BlackLine at Baird Conference: Strategic Clarity and Growth Focus

On Tuesday, 03 June 2025, BlackLine Inc. (NASDAQ:BL) presented at the Baird Global Consumer, Technology & Services Conference 2025, offering a strategic overview that highlighted both the company’s progress and challenges. The leadership team discussed a clear vision for growth, emphasizing new pricing models and key industry partnerships, while acknowledging the need for continued execution and adaptation.

Key Takeaways

• BlackLine is shifting to a platform-based pricing model, aiming for widespread adoption in CFO offices.
• The company is capitalizing on a major ERP migration opportunity, particularly with SAP customers.
• Strategic restructuring has been a focus, with significant management changes over the past two years.
• Expansion efforts are underway in the public sector and aerospace & defense industries.
• Margin improvements are targeted through cloud optimization and AI integration.

Strategic Direction and Team Restructuring

• BlackLine has undergone significant leadership changes, with a focus on strategic clarity and execution.
• The company’s relationship with SAP has been revitalized, leading to positive outcomes, as evidenced by collaborations with ExxonMobil and Delta.
• Upcoming announcements on AI are anticipated at the Beyond the Black conference in September.

ERP Migration Opportunity

• BlackLine is preparing for an ERP migration "super cycle," with an estimated 30,000 SAP customers expected to transition in the next five years.
• The company offers ERP agnostic solutions, ensuring data consistency during migrations.
• BlackLine’s integration with SAP systems is designed to be seamless, supporting both legacy and new cloud environments.

Public Sector and Aerospace & Defense

• Efforts to establish a presence in the public sector are underway, focusing on compliance for federal operations.
• Success in the public sector is seen as a gateway to expanding in the aerospace and defense sectors.

New Pricing Model

• The shift from user-based to platform-based pricing aims to drive finance transformation by encouraging widespread platform adoption.
• The new model, introduced in North America and now expanding internationally, has surpassed initial expectations.
• Customers have the option to retain the existing user-based model, with transitions planned over the next three years.

Margin Expansion and AI Impact

• BlackLine aims to enhance margins through cloud optimization and strategic resource allocation.
• AI is being integrated across operations, with a focus on data accuracy and transparency.
• Customer engagement is central to AI development, ensuring reliability and trust in AI-driven solutions.

Conclusion

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript of the conference call.

Full transcript - Baird Global Consumer, Technology & Services Conference 2025:

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: Okay, great. Great. Well, thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for day one of Baird’s Global Consumer Technology and Services Conference.

My name is Rob Oliver, and I follow the application software, software as a service base. And it’s a pleasure to have the management of BlackLine here. With us this afternoon, to my immediate left, Owen Ryan, who is the Co CEO. Next to him, Patrick Villanova, who is the CFO. Some of you may not have met Patrick yet.

He is new to the CFO role, although not at all new to BlackLine. And then to his left, Matt Humphries, who is the SVP of IR. This can be an interaction session, so please do not hesitate to email at the email address session4rwbear dot com, and I’ll try to get as many questions in as possible. Owen, let me start with you. Thank you so much for joining us today.

It was a pleasure to see you. It’s been a little over a couple of years since you came down from the board level into the operational role as co CEO of the company. And at the time, you outlined after a brief kind of figuring some things out, you outlined a bunch of changes that you felt needed to be made in order to eventually drive revenue growth and other things. And I was hoping we could just start with maybe stepping back and having you give a little bit of perspective on kind of like where we are now compared to where we were when you first got here, and then we can dive into some more specifics.

Owen Ryan, Co-CEO, BlackLine: Okay, sure. And good to see you again. So I think when Therese and I stepped into the co CEO roles, one of the things we really tried to figure out was what was the strategic direction of where this company should go. And we went through a pretty thorough process to decide importantly what we would do, but more importantly, even what we wouldn’t do. And so we made choices about industries, customer segmentation, geographies, relationships with ERPs, relationship with SIs, where we would take the product road map and then decided those things and then decided what we would not be doing in those particular areas.

That was the easy part, right, because you’re just you’re figuring this out where you want to go. And then the next big piece was figuring out that we have the right team to get us to where we needed to go. So over the last, I guess, it’s twenty months or so, everybody on the management team, except for our chief legal officer, chief administrative officer, has been replaced. So there’s a whole new leadership team. The last addition actually came in February of this year when we named a new chief commercial or a chief revenue officer, whatever terminology you prefer.

