Bentley Systems Inc (BSY) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

Bentley Systems Inc (NASDAQ: BSY) Q3 2025 Earnings Call dated Nov. 05, 2025

Corporate Participants:

Eric Boyer — Investor Relations Officer

Greg Bentley — Executive Chair

Nicholas Cumins — Chief Executive Officer

Werner Andre — Chief Financial Officer

Analysts:

Joe Vruwink — Analyst

Jason Celino — Analyst

Matt Hedberg — Analyst

Kristen Owen — Analyst

Alexei Gogolev — Analyst

Clarke Jeffries — Analyst

Jay Vleeschhouwer — Analyst

Taylor McGinnis — Analyst

Siti Panigrahi — Analyst

Guy Hardwick — Analyst

Joshua Tilton — Analyst

Faith Brunner — Analyst

Koji Ikeda — Analyst

Presentation:

Eric Boyer — Investor Relations Officer

[Starts Abruptly] November 5, 2025 Regarding the future results of operations and financial position, business strategy and plans and objectives for future operations of Bentley Systems Incorporated. All such statements made in or contained during this webcast other than statements of historical fact or forward looking statements. This webcast will be available for replay on Bentley Systems investor relations website@investors.bentley.com on November 5, 2025 after a presentation, we will conclude with Q and A. With that, let me introduce the Executive Chair of Bentley Systems, Greg Bentley.

Greg Bentley — Executive Chair

Good morning. As the case may be, and thanks for your interest and attention, I’m pleased to say that all Quantitative metrics for 25q3 are quite in accord with with our expected progress and outlook range for the year, but this quarter Nicholas will highlight the significant product announcements and developments presented and observed at our year in Infrastructure 2025 conference last month, which I think also merit your firsthand review at the links here Now. I always look forward to discovering through submissions for the annual Going Digital Awards the unanticipated ways by which our users are ever creatively applying software and cloud services.

This year I was pleasantly surprised by the plurality of those citing contributions from AI. So upon observing this AI Forward propensity at the level of projects and users, I reviewed with interest this year’s AEC Advisors survey of engineering firms participating in their annual CEO conference. You may recall that I previously reviewed two earlier such conferences where Bentley Systems helped with gauging progress and appetites in Going digital. The surveyed firms together perform most of the contracted infrastructure engineering outside Asia, with the distribution of their revenues by sector weighted like ours in favor of public works, utilities and resources, and within general building corresponding to what we classify as the commercial facilities sector.

The survey highlights a dramatic and interesting transition. AEC firms are now literally engineering the infrastructure for AI as spending for construction of data centers such as the project by digital construction leader dpr, which served as the example throughout our Year in Infrastructure keynote presentation, ramps to soon overtake spending on Office spaces AEC Advisors shows that digital investment as an internal priority is also succeeding for engineering firms. For the last five years, they in aggregate have achieved continually increased profit margins at the same time as also higher growth in organic net revenues, the latter perhaps limited by capacity constraints.

As separately reported backlogs reached record levels underscoring market robustness. This organic revenue growth is still increasing, including through 2025 estimates and net of both annual US inflation in red and in blue US GDP growth. AEC Advisors concludes that this growth in aggregate profit margin must be attributable to improvements in direct labor productivity as the total revenue percentage of other costs to support functions has risen continuously by almost 20%. This is despite real estate costs having declined since Pre pandemic by 25%, presumably owing to virtual and hybrid working enabled by our ProjectWise and other cloud services technologies.

And most significantly for us, these firms overall technology spending as a percentage of revenue will have increased by 40% over the six years through 2025. Combined with their organic revenue growth, their technology spending in dollar terms increased from 2019 through 2024 at a compounded annual growth rate of 13%, tolerably coinciding with the growth rate of Bentley Systems revenues. As I have reviewed in recent quarters over our five years as a public company, I believe that we have thus effectively enabled AEC firms to keep up with accelerating demand despite now chronic engineering resource constraints by constantly improving their labor productivity through Going Digital.

To understand changes now underway in the makeup and magnitude of AEC technology spending this year we again helped AEC Advisors with a supplemental AI survey yielding sufficiently representative responses. In the interest of validating the prevalence of the commendable self help AI initiatives that relatively surprised us within this year’s Going Digital Award submissions, we focused survey questions on AI that these AEC firms are already implementing, not just testing to support their businesses, excluding for this immediate purpose more widespread AI implementations for generic business purposes such as finance, HR and legal. About a quarter of responses report AI already being implemented around the periphery of applications such as ours to support the infrastructure engineering oriented functions of design, automation, construction planning or monitoring and or asset performance and maintenance.

Asked in what respects competitiveness would be advanced through faster AI adoption, these firms expect superior project delivery and quality, operational efficiency and clients experience and satisfaction. But they have the greatest regard for AI’s potential enablement of innovation and new services. To get to these benefits, the median reported level of AI implementation spending today, ranging from 6 to 53, is 19 basis points of gross revenue. That’s on the order of 5% of the overall technology spending rate we just reviewed. And as a frame of reference, this already somewhat exceeds what such firms on average are spending on all of Bentley’s system’s offerings.

