Upwork Inc. Common Stock Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

I think with that, I know there's going to be people that. It's amazing how in five minutes people drift in and out of rooms. But let's get started in the interest of time, just to keep the trains running. It's my pleasure to have Upwork back at the conference again this year. Hayden Brown, CEO. Hayden, you're always so generous for coming every year. Thanks for allowing us to have the conversation.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely.

Let's just start. I always do like to start a little bit big picture for the folks who don't know the company as well. Talk a little bit about what you're building, what you're scaling, what your key strategic priorities are, and then we'll build off that answer and go a little bit deeper and everything.

Yeah. Upwork, I think has always been more than meets the eye. I've been at the company for 15 years, and I think one of the things people discover when they really get to know the business is it's much more than just a talent matching platform or a place for people to come find freelance talent. We really serve customers on both sides, clients, which are small businesses through large enterprise, as well as independent talent, with the full end-to-end product around not just finding great talent or finding great work, but also delivering on and getting paid for or paying for that work. It's really an end-to-end platform that spans the entire work life cycle, and so we call it a work marketplace because it's more than just talent matching.

I think that's particularly important in the era of AI, when so much is changing, talent discovery methods, recruiting, all of this is, I think, being rewritten in real time. For us, our ability to provide a trusted platform that gives clients and talent the knowledge that what they need to get done is going to get done, and that they'll only pay for work that's been delivered is incredibly important. I'd say in the last 12 to 24 months, some of the thematics for us have really been around three growth levers that are really working in the business right now. The first of those is our push and our expansion upmarket to serve larger SMB customers. What we're doing there is a custom product called Business Plus, which is really meant for larger businesses operating on our marketplace.

It gives them a set of tools, including AI recruitment tools, including access to net 30 payment terms, access to collaborative hiring features, all of the things they need to really run their business at larger scale and with larger programs using independent talent on our website. That product is really our fastest-growing in company history. It grew 174% year over year last quarter and is ahead of plan. We had set a goal for it to be 5% of our total GSV this year, and already it's at 6.6%. So it's growing super well. We're seeing a lot of demand from customers that are bigger, looking for this type of offering. The second growth strategy we have is also around moving upmarket, but this time into large enterprise. In this instance, we've had an enterprise business at Upwork for many years.

Last year, we actually reconceived and relaunched that business, and really had rebuilt it end to end. We bought two companies that now are part of that new Lifted business that give us broader ways to serve large enterprise customers. This is a huge market. It's $650 billion of enterprise spend. Now with Lifted, we're able to serve all of that spend inside customer accounts across not just independent talent that's doing 1099 or independent contractor arrangements, but also other engagements as well. So we can do staff augmentation. We can do EOR, or employer of record, AOR, agent of record. We can do managed services and SOW work. That change to our Lifted strategy means that now we can sell into the largest enterprises in the world, a solution that really meets the needs of their compliant contracting and contingent workforce programs.

We can sell into those programs in a centralized way to compete for much more of those budgets, which typically are in a single account, might be $100 million or more of contingent spend. The Lifted strategy is off to the races. We're seeing really great traction and pickup with our sales team and with conversion in that business. That's something that's also performing really well for us this year and is on track for 25% GSV growth in 2026. The third piece of our growth strategy is really around AI. I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about AI today in this discussion because it's a big thematic for us and certainly is, for us, a tale of both headwinds and tailwinds.

From a tailwinds perspective, what we're seeing is really the acceleration of demand for talent on our platform who can help small businesses and enterprises with their AI-related needs. This entails all of the work around things like AI video generation or AI strategy consulting, which is a category that grew more than 50% year-over-year last quarter. We're seeing lots of demand for this type of talent because SMBs are trying to figure out, how do I adopt AI? Where do I get the talent that can do this for me and get value out of this new technology? The answer is they can find that talent right on our website.

The other piece of our AI thematic is really around our own tooling and rebuilding of our platform to be AI native, specifically to actually integrate into all of the AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT, which customers are using to get work done. Just in August, we launched our MCP, which means now customers inside of these AI environments can invoke Upwork and get talent directly inside those environments from our platform, and can also execute their workflows related to Upwork from within those tools.

This is also the stepping stone or the building block for us to expand our marketplace to not just serve human talent and human business owners, but also their agents, and the agents that are coming to Upwork to actually find human talent, which is a trend we've already seen happening, as well as enabling the ability to bring agents into the equation to deliver work on behalf of clients over time. These are really important growth building blocks as we think about where the business is going and evolving it not just from a demand standpoint and a channel standpoint, but also in terms of the core offering and who can participate.

Okay. There's a lot to unpack there, and I think we're going to go down most of those roads as we talk, but maybe just to level set with what you've learned about AI over the last 12 to 18 months, you highlighted some of the headwinds and tailwinds that the business is facing today. How has it informed any changed view about the long-term opportunity that presents for your company as a result of AI?

There's probably two things. One is, this is a business. We are a broad horizontal platform that serves more than 130 categories of work, more than 10,000 skills. Basically, every type of knowledge work happens on our platform already. That means that through every past era of work changing, whether it was the advent of social media or the introduction of customers trying to move things to the cloud, every time work has changed, we have seen those changes on our platform, and we've supported the birth and death of every type of work that's happened in the last 20-plus years. AI is in many ways no different. There's new demand that's forming around expertise and skills that people didn't even think about a few years ago, and now we're seeing those across our platform, and we're home to more than 300,000 AI practitioners globally on Upwork.

We're also seeing the death of certain types of work. Again, that story is not new for us. I think the only thing that's different now is the speed of that happening. The AI categories are growing faster than any categories we've seen in our history. We're also seeing, at the low end of our market, automation and displacement of work at a very rapid rate, which is, again, a cycle we've seen before, but it's being compressed right now. I'd say the other AI thematic for us that's really emerged over the last 12 to 24 months is this idea of moving Upwork from being a destination to being infrastructure. What I mean by that is previously, in the pre-AI era, you had to come to our website and sign up and manually take steps and actions as a customer to get the value of Upwork.