AvePoint, Inc. Class A Common Stock Piper Sandler 5th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference

Thank you for having us.

From a demand climate, it continues to be robust. What we see, last year, the theme of the day was token maxing. This year, the theme of the day is agentic AI. Of course, cost is a paramount concern, as well as risks that AI agents are causing. So we see very strong demand around agentic governance, agentic management. From that perspective, I think from an IT budget, these are top of mind for C-levels, so it is almost a separate conversation. We do see enterprises are blowing through their AI budgets fairly quickly in the beginning of the year, but that has required a lot more attention now in outcome-based measurements around AI spend. So there is a fair amount of discipline around that. But overall, the awareness around risk and cost management of AI, it is really top of mind.

The good thing is this has been something we have been doing for a decade plus, coming from an enterprise content management heritage and being able to do this in cloud at scale. Firstly, to help enterprises manage human access of data, so the better curation, classification, and cataloging, and starting in the regulated industry, and then now becoming a very common request in the commercial side in the non-regulated industry, because folks are realizing the quality of the foundational data is super important to drive good refinement training and refinement outcome for AI deployments. So we historically have helped companies manage employee data access, employee sharing and oversharing, IP leakage, and access control, so data security posture management, for example, for all unstructured data in the productivity side, whether it is Office 365 and now, of course, Google Workspace.

But now with AI, it is really employees operating at machine speed almost, because when you buy Copilot, an AI agent, by default, that agent inherits your entire permission structure. And now quickly, folks are realizing that is not a good idea to have something essentially move at machine speed on your behalf and be able to access all the systems and all the data you have access to, but then you have no control over how it has been shared, how it has been acted on. That is becoming a problem. So the top of mind now is to first discover all the agents running in company environment, including shadow AI, by the way. There is a fair amount of that happening, where employees are getting their consumer subscription of cloud, even using open cloud on devices.

Those are effectively unsanctioned use cases where corporate data could be leaked back to the model providers, and that is becoming another serious concern. So effectively, the top of mind today is the risk side of it. First, discover what actual risk exposure you have in the first place, and then bring them under management, bring them under governance. Shut down the shadow AI usage, because the IP leakage consideration as well, and of course, cost management. So security is top of mind, for sure. Then, DSPM, security posture management, that auditability of information access, it is corollary to that. Because what we do also is to recover when AI does do specific damage to the internal environment or shut down AI access or even runtime because of this incurring too much cost.

Yeah, great question. So specifically about what TJ was just alluding to around agents, we have a product that we recently released for GA back in January, AgentPulse, and we initially monetized it as a bundled strategy in our control suite. So when you think about governance, we added this agentic AI tool, our AgentPulse tool, and included it in the bundles. So it was not sold separately, but really just part of the bundles. It really helped accelerate customer adoption of our bundle strategy. But there was so much demand coming from customers that have a specific agent problem, what TJ just alluded to, in terms of, "I do not even know how many agents are in my environment.

Before I solve my whole control suite environment, my whole governance strategy, can you first help me identify what rogue agents might be running around in my environment?" So we released in July, AgentPulse as a standalone SKU. So that has been really popular right now from customers. So the monetization of that, what we tried to do is keep it very simple. Most licensing for the past 40 years has been seat-based licensing. So what we did is to reduce friction was we did not go consumption for all the reasons we just talked about, in terms of people trying to budget for consumption. We kept it a seat-based license to make it simple, reduce friction, make it easier for procurement departments to get it through. That seems to be really resonating with our customers.

Yeah, it's a great point. I would say what we see is almost an entry point. Right now, there are problems in companies' environments where there's an agentic or an agent problem, where we know there's agents running around in the environment. But maybe we don't know how many, we don't know who owns them, we don't know what they have access to. We don't know what kind of security risks. So there's an immediate crisis for CIOs, CTOs to get a handle on, "Hey, what's happening with these agents?" Even though they may recognize, I have a bigger governance problem with all of my data, I have an immediate crisis with I may have agents that are really putting me at risk.