Most significantly for us, these firms anticipate increasing their annual AI implementation spending over the next three years to a median ranging from 35 to 164 of 71 basis points, a multiple of almost four from today. If all other technology spending would just continue to grow at the same rate as over the last five years, this projected AI increment would cause total technology spending as a percentage of revenue to grow about 50% faster than at present. But we know the resulting AI impact will be such that rather than so extrapolate, we need to factor in the probable AI accelerated changes in infrastructure engineering business models as innovation and new services are enabled.

This was the subject of dialogue with a diversity of thoughtful market place participants including public and private sector infrastructure owners as we helped lead a separate survey and convened an in person discussion in September in London that culminated in this White paper the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Built Environment. The majority of the 140 senior opinion leaders surveyed expect the impact of AI on current business models and either to augur a major disruption and so are already taking steps to adapt or to impact to a significant extent. Interpreting the qualitative feedback as well, the knowledgeable white paper authors venture that AI will finally catalyze the long awaited tipping point in engineering business model mix from hours related revenue towards value price data enabled services and performance outcome contracting.

To be sure, the emerging opportunities accordingly anticipated around automation, analytics and digital twins bode well for Bentley systems forward looking initiatives. But to the extent that our accounts would become incented and through AI increasingly able to more so minimize their currently generally billable and engineering hours and days because they would instead be variously fixed and value and outcome pricing, what could be anticipated about the consumption of software and cloud services underlying our own business model? I could describe what we currently measure as consumption attended by a user and thus charged with any 365 per day for our open applications and per quarter for project wise and most term licenses.

As our AI native plus generation of applications progressively roll out the commercial norm for our attended consumption charging is likely to become a hybrid combination of these factors and of surcharges based on computing intensity. With our AI accelerating the pace of engineering productivity growth, attended consumption should generate commensurately higher value and hybrid monetization per relatively slowing time and or frequency of attended usage at year end infrastructure. Nicholas previewed the commercialization of an already evident source of incremental consumption with our application engines accessed through APIs to provide essential engineering context for simulations and analytics programmatically invoked by our accounts and users AI agents.

By virtue of our ingrained platform orientation, we are very enthusiastic about working with our enterprise accounts to prioritize development of many further such APIs and to arrive at reasonable monetization for the burgeoning value that API consumption will generate among potential AI enabled business model innovations. The cited AI surveys show me that engineering firms and owners share our asset analytics aspiration for digital twins created and curated through AI to become the foundation for infrastructure inspections, operations and maintenance. Bentley Systems is investing resolutely to lead this charge internally and through our ongoing prioritization of capital allocation for pertinent strategic acquisitions with critical mass for escape velocity gathering, I believe the resulting asset consumption will become for us another mainstay of subscription revenue growth not only within owner operators but also as their digital integrators with co innovating engineering firms.

My expectation for the confluence of our maturing incumbent consumption model and these new and incipient consumption streams is influenced by the way that these surveys and our enterprise subscription renewals show that infrastructure engineering executives are assessing against the backdrop of their engineering resource constraints, their current combination of record margins, organic real GDP plus growth and backlogs, and their auspicious opportunities in the infrastructure AI transformed future in the short and medium term. The prevailing sustainment of our E365 renewals, including for multiple out years at negotiated annual floor and ceiling escalations consistently averaging about 10%, reflects shared confidence of enterprise accounts and of Bentley Systems in the continued healthy overall gradient of a changing mix evolving to everyone’s benefit of attended API and asset consumption.

And now to review as usual our robust markets and execution, including also notably strong SNB and new logo growth and to highlight our year end infrastructure announcements and feedback over to Nicholas.

Nicholas Cumins — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, thank you Greg. A few weeks ago infrastructure leaders from around the world gathered in Amsterdam for annual Year Infrastructure Conference to showcase excellence in infrastructure delivery and performance through digital innovation. AMSTERDAM, Celebrating its 750th anniversary is a city built on land reclaimed from the sea through generations of engineering ingenuity. It was a fitting stage for YI and the Going Digital Award. That same spirit of innovation took center stage. YI was also an opportunity to share progress on last year’s key announcements such as integrating Cesium and Google Geodata across our portfolio. But today I will focus my remarks on Infrastructure AI, the theme introduced by Greg.

The backdrop remains the same whether to address climate concerns, ensure energy supply or more broadly support economic and population growth. Our world unprecedented demand for better, more resilient infrastructure yet lacks the engineering capacity to deliver it. We must make existing engineers more productive by empowering them with better tools, smarter workflows and more connected data. At yii, the Going Digital Awards finalists once again showcase how Bentley software helps them achieve meaningful productivity gains, often in the range of 15 to 25% or more. These gains one impressive most advanced projects and don’t reflect the industry as a whole, scaling them across all projects will help narrow the gap between global demand and current capacity, but closing it requires a step change in productivity.

