8x8 at Bank of America Conference: Strategic Growth and AI Focus

On Wednesday, June 4, 2025, 8x8 Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT) participated in the Bank of America Global Technology Conference. CEO Sam Wilson discussed the company’s strategic direction, highlighting both opportunities and challenges. While 8x8 aims for robust growth through innovation and AI integration, it faces hurdles in the U.S. market amid macroeconomic pressures.

Key Takeaways

• 8x8 plans for high single-digit revenue growth, driven by new products and AI.
• The company reduced its debt by approximately 40% since acquiring Fuze.
• U.S. market challenges were noted, but recent improvements in order rates were observed.
• 8x8’s strategy focuses on a complete solution for mid-market enterprises.
• The company is exploring M&A opportunities to expand its capabilities.

Financial Results

• Revenue aligned with fiscal year 26 guidance.
• Core business grew 4.6% year-over-year, showing acceleration.
• CPaaS business outperformed expectations.
• Gross retention increased by four to five percentage points.
• Free cash flow yield is in the low to mid-teens.

Operational Updates

• The Fuze platform will be shut down by the end of the year.
• Product offerings expanded from 2 to 10 lines.
• 8x8 has 220 carrier interconnections and operates in 60 countries.
• Focus on platform innovation with strategic partnerships for point products.

Future Outlook

• Continued investment in AI and cloud solutions is planned.
• M&A opportunities are being considered to enhance business scale.
• R&D spending will prioritize platform innovation and product integration.
• Aiming for high single-digit revenue growth through increased retention and new products.

Q&A Highlights

• Addressed valuation concerns and going concern risk.
• Discussed AI’s impact on the contact center industry.
• Clarified capital allocation strategy, favoring cash transactions over equity.
• Emphasized competitive differentiation with a complete solution approach.
• Confirmed visibility on improving revenue growth.

For more detailed insights, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Bank of America Global Technology Conference 2025:

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: We can go get kicked off. I’m sure we’ll probably still filtering in from the earlier keynote. I wanna keep it on track today. So, you know, really happy to have Sam Wilson from 8x8 here with us today. You know, I was telling Sam earlier, I always really enjoy speaking with him because a lot of executives like buzzword bingo.

You know, we do these fireside chats. There’s not a lot of substance to it, but Sam always has great substance and insight to his answers. So Sam, thank you again for coming out.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Please, Michael, thank you for having thank you. And thank you to BofA where I worked many, many years ago for having me here. I always appreciate it greatly.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Great. I wanted to start with you just recently reported earnings and obviously not a full recap but maybe hit top of the waves. Some of the key points from the recent earnings and the messaging.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: All right. So key things we our guidance numbers in general, gave out guidance for fiscal twenty which is our or sorry, fiscal twenty six, our new fiscal year. Revenue came in as expected, CPaaS business doing better. Saw and I made this comment, and I think this will be interesting to investors. I made this comment, you know, when we we did the earnings call, we talked about the fact that, March and April, we definitely saw a bit of disruption around new business generation.

I think a lot of that was macroeconomic driven because the international markets, which is about a third plus of my business, did fine and actually even better than expected. It was really driven by the fact The US market was a little bit rough around the edges. And then in Q and A, I was asked more about that and just stated that we definitely see in May or even May and into June as I guess it’s the taco trade now is what if I read correctly has gone to fruition. We definitely see that in in, you know, order rates and those kinds of things also.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Okay. Great. Great overview. You know, I I normally save the, kind of more pointed questions for the end, but I think the number I I think very topical, so I’ll start with it today. The disconnect between your messaging for your forecast for revenue growth returning to, I think you’re seeing kind of high single digits, about 8% in a couple of years on the top line and stabilizing the business even this year as FUSE continues to run off and you end up life that platform with where your stock is trading today.

And anyone can see the free cash flow yield. I think it’s in a low to mid teens right now, free cash flow yield, which in my mind is indicative of a company where there’s tremendous going concern risk. So taking those two separate points, return them into revenue growth and then when the stock is trading, can you help us bridge that gap or explain to investors why they should not be concerned about going concern risk or deterioration in the business? Alright.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: So I’m gonna break this up into three pieces. First, I’m gonna start at the big picture, which is the industry itself just real quickly. Right? Voice communications is actually celebrating its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary right now. And I’m pretty sure based on all the phone calls your trading desk gets and you get and we all do every day, voice communications isn’t going away.