What is really now where we’re at is when I think about ’twenty ’3 was like sort of the year of figuring out strategically where we would go, ’twenty four was putting the team in place to get things done, And then ’25 has now been all about execution. And we feel really good about the progress we’re making in every aspect of what we’re trying to do as an organization. What we need to be doing to continue to improve and upgrade the product has just been fantastic. We’ve got a number of really cool announcements we’ll make at our Beyond the Black Conference in September, particularly around AI. The things we need to be doing in go to market.

We’ve seen a lot of good progress across all aspects of that, from marketing to how we bring in net new to how we serve existing customers, our own professional services team, how we work with our partners in delivering those things, all really critical, the rollout of our industry program. And then a big piece of our business, for those of you who know, is tied to working with SAP. And that was a relationship that we and I’ll use my word, we went through a reset last year. We feel really good about where we are on that journey. For those of you who might have just gone to the Sapphire Conference in Orlando and or Madrid, you would have seen a lot of really top notch stories, for example, ExxonMobil and Delta talking about the power of BlackLine with SAP.

So those are sort of just some of the highlights of the things. But again, I think if Theresa and I would both say we feel really great about the leadership team we have around us. We understand exactly what we’re doing, and we’re focused every day on that. And I would tell you, I think that just about every BlackLine or if you asked them what the strategy was for BlackLine, they could tell you what we’re trying to do and what their role is in trying to accomplish that.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: You mentioned Beyond the Black, and I attended the end of last year. And you guys laid out a pretty ambitious plan at that event to go after the broader office of the CFO opportunity. And right towards the end of the initial presentation, I went up to one of your board members, David Henschel, who I’ve known for years because he was the CFO of Citrix. And I said, this is a pretty ambitious plan. He said, Rob, it’s all about the data.

We’ve got the best data here. So tell me, is that enough to win? And talk about that plan because you’ve got the office of the CFO, you’ve got FP and A providers, you’ve got accounting providers, you’ve got workload providers. It seems like everybody wants a piece of this. And yet, you called out a couple of Exxon and Delta, others where the data has mattered a lot.

So talk about the importance of that data and your ability to get that to resonate at the office of the CFO level.

Owen Ryan, Co-CEO, BlackLine: Yes. And I think Patrick and I will probably tag team on this a little bit. But we’ve been a SaaS company for a really long time. We’ve tons of customer information and data. What’s been important for us in the last two years is we’ve actually now really started to use that in ways that we had historically not.

So our ability to take the top 10 oil and gas companies, eight of which run on BlackLine, and then show them each how they can use our solution that much better or go to the two that we don’t serve and talk about the art of the possible. And it’s not about cash or suspense accounts. It’s about what do you do midstream, upstream, downstream, what do you do in distribution, retail, hedging and all the details that you get into in real, very specific use cases that show what that data can when you have that data and it’s clear, clean, reliable, usable, how you bring that to bear. What BlackLine’s unique position is, and I’ve used this analogy before, if you think about a river, we are at the headwater, right? And everything that goes through finance starts and works its way right through BlackLine.

So yes, there’s a lot of FP and A players downstream, a lot of soap players and all that, but nobody has what we have. And what we’re really beginning to do is exploit that in a way that maybe we hadn’t done in the past. But Patrick, you live this every day.

Patrick Villanova, CFO, BlackLine: Yes. I’d say, Owen, to elaborate on that. If you think about how we’re strategically positioned in an area better than our competitors, it starts with data. If you think about where we’re going as an industry, you can’t have a conversation without talking about AI. And this is the next step of what Owen was just talking about.

AI is only effective if you are releasing it into an environment of clean and consistent data. And if you maybe look at where some of our competitors operate and exist or how they exist, some of them operate within consolidations. Well, that’s a very high level of data. That’s aggregated data. That’s at a trial balance level for those accountants in the room.

Some of our competitors work by uploading information from Excel into the cloud. Well, the limitation on that data goes only as far as the person that put that Excel file together, a human being. We operate at the transaction level. We operate at the headwaters. We operate at the journal entry level, the initial transaction, the banking transaction, the most granular form of data that exists in an ERP or in a financial systems ecosystem.