That step change is just beginning to take shape and it’s AI the AEC Advisors survey referenced by Greg shows large engineering firms making substantial investments in AI for design automation. For those building their own AI agents, Bentley can support them in several critical ways. First, we help them tap into past project designs. Every infrastructure asset is unique, but new designs shouldn’t start from a blank screen. Historically, design data has been trapped in different file formats and proprietary systems. Pende Infrastructure cloud powered by itWin, data is ingested from a wide range of file formats and mapped to our infrastructure schemas so that it can be queried, analyzed and reused, including by AI.

In this context, we announced Connect, a new foundational layer to Bina infrastructure. Cloud. Connect delivers a connected data environment for project and asset information, improving collaboration across the entire infrastructure lifecycle. From there, product wise for designs and construction workflows and asset wise for operations and maintenance. Connect will be generally available in December. Next, we help firms who create their own AI agents by providing engineering context, ensuring their AI recommendations are grounded in sound engineering, logic and physical principles. Hyundai Engineering, a Going Digital award winner in 2023, demonstrated this by using our STAAD simulation application to validate integrity of AI generated designs.

This year, I highlighted four similar examples in my keynote, all drawn from an even larger number of Going Digital Award summations that illustrated how Bentley applications provide enduring context to AI. Infrastructure engineering is a creative profession, but one where precision is non negotiable and consequences are real. The same way that infrastructure organizations have trusted our broad and deep to empower their individual engineers, they are turning to our applications to provide the same precision to their AI agents. Now, as our applications were not designed to interact with AI agents, we also announced the Infrastructure AI Co Innovation initiative, inviting our users to partner with us to explore how our applications need to evolve both technically and commercially.

As Greg mentioned, to better support AI these AI use cases at yi, we also highlighted the AI capabilities we are delivering to the broader engineering community, starting with our next generation applications powered by AI. OpenSight announced that last year’s YAI for site engineering is now in limited availability. We also introduced two additional next generation applications in Early Access this quarter, Substation plus for collaborative substation design and Synchro plus for 4D construction modeling with AI Driven Insights feature Bendley Copilot or AI Assistant purpose built for infrastructure engineering. We are also enhancing existing application with AI, bringing Bentley Copilot and AI powered drawings, production to open roads and open rail and we unveiled new search capabilities in BEN Infrastructure cloud powered by AI as demonstrated on stage with ProjectWise.

One last point, we talked about how engineering firms are leveraging our software to ensure that the recommendations from their AI agents are trustworthy. A related topic is trust from the engineering firms in the data that we use to train our AI capabilities. The AEC Advisors survey shows security and data privacy as the top concern of engineering firms with respect to AI, and this is across all firm sizes. At yii, we reaffirmed our stewardship first outlined two years ago. Respect for intellectual property is foundational to Bentley’s approach. Users control their data always they decide if and how it is used for AI training.

To uphold this principle, we implemented strict governance only data explicitly licensed or explicitly contributed by accounts for the benefit of the broader band aid user community. Users can also fine tune band AI models with their own data for their exclusive use. And to ensure transparency, we introduced the Data Agreement Registry, an auditing system that shows exactly how data was used to train Bentley AI models. When others are vague on these critical topics, we lead with clarity. Overall, we were pleased with this year’s Year in Infrastructure, receiving great feedback about our comprehensive and principled approach to infrastructure, and I encourage you to check out our sessions and going Digital awards winners@yri bentley.com Moving on to our results for the quarter, we delivered a solid quarter in line with our expectations.

Our year to date results position us well to finish within our outlook ranges for the full year. Low double digit ar growth, approximately 100 basis points of margin expansion and robust free cash flow consistent with our long term financial framework. Q3ARR increased 10.5% year over year or 11% when excluding the impact of China. Growth was underpinned by a net revenue retention rate of 109%. E365 performance remained solid and we added 300 basis points of AR growth from new logos, again primarily within the SMB segment. For the 15th consecutive quarter we added at least 600 new SMB logos through our online store, with retention in this segment remaining high.

Turning to our total sector, resources was once again our fastest growing sector in the quarter. We continue to see soft signals of improvement in mining, exploration. Public works utilities delivered another solid quarter consistent with first half performance and driven by sustained global infrastructure investment. Powerline systems remain a standout performer benefiting from global demand for grid resilience and increased power generation. Growth in the industrial sector remained modest. Facilities was flat. Looking at our geographies at a high level. Asia Pacific had a strong quarter followed by the Americas and emea. Growth in Americas was solid, led by North America.

In the US our accounts continue to benefit from a favorable macro backdrop despite ongoing uncertainty, though less so from tariffs and policy shifts and the recent federal shutdown. To date we have seen minimal disruption from the shutdown. Looking ahead, they are concerned that full scale permitting reform for energy infrastructure and critical minerals in the US could happen in the coming quarters. Both our paradigm systems and sequent businesses are very well positioned to benefit from these developments in emea. The Middle east continued to lead the region with another very strong quarter followed by Europe and the uk.