Business communications as a whole isn’t going away. And the trends that we’re on around omnichannel and more channels, social, WhatsApp, SMS, etcetera, that fragmentation continues, is growing. That allows businesses to manage that, run that, use that along with employee collaboration, all those things. That market isn’t going away. So just in a macro perspective, we’re not going away.

If you look at our business, I wanna break it into two pieces. There’s the business without Fuse. So a couple years ago, we bought Fuse. It was a 240 fifth 240, 2 hundred 50 million dollar transaction. We’ve generated more cash flow than that, and we use that asset to pivot 8x8, the company, into an innovation driven motion.

If you look at our business without Fuse, and that is both on our platform and still on the Fuse platform because we’re upgrading the customers onto our platform. So just the core eight by eight business, we grew 4.6% on a year over year basis last quarter, in line with industry peers, etcetera. And we, saw accelerating quarter on quarter and year on year growth. So we saw acceleration. And that acceleration is driven by new products.

So now let me sort of I give you the the bottom line up front. Let me take a step back. So when we bought Fuse in ’23, we did a couple of things. We cut sales and marketing capacity tremendously, driving free cash flow generation that brought the growth rate of the company down. We acquired Fuze.

We started melting that ice cube of running it for cash flow. And then we took all that cash flow, and we invested in three things. Debt retirement because the company was over levered. It was at six and seven times EBITDA. Right?

Debt retirement. We drove it in innovation, and we put it into customer retention. And in the three years since then, what have we seen? We’ve reduced debt by 40% roughly. I’m a CEO.

I round a little bit to big debt numbers, like 38 something percent or something. We’ve increased innovation in new products. We’ve gone from two products we sell to 10 product lines we sell. That’s what’s causing the core business to grow year over year and accelerate. And number three is we’ve seen a four or five point increase in gross retention, which is also after a year or two causes the core business to grow.

And so we melted fuse to drive the core business where we needed it. And so I think what you’re gonna see is at the end of this year, we’ll have shut down the Fuze platform. At end of this calendar year, we’ll have shut down the Fuze platform. And that growth rate, that high that mid single digits, high single digits growth rate will start to shine through. And then as the new products continue to gain hold, as the increased retention continues to work, we can drive that high single digits.

Why high single digits? It’s just if you take a breakdown of my business and you multiply it by the industry growth rates by the various segments, it comes out to be seven, eight, nine percent depending on if you could use Forrester or IDC or Gartner or whoever. So it’s just a conglomeration of what the industry should be growing at and what we should be growing at as a company is high single digits. And I absolutely believe we’re on track for that.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Okay. That’s great. It’s a great way to begin. You know, and you mentioned that you generated more cash from the Fuse deal than you paid for the asset. Yeah.

Right? Makes me think about is there more alchemy to be had in the industry? Yes. Okay. So where do you think that you can generate greater value than the acquisition Every

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: every company that I’m talking to about acquiring them, it’s not you. Like, you’re terrible and you should sell to me at a very low valuation. There’s so the industry is massively fragmented. And it’s funny I’m talking to you, such a veteran of this industry. See, that was a nice way of saying it.

It is if you look at telecom historically, it’s a very regionally based fragmented industry. It’s almost by region, by territory, by geography, by physical infrastructure, etcetera. And we are a software company wrapped in telecom. That’s what we are. And so there’s tremendous ability for us pick up these regional assets and truly bring the power of cloud and AI and data to bear in this new era.

Right? The reason telecom companies are regionally based is because their infrastructure had to be regionally based. Mhmm. But in a modern cloud world, I can deliver voice services or data services effectively. I have 220 carrier interconnections at eight by eight.

I cover a vast majority, the entire world. I have users in a 60 countries, etcetera. And so I think the there there is still a space in this market for a global telecom company, and I think the potential of that global telecom company is exceptionally large. And as more and more businesses globalize every day, there’s more and more need to go to a single vendor that can supply them business communications globally.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: And maybe I’m running the wrong direction with this, but you mentioned kind of regional and maybe think of the old ROAC model and telecom, which was the rural local exchange carrier and those were all rolled up in early 2000s. Should I be thinking broader than just software potential targets and you know more towards traditional telecom asset based? Not Telecom or without running too far with it?