When you have that data and it’s clean and it’s complete and it’s accurate, that presents an unbelievable market opportunity to unleash the next generation of technology within the financial system ecosystem.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: One of the things that struck me, but I didn’t raise my hand, but I did attend SAP Sapphire. One of the things that struck me was what you mentioned, Owen, which was Delta and Exxon. And of course, those who follow by know that ExxonMobil is a customer because they called you guys out on their earnings call, which is always a nice endorsement. But Delta, I learned a lot more about. And both of these companies talked about the importance of data through their ERP migration processes.

So I guess it’s probably a two part question here is, one, how important is that as we get through the process of ERP migrations, is in front of us now over the next five years, how compelling of a case is that for BlackLine? And does this create an opportunity for BlackLine to not only win along with these migrations, but to get larger within those accounts as well?

Owen Ryan, Co-CEO, BlackLine: Yeah. And again, we’ll probably tag team here just a little bit. Please. Look, if you go from an on prem solution to the cloud and that’s all you’ve done, there’s no real value. And it’s hard for a CFO to justify spending $100,000,000 and nothing’s really changed.

And I think that’s why you’re seeing this conversation of finance first and the power of what BlackLine can bring on the front end of these migrations because then you get clear, reliable, actionable information data to drive your business forward. And I think it’s been a little bit of an moment for some of the big ERPs that we work with because it’s hard to make that case unless you’re going to get more out of it. And so that’s we’ve seen a big shift in mindset as we talk to these ERPs that we work with. Remember, we’re ERP agnostic even though we have a very deep relationship with SAP, but it’s the same across the board. But then when you start to get into like when Patrick starts to talk to these customers or these reps that are helping these customers or the SI partners to figure it out, this is where I think it gets interesting.

So you want to maybe talk a little bit about it?

Patrick Villanova, CFO, BlackLine: Yes. Owen, one thing you left out just from a sizing of opportunity perspective. Have There are about 30,000 upper mid market and enterprise SAP customers that are going to be part of this super cycle over the next five years between now and 02/1930. Now five years sounds like a lot of time, but if you are a multibillion dollar, multinational customer that is looking at that date of 02/1930, you better be talking about or starting your ERP migration now. It takes that long to properly plan it and go out.

So now, let’s talk about the planning process. And Owen hinted at this and one element of it’s funny. So if you’re an existing ERP customer that’s on prem and you have to move to the cloud, as a CFO, as a practitioner, or a CAO, the selling point that, you know, SAP comes forward with, you’re going to spend $10.50, hundred million dollars to go from on prem to the cloud and nothing’s going to change. And that kind of, in one way, says, okay, that gives me a little more confidence as a user, as somebody that has to sign off on this, that the new reporting is going to look like the old reporting. But in the same breath, to spend that much money and nothing changes, well, that’s not a very compelling sales pitch.

But the problem is things do change. Somebody that has been through ERP, somebody has done this in a previous lifetime, ERP migrations, as the end user, maybe not at the executive level, but the way you interface with the system changes, the user interface changes, the way that data is mapped into the cloud is different than on prem. The dimensions of the data, and by dimensions, I mean your segment reporting, your legal entities, your regional reporting, your internal reporting. All this reporting you’ve built for decades in your on prem system, it changes. And so there are changes that occur and change, you you have to mitigate that.

You have to mitigate the risks associated with it. That’s where BlackLine comes in. The benefit of BlackLine and finance first and BlackLine first, when you go through this five year super cycle, is that we are truly ERP agnostic of every version of SAP. BlackLine looks identical sitting on top of a 20 year old on prem SAP ERP as it does sitting on top of a brand new cloud based SAP ERP. We are identical in both environments.

And that is key. Because if you’re entering this process and you’re a CFO that has to sign off on this or a CIO, you want the shortness that the data that’s been sitting in this decade old or older ERP is going to come over completely. It’s going to come over accurately. It’s going to come over in the correct fields. It’s going to come over into the correct legal entities.

So how do you do that? Well, you lead with BlackLine, you extract all that data, you cleanse it, you reconcile it, you organize it, and you automate it. And that’s where you start the super cycle. That’s where you start the conversion to the cloud. Then you initiate the actual project, the actual implementation, and the information that’s sitting over here in BlackLine comes seamlessly over here into the same BlackLine because it’s identical in the cloud as it is on an ERP system.

And that’s the value proposition. If you’re spending tens, $5,100,000,000 your number one risk in any ERP migration is data, and we provide that assuredness. We provide that confidence to a CFO or say, oh, that the data over here is going to look identical to the data that’s sitting in your old ERP. That’s why you lead with finance first. Always present the alternative.