Long term opportunities are supported by robust investment in transport, water and energy, particularly in areas such as dual use, infrastructure, centric expansion and nuclear. There is also movement in Europe on permitting reform. The European Commission published guidance to help Member States accelerate permitting and deployment of renewable energy and grid infrastructure as part of its broader effort to lower energy costs and strengthen supply security in Asia Pacific. Overall performance was strong with India and Southeast Asia standing out. Robust investment in India is expected to continue supporting its 2047 vision for long term growth and development. Growth in ANZ remains softer due to the slowdown in transportation spending in Australia.

However, there is general expectation that it will rebound driven by infrastructure projects tied to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics. China’s performance was consistent with our expectations given the economic and geopolitical headwinds and represents only about 2% of total ARR. And with that Werner over to you.

Werner Andre — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you Nicholas had a solid third quarter and are well positioned with respect to our financial outlook range for the full year. Total revenues for the third quarter were 376 million, up 12% year over year on a reported basis and 11% on a constant currency basis year to date. Total revenues grew 11% and 10% on a reported and constant currency basis respectively. Our mainstay subscription revenues grew 14% year over year for the quarter in reported and 12% in constant currency and for year to date, subscription revenues grew 12% on a reported and constant currency basis.

Subscription revenues represent 92% of total revenues, up 2 percentage points from the same quarter last year, reflecting improvements in the overall quality of our revenues, visibility, growth, consistency and margin contribution. Our E365 and SMB initiatives continue to be solid contributors. Perpetual license revenues for the quarter were 11 million, essentially flat compared to the prior year. Perpetual license sales make up only 3% of total revenues and will remain small relative to our recurring revenues. Our less predictable professional services revenues declined 2% for the quarter in reported and 3% in constant currency and now represent 5% of total revenues.

We currently expect that our professional services revenues will remain at current levels for the remainder of the year. Hence this would be for the full year about 5 million less than we had originally planned. It is still the case that the largest portion of these non recurring services relate to IBM maximo implementation and upgrade work. Our last 12 months recurring revenues, which include subscriptions and a small amount of recurring services increased by 13% year over year in reported and in constant currency and represent 92% of our last 12 months total revenues up 1 percentage point year over year.

Our last 12 months constant currency account retention rate remained at 99% and our constant currency net retention rate rounded down to 109% led in magnitude by accretion. Within our consumption based E365 commercial model, we ended Q3 with ARR of 1,405,000,000 at quarter end spot rates on a constant currency basis. Our year over year ARR growth rate was 10.5% consistent with our seasonality expectations for the year which included the favorable impact from the onboarding of our cesium acquisition in 24q3 dropping off this quarter. Excluding China, our year over year constant currency ARR growth rate was 11% with China being 2% of our total arrangement.

On a quarterly sequential basis, our constant currency growth rate was 2.2% below our 24 Q3 sequential growth rate of 3.2% impacted by the timing of programmatic acquisitions and asset analytics deals. With regards to seasonality, we expect 25Q4 to have higher year over year ARR growth compared to 25q3 due to the timing of potential acquisitions and anticipated asset analytics deals. Our GAAP operating income was 84 million for the third quarter and 284 million year to date. I’ve previously explained the impact on our GAAP operating results from deferred compensation plan liability revaluations and acquisition expenses. Moving on to adjusted operating income less stock based compensation expense, our primary profitability and margin performance measure adjusted operating income less SPC expense was 104 million for the quarter up 16% year over year with a margin of 27.7% up 100 basis points year to date.

Adjusted operating income less SBC expense was 335 million up 13% with a margin of 30.2% up 60 basis points. Our margin performance for Q3 and year to date has been strong and we remain confident about delivering our full year adjusted operating income less SBC target margin of approximately 28.5% representing an annual margin improvement of 100 basis points. As a reminder, our OPEC seasonality is always more heavily weighted towards the second half with our annual races occurring as of April each year and our larger promotional and and event related costs also concentrated in the second half of the year and particularly Q4.

Further, our OPEC seasonality in 2024 was impacted from head cost run rate savings from our 23 Q4 strategic realignment which benefited the first half of 2024 and shifted some of our run rate and discretionary investments into the second half of 2024 and particularly Q4 2024. We therefore expect more than 100 basis points of margin improvement for the fourth quarter of 2025 when compared to 2024. Our free cash flow was 111 million for the quarter and 384 million for the year to date. This is generally consistent with our expectation based on our seasonality of collections and expenditures as well as the timing of cash tax payments which are more concentrated in the fourth quarter.