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: I don’t think I want to own physical infrastructure. I think that’s a I think what what look, in my world, what I think you’re gonna see is you’re gonna see the traditional Verizon’s and AT and T’s and Comcast’s and those people, they they all talk about going to layer seven. I’m gonna sort of geek out a little bit. They talk about being application providers, but they’re not. They’re physical infrastructure providers.

They’re one, two layer providers, and they’re very good at it. They know how to get a permit in San Mateo County to run a piece of fiber down the street, and I have no clue of even who to call. So what you’re gonna see is their business is really going to be that physical infrastructure, and our business is gonna be running the applications, the business communications on top of that. And with AI coming or here, depending on which person you’re gonna hear today, that becomes even more important. So I don’t wanna be in the physical infrastructure, but what I do wanna be is a global software provider that’s providing business communications.

And there’s so many of these regional players that are stuck subscale that we should begin to actively do that. And if you read my cash flow statement, I did a deal last quarter, and I’d like to do more deals in the future.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: I completely agree with you. Roll up makes total sense in industry right now.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Absolutely. And that’s what and so the funny part is we would have started earlier if we could just get the debt down faster. Right? So the whole point is to get the debt down so that I can use the cash I’m generating, not for debt retirement, but for M and A and other things that drives more scale in

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: the business. And in these hypothetical transactions, you know, do you envision them being being cash transactions or, you know, is your equity a currency that you think you could use will be accepted?

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: My equity is highly undervalued. And if I’m like Warren Buffett, I would never use it for a transaction unless I absolutely had to. Now look, every once in a while you want to do something around a retention and those kinds of things. You’ll use some equity as a retention tool. But as a general rule, we want to do cash transactions.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Okay. And I asked Vlad from RingCentral yesterday. I

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: know that guy’s in. Yeah. Oh, wait a minute. He’s the absent CEO of my competitor.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: I can’t comment. Asked him this question yesterday, so I think it’s fair game. I pointed out that his stock is also undervalued in my opinion and in him being a relatively large shareholder. Would he consider adding value through LBO, MBO? Because in my view, these businesses could actually handle more leverage than what you’re driving towards.

You can lever it up, you can drive it more for cash and obviously generate a tremendous amount of value. Is that something that you’ve evaluated, you know, with your board or or

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Yes. So let me be super clear so there’s no misunderstanding. My board and I evaluate capital allocation, capital structure. Every board meeting, it’s something that’s discussed. There’s actually a strategic investment committee or a capital allocation committee of the board.

So I for the any lawyers listening, we have dotted i’s and crossed t’s and have minutes all over the place. More on a practical level, I view us as a software company wrapped in telecom, not a telecom company wrapped in software. Okay. A telecom company runs generally more highly levered. A software company and I’m a little old school.

I came to Silicon Valley in 1994 originally. Is, you know, when I was in the first ten years in Silicon Valley, tech companies ran with no debt because you never wanted debt payments to get in the way of r and d because r and d is your lifeblood. And so I think our optimal leverage ratio is zero. I don’t know if we’ll get there anytime soon, but a low leverage ratio net cash is where we should be. I know from a NBA business school perspective, that’s probably not the right level.

But I think from a running an innovation driven technology company, that’s the right level. You always wanna be able to fund R and D and GTM to the proper levels.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Okay. Very, very, very clear. I I wanna shift away from from this conversation, but thank you for entertaining all those questions and get back more towards your core business contact center specifically. Wanted to start there. There is an investor perception that AI is an existential threat for contact which quite frankly goes against a lot of the results companies are reporting in contact center 8x8 included.

So maybe first touch on that, but then second, where you have most success competing in contact center and and why and why you’re winning.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Sure. Okay. It’s a great question. So let me talk about the existential crisis first. So I don’t I don’t know what you’re gonna hear from other executives, but I will tell you that I do believe technology replaces labor over time.

You know, the car replaced buggies, the wheel replaced whatever, hauling stuff manually, etcetera. You you’re gonna have technology. The idea, though, that we won’t evolve and provide the technology, I think, is the existential threat that the market misses. We sell AI. We sell tons of AI.

And as a matter of fact, this is part of the pivot with Fuse. We saw this coming years ago. We’ve been investing in AI as far back in 02/2019. We hired a bunch of people from IBM Watson. Like, we’re six years, seven years into this game.