What if you don’t do this? Well, I can tell you because for some of the migrations that have occurred, BlackLine came last. And what happened there was the new reporting in the cloud didn’t look like the old reporting in on prem. And now you have a needle in a haystack exercise. You implement BlackLine and you start reconciling everything in the new system and then you have to trace it back to the old system.

It’s possible. We can fix it, But that is not an efficient way to approach the process. It’s not a good way to mitigate risk. You want to take care of this on the front end and start with BlackLine, start with finance first. That’s the clear value proposition to the buyers of our product like me.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: Great. So compelling setup here relative to SAP. Now let’s talk a little bit about your preparedness to meet that moment. I know, Owen, you called out last year there were some changes within the SAP ranks of SAP North America, which created some friction, not just for BlackLine, by the way, for others. And we noticed them because a lot of SAP people went to ServiceNow to follow Bill McDermott.

So it created some disruption to the partner network. So and you also mentioned how you now have a management team that is turned over. And one commonality I’m noticing is that enterprise readiness, whether it be Stuart or we can talk about or you with your background and everything. So then let’s talk about the preparedness of BlackLine to meet this moment with SAP. Where are you guys relative to that opportunity?

Are you in a good spot? Are you is the phone ringing when it comes to these deals? Talk about SOLEX and the relationship there.

Owen Ryan, Co-CEO, BlackLine: Yes. I think you’ve just nailed it, right? So I think for a while, it felt like we were having to lean in, push hard to crack open the door a little bit. There’s a number of changes that we have been able to work through with SAP that were critical. So and we have now what we call one joint golden architecture, so you can sort of see on one piece of paper how SAP and BlackLine fit together and work together, which was very important from our vantage point.

In essence, if there’s an SAP rep selling a new ERP system, BlackLine is, in essence, an opt out versus an opt in. So we’re really part of the core of what they’re trying to offer. The compensation systems are aligned better so that it’s now right, it’s incentive for the SAP rep to sort of think about BlackLine in a different way than maybe in the past. For me, listen, it’s great to have alignment at the top of the organization, but that’s not really where success comes from. It comes on the front lines.

And I think of anything that you would sort of see coming out of like a Sapphire conference, like our booth was overrun by SAP reps, which is a really good sign who wanted to learn and understand more. That wasn’t necessarily the case in the prior year. So I think there’s a big difference. That same thing happened in Madrid. And so I think that, that is a positive thing.

Obviously, adding Stuart into our organization with the relationship he has, Stuart came from SAP, very, very important because of the nature of the relationships he had where he was driving spend, which was sort of analogous to what we’re trying to do in the office of the CFO. So all those things are lined up really well. I think the hard part is they’re just still so much bigger than we are and trying to pick and choose the right places to go and pursue opportunities together. But we feel a whole lot better today than we did a year ago about where we are.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: Got it. Matt, I want to work you into the conversation, if I can. Since you wear a few hats at BlackLine in addition to doing IR, you also, as a veteran, thank you for your service. You oversee some aerospace and defense vertical sales. And it’s an area where I think you guys have had some success as a firm in specific verticals.

And I’m curious if you could just talk a little bit about, I guess, two parts to it. One is some of the challenges and opportunities within the Beltway, whether it be aerospace and defense and others. And then perhaps talk a little bit about the government opportunity as well, which I know you’re pursuing.

Matt Humphries, SVP of IR, BlackLine: Yes. So great setup. I spent a lot of time working with our sales reps in the aerospace and defense industry, and we have a who’s who as you would expect of customers across the spectrum and in different stages of adoption of BlackLine solutions. But then sort of as a parallel, we are building out a public sector practice. We talked about it last year.

There’s a lot of steps involved as you would expect in terms of ensuring that there is a compliant instance of your offering to sell to the federal space to make sure that it’s been third party tested, to have a sponsor, to have allocated budget from that particular department, agency, or sub agency. And so we’ve been doing a lot of work on the public sector to get all that lined up as we look at ’26 and beyond in those longer term targets. And that sort of helps me on the aerospace and defense side because traditionally, in aerospace and defense, we have served the commercial portions of those business, just to take one industry as an example. But if you look at some of our customers, sometimes 30% of their revenue comes from the commercial side, and the balance comes from a mix of consulting or serving in a contractor capacity with the DOD. So being able to kind of parallel a lot of the success that we expect to have over the next few months and quarters in the public sector and take that in turn, go open up a new opportunity in the aerospace and defense is really not a primary motion from the industry perspective, but a sort of tangential benefit that comes as we continue to mature and build out that process.