We are on target to meet our full year free cash flow outlook of 430 to 470 million with regards to capital allocation along with providing sufficiently for our growth initiatives. Year to date we deployed free cash flow as 135 million fully paying down our senior debt, 93 million in effective share repurchases to offset dilution from stock based compensation, 10 million in convertible senior note repurchases and 64 million on dividends. With our senior debt being fully paid down, our net debt leverage including all of our 2026 and 2027 convertible notes as debt was 2.2 times adjusted EBITDA down from 2.9 times at the end of 2024.

Our strong balance sheet and projected free cash flow generation will sufficiently fund our dividend share repurchases and growth initiatives including potential programmatic acquisitions. Our five year senior secured credit agreement dated from October 2024 provides a current undrawn 1.3 billion revolving credit facility. This provides sufficient flexibility to address the January 2026 maturity of 678 million in outstanding convertible debt while keeping our cash interest thereafter at about the same magnitude as in the recent past. Interest rates on our debt are protected through very low coupons on our convertible notes and very favorable terms of our 200 million interest rate swap expiring in 2030.

And finally with only 1/4 remaining, our performance for the first 9 months gives us confidence in our ability to achieve our annual financial targets. I already provided incremental color on Our fourth quarter expectations for ARR adjusted operating income by stock based compensation margin and free cash flow with regards to total revenues 2025 to date reflects a continued shift in mix from professional services revenues to subscription revenues, improving our overall quality of revenues and margin contribution. With regards to foreign exchange rates for the third quarter, the US Dollar has weakened relative to the exchange rates assumed in our 2025 annual financial outlook, resulting in approximately 10 million of incremental revenues from currency and a total favorable impact for the first nine months of approximately 18 million.

Based on recent rates where the US dollar has weakened relative to our outlook rates, if end of October exchange rates would prevail throughout the remainder of the year, our fourth quarter GAAP revenues would would be positively impacted by approximately 8 million relative to the exchange rates assumed in our 2025 financial outlook. And with that we are ready for Q and A. Over to Eric to moderate. Thank you.

Questions and Answers:

Eric Boyer

Thanks Werner. Before we begin, I just wanted to remind everyone to limit yourselves to one question so we can get to everybody today. First question will come from Joe Brewing from Robert W. Beard.

Joe Vruwink

Great. Hi everyone. Maybe can you go into a bit more detail on the opportunity for better ARR growth in 4Q. That’s a big renewal period, but also asset analytics opportunities and just on the point about renewals. So to the point Greg, you were making at the start, how Bentley applications are called a few years from now could look a lot different than how they currently are utilized. How does that get encapsulated with an enterprise customer that is willing to engage with you over a multi year time frame? And are you appropriately monetizing the full potential of with kind of the ceiling floor structure you have been using around these consumption arrangements?

Greg Bentley

Well, I’ll say to your last question Joe, that we only monetize the actual consumption. It just happens to be bounded by a floor and ceiling potentially. And we are not yet monetizing API consumption for instance, even though some of it is occurring. What? What? In in the course of a renewal with an Enterprise account for E365, they tend to prefer to get visibility into their spending in the out years as well. And it continues to be the case that we wind up on average negotiating that each year of that renewal the floor and ceiling escalate by about 10%.

And I think they’re aware because you see the these enterprise accounts are the ones responding to the survey about spending on AI and expectations about AI. They know that their mix of consumption and modes of consumption will change over that period of time, but they are comfortable with expecting to spend a low double digit amount more with us and no doubt with others each year. And we’re satisfied to. We, we likewise know there’s going to be volatility in the components of the mix. But when you put it all together in an enterprise agreement, you’ve heard my, my take on that, which is to be confident that while the mix will change, the magnitude will reflect the increasing value, especially from.

From AI Nicholas, as to. For the fourth quarter. Yeah, indeed it is a strong renewal quarter and our expectations are comported with that.

Nicholas Cumins

Right. Well, first of all, Q3, AR growth was exactly what we were expecting. And what we’re expecting for Q4 is AR growth year over year to be stronger than Q3. Part of that is the renewals, as you mentioned, and then how much better it will be than Q3 will depend on potentially M and A or some of the big asset analytics opportunities that we pursue.

Greg Bentley

But it would be better than Q3 in any case because of the magnitude of renewals that occur in fourth quarter. So they’re all layers that give us confidence in fourth quarter and of course therefore in the outlook for the year.

Eric Boyer

Thanks, Joe. The next question comes from Jason Salino from KeyBank.

Jason Celino

Great, thanks. You know, I wanted to ask about the government shutdown. You know, I recognize that in your. Prepared remarks you said it’s had, you know, minimal impact. maybe. Can you just elaborate on what you were seeing or not seeing and why it’s been so limited.

Nicholas Cumins

Yeah. To date we have seen indeed minimal impact from. First of all, our direct revenue from the US federal government is less than 1% and indirectly for the projects that were already awarded IHA funding while the funding continued to flow during the shutdown. And that’s very much because of the way IJ was structured. Now, depending on how long this shutdown is gonna is gonna go, you know, it could be that very much at the margin when we get to renewals with some accounts, and you may recall that renewals are based not just on past performance, how much they’ve been consuming in the past year, but also how much they’re expecting to consume in the next year.