We knew the OpenAI folks before they were public. I mean, before the LLMs were announced and ChatGPP was announced, we were already working with their technology on transcription and other pieces of it. So the idea that we would have seat count decline, but our revenues actually grow because we are selling more combination of products to that customer is actually what you see happening. We now sell 10 plus products. A number of them are AI based products.

I think what the existential crisis is is that the model’s gonna change. You’re gonna see a little bit less subscription revenue, more consumption revenue over time because most AI products Mhmm. Are based on consumption because there’s no concept. I mean, you look at AI, it’s based on tokens. But there’s no concept of a seat because there’s no concept of a human being.

And the idea that you’re gonna charge on a per agent per month or whatever is whatever. Mean, it’s unlimited. A human being can only work eight hours or ten hours or twelve hours in your case. But mean, you can’t an AI can like, I can just replicate. If I have one agent and it’s overloaded, I can put six more and I can throw more compute at it, and those costs are going to go up.

So I think the existential crisis is that somehow AI happens, and 8x8’s completely asleep at the wheel and keeps doing what it’s doing as it drives off a cliff. And I just want to assure every investor out there that that is completely false, and we’ve been at this game for a while, and we’ll continue to be at this game. Taking that one step lower, you were talking about the contact center in particular. Right? So what we sell or what we specialize in is the layer below the big Fortune 500 companies or Fortune 100 companies.

We want to focus on taking the technology that was exclusive to that realm. So let’s use it in United Airlines. I think last time I talked to United Airlines, think they had 30,000 concurrent agents any given day on staff. Right? But because they have 30,000 agents, they’ve invested a lot in developing cool technologies and capabilities, etcetera, etcetera.

We wanna make that available to a company that’s got a thousand concurrent agents, and we have customers with a thousand concurrent agents. And the same capabilities, the same level of customer service, the same everything that you would get from head around minus all the developers and the customization and everything else. So if you look, we invest a huge amount in platform technologies. What the platform technologies allow a mid market enterprise customer to do is deploy a set of technologies that allow them to achieve, self-service, contact center, omnichannel, routing, the whole kit and caboodle of things they wanna do today. And and it’s a platform for the future with AI because we’re capturing all the data, all the interaction data.

So if you think about where I think one of the big areas that AI is going in the future is the stuff that’s written today is available for AI today. So if you’ve got a book or whatever, you know, they they crawl the Internet, they crawl your Internet in a rag model, etcetera. But the future is gonna be, what about all the voice communications? What about all the chat communications? What about that real time information?

You know, don’t tell me this customer had a problem six months ago that we didn’t solve. Tell me the customer that has a problem today that I need to get solved because they’re a major customer. The only way to do that is to tap into real time communications. And the only way to do that is have a platform that’s capturing all the real time communications. That’s what we do.

And it’s actually differentiated from our competitors. We are a contact center company. We are a UC company. We are a CPaaS company. We are a business communications company.

And that, I think, is going to be ever more important as this AI thing takes off. I think you’re going to see my competitors, and you already see them, trying to get into the contact center game. Probably four years from now, they’ll realize that, oh my god, CPaaS actually matters.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Mhmm.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: And start to get in that well. You see the CPaaS guys trying to get into voice calls and everything else. Like, it’s gonna continue to blur, and I think we’re way in front of that trend. And what we figured out in the last three or four years is how to optimize our innovation dollars for that world. I would say pre me becoming CEO, we tried to do too much ourselves.

And what we now have is the perfect balance between we build it in house or we partner for peace. So it’s a very long winded answer, but you gave me a multi part question.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: No. No. It was a great answer. And I think another part of the question was, you know, specifically the market that you’re targeting, right? There’s obviously a large enterprise.

There’s

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: like the way I say it, I’ll say it is two fifty employees to 20,000 employees. So that’s generally 25 contact center agents to 2,000 concurrent contact center agents, kind of rough ballpark. And I’m generally looking for a company that doesn’t have developers. So what I mean by that is they’re not trying to build an in house custom solution. They’re a trucking company or a law firm or whatever whose business is not building technology.

Their business is using technology to give an outcome. They come to us.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: In this contact center in general, I mean, there’s been the projection for years, whether it’s IDC or others that, you know, industry would grow, you know, low double digits, mid teens, maybe. Doesn’t seem to be hitting, hitting that mark. And it seems like it’s still a lot of the, industry is still in the old on prem model as well. Right? Which could just be based on a number of factors.

