Google Cloud And Databricks Will Advance AI Adoption Amid Risks

Key Takeaways

• Reduced financial risk and strategic partnerships are strengthening customer trust, supporting contract renewals, and setting the stage for sustainable revenue growth.
  
• Investment in generative AI and platform integrations is driving customer efficiency, platform differentiation, and long-term improvements in pricing power and margins.
  
• Declining revenues, customer hesitancy, stiff competition, prolonged sales cycles, and reliance on cost-cutting highlight significant challenges to sustainable growth and profitability.

Catalysts

Operates as a digital customer conversation.

• The successful refinancing and deleveraging of the balance sheet materially reduces financial risk, reassures enterprise customers about LivePerson's stability, and is expected to accelerate the pace of contract renewals and new business wins, positively impacting future revenue and reducing customer churn.
  
• Adoption of Generative AI features on LivePerson's platform grew 45% sequentially, with clear evidence from enterprise clients of improved efficiency and customer satisfaction; continued investment in differentiated AI will drive platform stickiness, higher pricing power, and improve gross margins over time.
  
• Deepening partnerships and integrations with Google Cloud and Databricks are set to enhance LivePerson's innovation cycle and capabilities, positioning the company to capture share from enterprises needing robust, scalable AI-powered customer engagement solutions, likely supporting higher long-term revenue growth.
  
• Migration to Google Cloud's infrastructure and Databricks' analytics environment is expected to deliver product and operational efficiencies, enabling resource reallocation toward innovation and driving improvements in operating leverage and net margins.
  
• The secular trend toward 24/7, omnichannel, AI-powered customer engagement is expanding LivePerson's addressable market, and resolving balance sheet uncertainty now positions the company to better capture this long-term demand-supporting sustained revenue growth and elevated recurring revenue visibility.

LivePerson Future Earnings and Revenue Growth

Assumptions

• Analysts are assuming LivePerson's revenue will decrease by 15.1% annually over the next 3 years.
• Analysts are not forecasting that LivePerson will become profitable in next 3 years. To represent the Analyst Price Target as a Future PE Valuation we will estimate LivePerson's profit margin will increase from -62.7% to the average US Software industry of 13.1% in 3 years.
• If LivePerson's profit margin were to converge on the industry average, you could expect earnings to reach $21.8 million (and earnings per share of $0.19) by about September 2028, up from $-170.3 million today. The analysts are largely in agreement about this estimate.
• In order for the above numbers to justify the analysts price target, the company would need to trade at a PE ratio of 9.4x on those 2028 earnings, up from -0.5x today. This future PE is lower than the current PE for the US Software industry at 36.6x.
• Analysts expect the number of shares outstanding to grow by 6.36% per year for the next 3 years.
• To value all of this in today's terms, we will use a discount rate of 12.32%, as per the Simply Wall St company report.

LivePerson Future Earnings Per Share Growth

Risks

• Year-over-year revenue and bookings declines-hosted services revenue and professional services revenue both fell by 25–26% year-over-year, and deal values were down 9% YoY, indicating continued customer hesitation and renewal delays; if these trends persist, they may lead to sustained revenue weakness and impede long-term earnings growth.
  
• Persistent renewal hesitation from large enterprise customers-hesitancy partly attributed to concerns over LivePerson's financial stability and balance sheet, could result in significant revenue loss and increased customer churn risk, especially due to customer concentration and dependency on a few high-value contracts.
  
• Intensifying competition from both large cloud providers and agile AI-first startups-new entrants offering AI-powered bots are introducing increased "headwinds," which could erode LivePerson's market share, pressure pricing, and limit their ability to maintain or grow recurring revenue and gross margins.
  
• Slow enterprise buying cycles and extended decision making-macroeconomic uncertainty is prolonging sales cycles, especially as AI adoption creates new compliance processes and more decision-makers, potentially leading to delayed or cancelled deals, which threatens near
• and long-term topline growth.
  
• Ongoing need for cost-cutting and focus on financial discipline-LivePerson's improved EBITDA guidance is due partly to aggressive cost management rather than organic growth, suggesting underlying profitability challenges; failure to reignite top-line expansion could hamper margin recovery and ultimately depress net earnings over time.

Valuation

• The analysts have a consensus price target of $1.25 for LivePerson based on their expectations of its future earnings growth, profit margins and other risk factors. However, there is a degree of disagreement amongst analysts, with the most bullish reporting a price target of $1.5, and the most bearish reporting a price target of just $1.0.
• In order for you to agree with the analyst's consensus, you'd need to believe that by 2028, revenues will be $166.4 million, earnings will come to $21.8 million, and it would be trading on a PE ratio of 9.4x, assuming you use a discount rate of 12.3%.
• Given the current share price of $0.89, the analyst price target of $1.25 is 28.8% higher. Despite analysts expecting the underlying buisness to decline, they seem to believe it's more valuable than what the market thinks.
• We always encourage you to reach your own conclusions though. So sense check these analyst numbers against your own assumptions and expectations based on your understanding of the business and what you believe is probable.