And we started with a couple key industries last year, maybe five, and then we rolled that out more holistically this year across pretty much our entirety of the primary industries we serve. A lot of our deal activity in q one was a direct result of some of the industry motion that we put into flight last year. And so it’s important, I think, I don’t want to speak to for Stuart or Owen, but Stuart recognizes that it’s an important part of our long term strategy. One of our key go to market partners and a lot of our SIs that serve both public sector and aerospace and defense often bucket it in the same category of regulated industries, so aerospace, public sector, utilities. So there’s a lot of opportunity to kind of leverage what others have done in the past.

They have sort of trailblazed for us to kind of go forth and do more, either net new with the public sector or alternatively expand with existing A and D customers.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: Got it. Helpful. Question from the audience on pricing. You guys did announce that you were raising prices at the start of the year, and I think those prices are now rolling in, if I understand, upon renewal, if that’s correct. No, is it?

Owen Ryan, Co-CEO, BlackLine: Go finish the question, then

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: I’m not afraid to be corrected. Yes, it’s okay. And so I had a question on that. I’m going try to combine it with the one from the audience, which is about essentially customer receptivity to new pricing models at this time when there’s so many moving parts from a buyer’s perspective, whether it be generative AI, how to price it, whether it be buying based pricing versus seat based pricing. So love to hear your view on that.

Patrick.

Patrick Villanova, CFO, BlackLine: Yes. Thanks, Rob. So just a point of clarity, we weren’t raising prices at the beginning of the year. We launched a new pricing model, which took us from a user or seat based model to an unlimited user model. And that’s a very important distinction in terms of how we’re rolling out our pricing.

So just a quick background. In 2024, we did run a pretty robust project using third party consultants to develop this new pricing strategy. And as part of that project, we talked to all of our existing customers or reached out to all of them. We reached out to former customers and developed a strategy and a thesis statement or theory about the receptivity of unlimited user based pricing or a platform based fee. That analysis conveyed that a strong majority of our customers would welcome a pricing model like this.

And while it’s still early, we did roll this out in January in North America, and it slightly exceeded our expectations for the preliminary rollout. We’re rolling it out now internationally. And to your point, Rob, we’re introducing it to all new logo customers, and we’re introducing it to our renewals base over the next three years. Now that said, we would expect that, that an over a strong majority of that renewals base will be touched or reached out to in the next year or two as word-of-mouth goes out there. We’re already receiving inbound inquiries about how this model works and interest in it.

Now to be clear, there was one market segment that we did not think would have the same level of receptivity, and that’s the lower bid market. And that’s a market that we have largely, unless there’s an IPO opportunity or a preexisting relationship, it’s a market that we’re largely moving away from. Or if they churn out, we don’t continue to pursue. We are investing in upper mid market and enterprise. That’s where our major opportunities exist.

So in those markets, upper mid market and enterprise, we have slightly exceeded the adoption rate that we were planning for. With that said, we’re not forcing customers onto this model. I want to be very clear with that. You can stay on a user based model. But what we’re finding and what we believe is that most CFOs and CEOs don’t want to stay on that user based model.

It’s not really a good finance transformation conversation to take a office of the CFO org and try to narrow it down to a handful of users within your GL team or revenue team or what have you that use BlackLine. The conversation we’re having now is much more positive, and that’s why we’re seeing the receptivity that we are. We are approaching CFOs, CIOs and saying, we now offer a platform through Studio three sixty. And Studio three sixty, which we haven’t talked about yet, connects our four solutions and allows data to flow between those four solutions seamlessly. So rather than talking about the number of users, let’s get everyone within the office of the CFO logged in, unlimited users.

And let’s get them on the platform, and that’s how you drive culture change. That’s how you drive finance transformation. You have everybody on the platform consuming it, which leads to and I see which leads to the next part of the conversation that we’re having, which is why it’s being embraced. The pricing is very straightforward and simple. On the left side, you have about 25 revenue bands and that’s the revenue of the customer.

That’s where we land. That’s your platform fee. Your price only goes up if your revenue goes up. Our revenue goes up, your revenue goes up. It’s a great handshake with CIOs and CFOs.