But what do you think the tipping point is where we see acceleration of migration to the cloud and to the AI based solutions that are promised to add productivity and reduce expense and all these magical things for customers?

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: It’s fantastic question, and I’m probably gonna give you a terrible answer.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Thank you.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: I’m not sure there is a tipping point because the notion of a tipping point is really from Jeffrey Moore’s technology adoption curve. Right? You go into the chasm, you have the bowling alley, and then you sort of get to the tornado. Mhmm. But the notion behind that is it’s a new technology, new application, a new thing.

And if you think about voice, you’re talking a 50 years old. If you think about chat, you’re talking about 40 years old. Right? If you talk about email, you’re talking about 50 or 60 years old. So I think this is not about a new application.

It’s about a new delivery system. That new delivery system is the cloud where we control the infrastructure. We make it easier. We make it more cost effective, etcetera. And so we’re not gonna necessarily see that we’ve reached a magic point.

The light bulbs go off, etcetera, and off to the races we go. Now where could I be dead wrong? AI. I think you can’t do AI on prem. It’s not gonna work.

It’s too hard. You would spend 10 times more trying to get your on prem crapola to be AI ready to go than it would just be to rip it all out and replace it with us or one of our competitors. Right? So I think the magic to me will be and phase one of AI is evolutionary, which is, hey. We’re gonna run our on prem stuff, but we’re gonna try to figure out and get some agent assist to work on the side and whatever.

But if AI is truly revolutionary that people think it is, and I truly believe it is, then what’s the tipping point will be, hey. The infrastructure I have will not work. Right? So let’s go back to the 1998. I’ll give you two I’ll give you the light bulb going off for me.

1998, what was the correct infrastructure for the Internet? I guarantee you it wasn’t a large mainframe computer sitting in your basement. Right? It was client server, etcetera. And that issue led to CloudFare and AWS and everything else, etcetera.

Right? So and number two is what was the proper amount to invest in the Internet? Every dollar you had. The companies that invested every dollar they had were wonderfully successful, and the companies that dragged their feet struggled and struggled and struggled. And I think what we’re gonna see is you’re gonna see the companies that are investing in AI and investing in the cloud and investing in modern communications and those things will gain a competitive advantage.

And the ones that stick to their legacy on prem system forever, it will cause their business to have problems, and then they’ll invest.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: You know, your comment about technology progression and telecom being 150 years old. Maybe think back that in the late ’90s traditional telecom was still dominant. There were a lot of competitors. Obviously, then you had VoIP in the early 2000s. That was a disruptive technology created new disruptive companies like 8x8 and RingCentral and others started providing, we call it cloud based communications today, but it’s just different model.

Why won’t the next technology emerge and somehow displace companies like 8x8 and others in the industry with some new new solution where, you know, we’re we’re we’re, you know, a company that wants, you know, that wants context center AI agents can just buy from somebody else very easily at a much lower cost. Right? And it can undermine the industry.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Totally could happen. Well, this is let’s I mean, I think it’s a great question, but but let’s look at let’s look at Avaya, Mitel and the crew. Why they should have owned this market? Mhmm. They should have owned.

Like, we shouldn’t exist. We exist because the incumbent vendors fell played at Clayton Christensen’s Inventor’s Dilemma and refused to invest in the cloud. Right? That is a story as old as time and world. At a basic level, we’re human beings.

We communicate by text and voice. Like, that ain’t gonna change. So the need for business communications isn’t gonna change. Mhmm. Right?

What method we use could change, but that’s not going to change. So the answer is we will only not survive as a company if we are stupid. You can read the rest of that sentence. If we’re stupid, we deserve to die. And if we’re not stupid, we deserve to continue to move forward.

And I we spend a lot of time as a management team and as a company making sure that we are not stupid.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: So it’s Darwinism.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Sure. Isn’t that business? I mean, look, I mean, look, rule number one, don’t take your company private, lever it to the moon and cut all your R and D spending, Mr. Avaya. Right?

I mean, that has consequences. You’re upset

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: at my bankers now.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: I’m not sure there’s any fees left to get from that thing.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: We have about five minutes left. You’re always great with the commentary just kind of on the industry and how you’re competing and others. And so can you give me your perspective about maybe who you worry about most competitively, maybe who you worry about least where you’re eating their lunch or doing really well. And you did mention earlier, and I want to come back to it, your combination of assets. We have UCaaS, you have CPaaS, you have CCaaS as well.