It could be that the, at the, at the margin, the consumption expectations going forward may be impacted. Yeah. But this is super early to say. Yeah, okay. And it will really depend on the shutdown goes.

Jason Celino

Yeah. And hopefully it ends soon. So. Yeah, we’ll see. Great.

Greg Bentley

Other things, you know, kind of indirectly are good, are gummed up also. And. We hopefully not for much longer. Things like the permitting reform. We keep expecting and you know, some other functions of the federal government that don’t have to do with, with using software, but changing policies and so forth that are also on hold. We’d like to see the shutdown end sooner rather than later and we think that’s the general expectation now.

Eric Boyer

Thanks, Jason. The next question comes from Matt Hedberg from rbc.

Matt Hedberg

Great, thanks for taking my question, guys. You know, a lot of the bigger frontier model builders are noting that access to power is the biggest bottleneck for compute capacity today. And I guess, Nicholas, you know, you noted both PLS and Sequent is set to benefit from this longer term, which is sort of in line with our view. It’s also nice to see, I think, you know, although permitting reform takes time, Greg, you said it’s sort of like there’s, it just takes time. It sounds like EMEA permitting reform is accelerating a bit. I guess my question is realizing these projects take time and permitting reform takes, takes time as well.

Are you starting to see any sort of early benefit from early, you know, sort of like discussion with customers around this activity and how should we think about sort of like medium to long term this desire for more power to positively impact ARR growth?

Nicholas Cumins

Well, first, you know, despite permitting reforms still to come, both TLS and Sequent remain strong growth engines for the company. Right. Both businesses are still growing faster than the company. We have seen now in, in the US for example, some acceleration on some mining projects through the, it’s called the FAST41 process for minerals that are strategic importance to the US economy, like lithium or copper. Yeah. There is a similar bill that was passed in Canada. So we think this is, I mean this is happening basically for mining. There’s already a lot of movement in order to accelerate permitting or accelerate certain projects.

But for the electric grid, this is still to come. But we’ve seen some very encouraging signs in the past few months in the U.S. i think there’s a clear realization here that we must expand the electric grid. And there’s a lot of effort, a lot of activities going into strengthening the existing grid, making it more robust, but we actually need to expand in order to cope with the higher demand that, that, that, that is for electricity and a lot of that coming from data centers, by the way. So you can see it as a, as a growing tailwind for us.

Eric Boyer

Thanks, Matt. The next question comes from Dylan Becker, from William Blair.

Faith Brunner

Hey guys, it’s faith on for Dylan. I just wanted to double click onto your AI innovation roadmap and how you’re working with your customer Base to build that out, maybe how that played into Cloud Connect and really what you’re focusing on and how you’re prioritizing the different opportunities.

Nicholas Cumins

Well, first of all, what was remarkable when we looked at the submissions for this year’s Going Digital Awards was seeing how much our users are investing in AI themselves. And that was a big part also of the of the update that Greg provided with the AC Advisor survey. And we can see how much is invested in AI. And as always, we’re using the Going Digital Award submissions as a bit our own survey of what’s going on with the most advanced infrastructure organizations out there in leveraging digital to drive the productivity. And it points to our core applications, engineering applications playing a new role going forward.

Not just here to empower infrastructure engineers, individual engineers, but actually to start to interact with AI agents. And we think this is a fantastic growth opportunity. Now we’ve seen the net acceleration of use cases where all applications are being used in conjunction with AI that is being developed by our users. If we just look at and reflect on the past, on the past couple of years and we’ve announced a co innovation initiative in order to engage with our users, to partner with them, to discuss how can we evolve our engine applications technically and also how can we evolve the commercial model around these applications so that we can support those workflows going forward.

Better support those workflows going forward. We’re hugely excited about that. Right. But even there is a lot of investments on our side for our own AI capabilities that we’re delivering to our users here. We make sure that first of all, all of our product organization, all of our user facing teams have a deep empathy, a deep understanding of the needs of their users, the accounts that we serve, we understand where potential opportunities to drive more productivity through AI, for example. And then we involve representative users along the way in helping us prioritize which use cases are we going to go after first with AI, we involve them during the development of those capabilities.

We involve them with beta software, what we call early access. We involve them of course, during limited availability to make sure that the product can scale to the broader market and so on and so forth. So we have constant touch points all the way from the very beginning of the exploration what problems can we solve with AI to making sure that the software can scale. We have involvement all the way with representative users.

Eric Boyer

Thanks, Pete. Next question comes from Kristen Owen from Oppenheimer.

Kristen Owen

Hi, good morning. Thank you so much for the question. So I wanted to ask you about labor availability, not just here in the US but globally in the construction and infrastructure trades. Obviously AI can’t actually build infrastructure. So I’m wondering if you’re starting to see that meaningfully impact any of your engineering from customers. You know what sort of impact these labor challenges are having maybe on project delivery times, budgets and then add on this piece of, of willingness to invest in technology to help with some of those productivity challenges. Thank you.

