Sumedh Thakar
Analyst · Canaccord Genuity
Yes, that's a great question. And I think it's really the focus for us on investment in R&D and sales and marketing right? And at the beginning of the year we started with the plan to hire a CRO from a sales perspective and put focus on hiring more engineers, et cetera, to be able to deliver on all the capabilities that we're talking about. And I think as we have -- I'm pretty happy with our focused execution with the level of investments that we have made and the way Shawn, who is our VP of Global Sales, has executed with the team to give us a solid quarter. And so the focus for us now is to really, from a sales and marketing perspective to focus on working with Shawn and team. So that we can get efficiencies from what we are seeing cross-functional between our sales team, our product management team, et cetera. And then on the R&D side, we have had really good success with leveraging AI internally within our own development efforts. And as an example, we pretty much stopped hiring anybody in QA anymore. We are seeing 20% to 25% efficiency gain with our best engineers. And ironically, it's actually the best engineers who are getting the most benefit of using AI. And so in a way, with all the things that we are doing with adding AI into the Risk Operations Center, AI is benefiting us in adding those without a significant increase in our R&D expense. And so I think at this point, the way we are looking at it is we're going to continue to leverage AI. And of course, we're going to invest back in our business. But no need really at this point for us to look at having CRO and the team is executing well focused with what our goals are. And then on the R&D side, again, we, of course, are -- if you see the innovations that are coming out, is a pretty rapid pace, we will, of course, continue to invest in R&D, but it's all going to be looked at from the lens of what kind of investment we will make in terms of people versus AI tools and how those tools are going to give us the required efficiency or I would say, unexpected efficiency in some cases. And so we're excited about what we're going to be able to do from both adding the Risk Operations Center, Agentic AI capabilities while internally also using Agentic AI across the board, not just in R&D, but also in sales and other areas as well.