And maybe that positioning, I know it’s kind of a multi pronged question, broader, just kind of who do you worry about, who do you not worry about, and then how those assets allowing you to compete.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: I would say that the companies I worry the most about are gonna always be the hyperscalers. I’m gonna give you a broader brush. So there’s obviously Microsoft, who’s a partner of ours and we partner with them extensively. Amazon, who has Connect. Google, who, I don’t know, some days is in and some days is not, who we also partner with extensively.

But I think I would also throw in there a Salesforce, a ServiceNow with the things they’re doing around CRM and the changes in CRM and those kinds of things. Because I think if you look at CPaaS, right, there’s an argument to be made that in the future our business may not be packaged software, but it may be make a phone call, get a voicemail, receive things. You could break apart our service into a pure consumption based And so I think for a whole host of people that will never go that route, but there’s going to be the Ubers of the world that want to have voice masking, the technology we sell frequently or those kinds of things. And so I think what you’re going to see is you’re going see a bifurcation. But I always, I still think globally, like let’s not use Silicon Valley, California as a representation of the globe, right?

A third of our business is outside The United States. I think for the next thirty years, we have more than enough business and opportunity to go after that mid market enterprise customer who wants to have great business communications but doesn’t know how to make that journey.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: And so just to kind of summarize as well, what you were talking about is that you do believe you have direct line of sight to improve revenue growth. This is an aspiration. It’s actually something you believe you can project,

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: right? If Excel is completely lying and I’m completely delusional, then no. But I think both those things are absolutely true. Yes. Okay.

We have direct line of sight to continued growth.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Okay. Competitively 8x8 is well positioned and continues to do well in terms of market share gains. Getting more traction in CCaaS, the CPaaS business, which was probably left for dead four or five years ago, has actually been improving. And it’s expanding, I believe, the footprint where you’re competing in that business. And then the third piece, just to come back to it, is that there is a massive market disconnect with the valuation that they’re holding on eight by eight and those two those first two points.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: If And and jokingly, one of my board members said to me recently, should just rename the company 8x8 dot ai and triple the valuation of the company overnight. Right? You sell AI. You have AI. AI is a trend that you can sell more of in the future.

You enable your mid market customers to get AI results and self-service and those kinds of things. You just have a label that doesn’t work. So I think the answer is yes. I think we’re well positioned for the future. I would like to spend more on R and D at some point in the future.

I’d like to do some M and A and get some scale in the business over the future. But I have no concerns that we won’t show growth, continue to generate cash flow over a multiyear time period, and provide a good return to investors.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Do do you feel constrained in the amount of capital that you can spend in r and d? It’s a fundamental disadvantage for eight by eight that you can’t spend more?

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Look, I’m a Silicon Valley tech guy. Like all the money in the world is not enough for R and D, right? I mean, I always have another project and I always have a CPO telling me he’s just one scrum team short of whatever new project I’d like to sell and develop or sales rep I’d like to hire. The business is all about trade offs and priorities. But yeah, I mean, I’m not going to say I wouldn’t want to take more R and D money if someone gave me a bag of money.

I’m certainly not going to borrow money to spend more on R and D. I’m fiscally conservative and want to stay that way.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: And I should assume that strategically you’ll continue to do, I like to call it R and D through partnership, right? Leveraging others R and D to create or improve products.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Absolutely. We’re we’re we’re spending our money on platform R and D, so platform innovation. Part of that is the ability to plug in point products and get a complete solution. So we’ll partner for a point product to put in so that we can offer a platform, which then gives a complete solution. And this is where I think at an eight by eight level, we’re misunderstood.

I think there’s tremendous value in providing a complete solution because what we’re doing is the customer will pay us for the integration that either they would have to do themselves or hire an SI or hire somebody else to do. They’re just gonna get it from us and they’ll happily pay us for doing that. It’s a

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: great place to stop. Sam, thank you so much for coming in. Michael, thank you. It’s always good to see you.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: And once again, thank you for having us.

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: Of course. Thank you.

Sam Wilson, CEO, 8x8: Have a

Michael, Interviewer, BofA: great Sam. Thank you.

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