Greg Bentley

Kristen, I think the biggest picture is that everyone has long expected the engineering services firm. So that’s half of our business and they work for the other half of our business. The owner, operators, everyone has expected the way they work to change from a time and materials billing hours to paying for value and therefore having a platform to incent and reward for instance these AI investments. The biggest picture I think is that the ongoing engineering resource constraints are influencing that now happening in favor of AI investments and expectations and changes in the commercial model.

And you know, the opportunity for us is to be shoulder to shoulder alongside those engineering firms we want to help be their arms merchant, providing them the for instance asset analytics cloud services that they will rebrand and bundle with their engineering analytics and their own data and AI models, but where they won’t need to get into providing the cloud services, the things we can do together with Google and, and then adding our asset analytics layer. So, so changing the commercial models is the accelerating that because everyone has expected it to occur and it’s been slow.

I think that finally is being catalyzed now and that’s the biggest impact.

Werner Andre

Thank you.

Eric Boyer

Thanks Chris. And the next question comes from Alexi Google from JPMorgan.

Alexei Gogolev

Thank you Eric. Hello everyone. Hi Greg. I wanted to ask you to maybe. Give us a brief update of how the partnership with Google is going. Have there been any incremental customer conversations on the back of this partnership and. What does that mean for your asset analytics opportunity?

Nicholas Cumins

One of the updates we gave at YI was how we are integrating Google Geodata across our portfolio. It starts with our engineering applications Microstation. The new version of Microstation don’t include cesium for 3D geospatial visualization but through cesium is actually integrating 3D photorealistic tasks from Google. And I mentioned the launch of Ben Infrastructure Cloud Connect. The user experience of Bell Infrastructure Cloud is also powered by Cesium and also powered by 3D photorealistic tiles of Google. So that integration is going very well and we’re expanding really across our full portfolio. We are quite excited also about the opportunity with Google when it comes to asset analytics.

Google is a source of data that can be analyzed in order to better understand the current conditions of infrastructure assets and their full context. And you may recall that we’ve announced a couple of months ago a deeper partnership with Google from that standpoint where we’ll be processing Google Street View imagery to understand basically the inventory of assets out there and be able to do a before and after comparison on what’s going on with these infrastructure assets when we compare it with dash cam data that we’re processing through our own road monitoring solution. Right. And that’s just one example of so many other use cases that we’re discussing with Google where we can empower deeper analytics about existing assets.

Thanks.

Eric Boyer

Next question comes from Clark Jeffries from Piper Sandler.

Clarke Jeffries

Hello. Thank you for taking the question. You know, I wanted to ask just as a little bit of a follow up to the discussion around the appetite of AI spend with your customers. Seems like a lot of this is survey work and sort of perspective on where they’ll go. But I wanted to ask today, are you seeing proactive RFPs from these customers around AI capabilities or is it too early and sort of. Do you imagine there being a discrete sales approach around AI functionality or do you feel like this will be very organic within your kind of existing sales motion?

Nicholas Cumins

Also on the, on the former, it is still too early for the market to ask specifically for AI capabilities for specific use cases. It’s still too early. However, indirectly we do see infrastructure organization insisting that it is as easy as possible for them to access data that is being created or managed through software coming from providers so that they can use it for their own AI purposes. Yeah, and by the way, so this is much more indirect. Yeah, but they are aware that software providers are developing AI capabilities and we see them clear and clear about.

We want to make sure that when you do this as a software provider, you don’t use our data without our explicit permission. Right. This is very top of mind right now and it’s a part of the conversation. When talking about benefactor to cloud connect, for example, we reinforce our commitment to data stewardship. We make it very clear that the data of our users is their data always. We don’t use it to train our own AI unless they explicitly authorize us to do so. And that is a clear differentiator versus other providers who are maybe just less clear on that topic. But in general we are still very early stage when it comes to requirements for AI specific capabilities. And because it’s still very early stage, we don’t see a need right now to have a different go to market approach when it comes to positioning these AI capabilities.

If you look back at what we basically announced in terms of our own AI capabilities, sometimes it’s the next generation of an existing application like OpenSight plus is the next generation of OpenStack substation plus the next generation of substation. The same way that we’ve gone to accounts to position open the original open site solution on the original substation solution, then we’re going to continue to do the same, even if the new one is powered by AI, then we’re also introducing a lot of new AI capabilities or AI capabilities to existing applications. So same thing, there’s no need in order to do a different go to market.

Asset analytics is different here. We’ve been always very clear that we want to go both direct and indirect, right? So I said, you know, we are going after owner operators and the firms that serve them in order to position those capabilities. But we definitely welcome other organizations to take our capabilities and offer them as part of their own offering for asset asset monitoring, asset maintenance, asset management.

Clarke Jeffries

Perfect. Thank you.

Eric Boyer

Thanks, Clark. Next question comes from Jay Bleachauer from Griffin Securities.