That’s how your fee goes up. Over here, on the right side of the placemat are all of our consumption based products, whether it’s i2C, intercompany, journals, automated matching. And the more people that you have using this or consuming these products, yes, your price goes up, but your per unit price goes down. So it’s more revenue for us and it’s a higher ROI for you. So it’s changed the entire conversation to the positive, which is why CFOs and CIOs are willing to pay a little bit more and land on a higher price point.

They’re willing to pay more than your standard inflationary uplift because we’re now having a platform and transformation conversation and not a user conversation.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: And do those ROI numbers include a vendor that they might not need? Who you guys now, because of all of that that you’re providing, they may need fewer resources. So

Patrick Villanova, CFO, BlackLine: one stop shop is is big for a lot of CIOs. And what this is doing, what this platform and pricing is enabling is introducing all of our solutions at once. Rather than starting with RECs and tasks and users, we’re bringing our entire platform, which then eliminates the needs for other vendors that might operate in I2C or consolidation or analytics or intercompany.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: Great. I’ve got to squeeze in two questions in 3.5 I guess the first one on Patrick, for you on margins, you guys have done a phenomenal job, you and your predecessor Mark Martin of ramping margins. I guess as you guys now have a target model out there of reaccelerating revenue growth pretty markedly over the next few years, how should we think about margins relative to that? Is you guys put out margin targets as well, but like is it can you do this with the current expense run rate? Can you continue to be the profitability machine that you guys have been in a very impressive way while accelerating revenue growth and going after the opportunity?

Patrick Villanova, CFO, BlackLine: Absolutely. It’s that simple. We feel very confident in our ability to expand margins. I know we have two questions left, but just to really succinctly put it, it’s coming from three places essentially. It’s coming out of gross margin, which is part of our Google Cloud optimization.

We’ve been on a multiyear migration to the cloud, and that drives some redundancy with your infrastructure as you move from some on prem and other cloud solutions to one singular cloud solution. That’ll be completed in early twenty twenty six, and that redundancy goes away. Second element, we’re using AI almost throughout the entire P and L. And what I mean by that is, in terms of customer support, we’re starting to introduce AI because 80% to 90% of all support tickets are pretty straightforward and not complex. Login issues, stuff like that, that AI can address more efficiently and more effectively than a human being answering the phone.

And then we’re also migrating a lot of support and engineering to lower cost locations. And we’re coupling that support and lower cost locations with better AI tooling for more efficient programming. So we’re getting a better salary and price point on the talent, and that talent is generating and operating more effectively and efficiently using this tooling. And then the third element, we have a new CIO who’s fantastic, and he’s now introduced a lot of AI into the back office, eliminating a lot of need for data entry, for the transfer of information. So we’re seeing efficiencies throughout the P and L.

All those efficiencies are allowing us to make the investments we’ve talked about here today to drive growth and have it not just drop to the bottom line, but also expand. The only part of the P and L or the only part of our business that is remaining indexed to revenue is investment in our product. It’s P and T. That stays consistent throughout the entire model because we know you have to continue to invest in your product to maintain the lead and competitive advantage.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: Got it. I’ve got thirty seconds. Thanks, Patrick. Owen, so AI, is it driving adoption? Or is it stalling the market right now?

Or is it neither? I think ultimately, it probably drives adoption. But I’d be curious right now if it’s causing people to kind of wait and see a little bit.

Owen Ryan, Co-CEO, BlackLine: I think we do get a fair number of questions about how BlackLion can use AI in our solutions to help our customers. And again, remember this, we play in a different part of the P and L, if you will, or in the office of CFO compared to FP and A, right? We can’t be 95% or 99% accurate. We need to be 100%. And so our customers want to make sure that they can understand the trail, the transparency of what’s going on as how we use AI.

There can be no black box, right? The CFO has got to sign a rep letter with the CEO that says, we didn’t use AI in the preparation of our financial statements or in our control structure. So there’s things that are starting to come to bear. Of the things that you should know is the way we’re building out AI is in partnership with our customers and our implementation partners. So we know what we’re moving forward with is going to be embraced by the market versus doing it without sort of that point of reference.

So I know we’re out of time, so I’m going to stop talking. There’s more Super helpful. More to come at Beyond the Black in September. So hopefully, you guys will be there.

Rob Oliver, Analyst, Baird: Great. Yes. Look forward to seeing you in September and sooner. Please join me in thanking the management of BlackLine. Thanks, guys.

Appreciate it.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.