cost base at the same time they are building higher-valueAI revenue. We believe that this combinationwill ultimately justify premium multiples for the enterprise software category,well above where they are today.
Finally one of the findings we didn’t appreciate until now is the TAMexpansion argument. AI both protects incumbent software and expands whatincumbents can charge for. We are seeinga shift whereby traditional services TAM is now becoming a market software canserve with agents.
Thank you for your readership. Seemore blogs and SaaS data at blossomstreetventures.com. Email the author atsammy@blossomstreetventures.com.