PAR Technology Corp. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

All right. We're going to start with the next session. Next up, pleased to have Savneet Singh, President and CEO of PAR Technology Corporation. Savneet, thanks for joining us again. It's a pleasure to have you yet again at the conference.

Thanks for having me. Before we get into details, I think let's level set for the room.

Anyone who may be newer to the name, PAR has been on a 40-year-old journey to kind of reinvent themselves from a hardware company to a software company. Can you give us a snapshot of who PAR is today and what the platform does across restaurant, front of house, and back of house?

Sure. PAR is a platform to run enterprise restaurants and convenience stores. We are everything from loyalty and online ordering, all the way to point of sale and back office. Our platform really sort of starts with plant the flag with point of sale, and then we looked up, saw you, back of house, online ordering, and loyalty. We've been sort of deep in software for six, seven years now. Expanded rapidly. Today, we cover over 100,000 restaurants and 25,000 convenience stores.

Got it. Okay. On second quarter numbers, you reported last month you raised full year on both the top and bottom line. You haven't been giving guidance for a while, so I think that's notable. What stood out to you in the quarter? Anything you'd like the script to focus on?

We started guidance this year. This is our second time giving guidance. I think probably the biggest takeaway is we continue to significantly outperform our EBITDA targets. I hope that continues for some time. I think that there's a really strong operating leverage story here, alongside really durable growth. I think probably the biggest takeaway was that we are overearning. I don't think it's overearning. I think we're earning into a continual growth. I think every dollar of future revenue will come at a substantially higher margin than where we started. That is really a direct result of a platform strategy, whereas when we're now selling 2, 3, 4 products per customer, the incremental margin per customer is much, much higher than it was in the past.

I think there's a little bit of underappreciation of how much that is flowing through the bottom line. I think the second thing that's interesting to take away is we crossed over 20,000 sites that have our PAR Intelligence platform on it now. I think that's really exciting for us because we're selling to enterprises. It's not like a tool we can just flip on and say, "Surprise, you have it." We have to get approvals. We got to get it signed up. I think it gets us really excited about the potential future monetization of what we're doing there.

Yep. I want to come back to that in a second, but maybe talk for a second about the decision to give guidance. What was the thought process? What changed in terms of visibility? Secondly, how are you thinking about the philosophy around guidance go forward, about how you set the bar and evaluate over the course of the year?

Yeah. I think guidance for us was probably twofold. One, when we took over the company, we were less than $10 million of ARR, and we used to get asked to give guidance, and I am like, "How many Series A companies give guidance?" We just happened to be public. I think it was always hard. I think when we were building up our platform, part through acquisition, part organically, it was very hard to give guidance that I think was instructive. I think we got to a point now where the business is mature enough where we felt comfortable giving guidance. I think the second part was we had a lot of visibility coming into this year, so we didn't want to come out with guidance and be wrong.

We felt like we had a lot of visibility this year and thought it was a good time to kick things off.

Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Just philosophy going forward on how you set that bar.

Yeah. I think we try to put a bar we can hit and hopefully exceed. The first two quarters, we beat pretty substantially. I think we'll eventually narrow it in to be. I don't think we want to beat by that much all the time, but I think our goal is to put numbers we can achieve and give reasonable expectations.

Yeah. Got it. Okay. All right. Let's talk a little about AI and how that's impacting the business. Can you talk through how AI is actually changing how PAR operates internally, and how you're kind of separating structural cost takeouts from what I think you called AI washing cost-saving programs?

Yeah. I think we went about AI really department by department, job by job. I think it took a little bit longer, but I think it really worked in our favor. If you exclude the set of assets that we acquired in Q1 of this year, our organic OPEX is down something like $15 million or $20 million. A substantial portion of that came from cost takeouts leveraging AI. I think an example is probably helpful. Our finance department today is down 25%, maybe 30% from where it started this year. Our goal is to take it down to 40% by Q1 next year. We've been able to take out a huge portion of our finance costs because we've been able to leverage AI in areas that we were manually doing stuff.