AvePoint CFO on AI Safety and Budgeting

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Thanks so much for that, Marlee. Yes, joining me here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is Jim Caci, who's the CFO of AvePoint. Thank you so much, Jim, for joining me today.

**Jim Caci** (0:08)
Thank you.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:08)
All right, hot off the earnings, just remind our viewers first and foremost exactly what AvePoint does.

**Jim Caci** (0:13)
Great. So we're definitely in the technology software world, and our focus is on really the AI trust world in terms of unifying that really trust layer for AI. And that's our focus.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:26)
Okay, and I'm sure that's a really big deal for a lot of companies right now.

**Jim Caci** (0:30)
Today it is, yes.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:30)
Let's run through some of these numbers. Recorded net new AR, reported 22 percent total revenue growth. What drove all of that?

**Jim Caci** (0:39)
You know, it's great. Some of what we just talked about in terms of people's concern around AI and the trust, and are we governing our data properly. So that's definitely been a big push. And we're global in nature. So we saw great growth in North America, a MIA and an APAC. So for us, it's really execution across the globe, and really across customer segments. We had really good growth from our enterprise customers, really significant deal flow there, and then also record new number of customers that we added for SMB really through our managed service provider. So it's been a really strong quarter from that point of view and across the board.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:16)
Yeah. How are you doing that? You know, bringing on that record number of SMB members.

**Jim Caci** (1:21)
Yeah. Again, it's really our partner enablement strategy. We committed to about three or four years ago now that, in order for us to scale, we could not do it alone. We started out as a direct only organization, and now the focus is we continue to sell directly, but we really need our partner channel to really help us. And that really has accelerated. About 60 percent of our ARR today comes through the channel. And so that's definitely helping us accelerate that growth and definitely helped us in Q2.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:49)
I want to unpack trust a little bit more.
When you talk about governing data, I mean, we've been hearing all these stories of some of these AI models, jumping out of sandboxes as like, it feels like Jurassic Park and getting onto the Internet and getting into other. I mean, Meta was the latest, wasn't it reportedly, and I heard Moot Shot Kimi K3 actually, a report out today potentially might have done the same thing. I mean, is this a big concern right now? I mean, is this part of the trust issues that you're having to address right now?

**Jim Caci** (2:20)
100 percent. I mean, I think you touch on it right, like this escape. It's almost like animals escaping from the zoo, right?
So there's definitely tons of concerns. We're definitely in more conversations today with CIOs, CTOs, CISOs around, hey, what is our strategy? What are you seeing? It's great to be participating at that level, at a strategy level as opposed to just a vendor level. So it's definitely where we're playing today in terms of that trust. We think we can help in terms of understanding what your environment looks like.
And that's a big problem for today is that CTOs and CIOs just don't know. People are spinning up agents left and right without authority to do so. And in their environments today, they don't know what's going on.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:03)
Right.

**Jim Caci** (3:04)
I mean, it's very scary.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:04)
They just know they have to do it. AI agent, you have to incorporate it. And I guess, yeah, as you say, they don't know exactly what it is they're dealing with. You have such fascinating data and research. The fact that the trust is actually holding a lot of organizations back from deploying AI, in fact, 90 percent, you say, have already delayed AI deployments by an average of six months, citing a lack of trust. I mean, that's staggering.

**Jim Caci** (3:28)
It is staggering. And if you think about it, if you had a mission to accelerate and you want to go faster, and your CISO or CTO are saying, sorry, we can't because we don't trust what's actually going to happen in the environment, whether that's the agents that you're creating, or even the models that you're using because we don't trust what's going on. We're unclear as to the access that these things have. So that's where we really play. We can help govern that data and govern the access of your agents.