Jay Vleeschhouwer

Thank you. Good morning. Nicholas. I’d like to ask about something we talked about at the conference three weeks ago in Amsterdam having to do with your product development. Specifically, how have you evolved or how do you think you might still need to evolve your product development management or operations in light of all that you mean to do across the portfolio? Do you think that you can or should, for example, impress the time between beta and ga, something we talked about a few weeks ago and in light of what Greg talked about earlier with regard to your new consumption model, how might those new techniques of consumables possibly tie back into your product development process or product release timing?

Nicholas Cumins

Right when it comes to our own product development process, we got an earlier question here on how much are we involving users, how much are we involving accounts? And we’re very keen to continue to do that and do that even more. Right. When we release our software, we want to do it in a very iterative fashion. We don’t have necessarily top down target on. You must go from early access beta to limitability in that time frame and you must go from limitability to general availability in that time frame. It will really depend on the feedback we’re getting from representative users.

Especially when it comes to very new capabilities. We’re sometimes creating new, potentially we’re creating new markets. When it comes to asset analytics, et cetera, we want to make sure that we get it right before we push too hard. So it’s important for us that we keep it is very close feedback loop with representative users and we trade as often as necessary. Necessary in order to get the software right and then ready to scale. Yeah. And now we are embracing AI as well to improve our productivity. And also the majority of our developers now are working with AI tools every day to be more productive, whether it’s for coding assistance or even generation of some parts of the code for functions.

Right. And we’re quite pleased to see the level of embrace by our developers, you know, not necessarily top down really coming from them to use AI capabilities. And it remains a very good analogy for how we’re seeing AI playing out for infrastructure engineers. Not AI replacing infrastructure engineers, but AI making infrastructure engineers more productive. AI being more of a cop out if you want. Thus the name by the way of our own AI assistant, Jay.

Greg Bentley

I’ll say that you and I share a long background going back to when our desktop products were a platform for specialized applications developed including by our accounts. And we had special teams that worked with the accounts, the developers within the accounts to help support their particularizing our existing applications for their own purposes. That’s kind of gotten extinct by now. Individual organizations don’t develop their own particular software for this. But what we saw in the AI surveys and we saw in the Going Digital award submissions are a lot of investment by the enterprises, the AEC firms, larger ones in their own agent environment and the APIs that we’ll create because we have to move engines to the cloud and open them up and so forth will be another way of working with developers.

The developers will turn out to be the developers in the large enterprises. And I can see that being a different kind of go to market incremental orthogonal approach for the future. Echoing back to what we’ve done in the past where we love our role as a platform provider especially.

Eric Boyer

Thank you. Thanks Jay. Next question comes from Taylor McGinnis from UBS.

Taylor McGinnis

Yeah, hi, thanks so much for for taking my question. Maybe just on the financials. So if I adjust for the lapping of the acquisition it still looks like net new ARR was down a bit year over year on a constant currency basis. So I think I said that that was in line with expectations but maybe you can just unpack the drivers behind that. And as we look into 4Q I think to get upper end of your guys guidance range it implies a big step up in net new error. I know you mentioned M and A and you know some of These asset analytics deals, you know, potentially being needle moving there.

So when you think about, you know, the size of, you know, M and A that you guys are contemplating or you know, how big some of these asset analytics deals could be, could you just provide a little bit more color there? Thanks.

Greg Bentley

Well, okay. And I’ll just, just jump in on asset analytics because you’ve heard me say we have such a big dependable flywheel, you know that they’re the only thing that’s volatile in what we do is the asset analytics business because we’re looking at landing seven and eight figure deals and it isn’t yet at critical mass. I think you could say that we believe it will become so soon. But on the margin it does make these differences in which quarter those deals fall. And of course speaking of frame of reference, our business used to be like that back when the software business was an upfront license business and so forth.

But, but for, for us it makes this difference on the margin. But the margin is what is significant when we’re comparing one quarter to another at the, at the level of when was 10 and a half, 10.9 and so forth. It, it’s to do with these asset analytics things.

Werner Andre

Yeah, maybe I add like in, in for asset analytics like Q2 and Q3 last year was particularly strong and the opportunities for, for bigger deals are more towards the end of the year in 2025 and on the M and A side. So just to say like we don’t need M and A to be within the outlook range for our err. There are a number of transactions that we are working on. We expect that we close at least one by the end of the year. Over the last few years our contribution to er, constant currency er growth through M and a was between 40 and 70 basis points and we do expect for this year that we are roughly within that range again.

And our Q3 year by year er growth rate that we’re showing is purely organic. So there’s no benefit from M and A at all. So we have 10.5% purely organic and without China it would be 11% purely organic.

Eric Boyer

Thanks Taylor. Next question comes from CD Panagradi from Mizuho.

Siti Panigrahi

Thanks for taking my question. I want to ask about macro. If you think about last year there was so much uncertainty, election going on, interest rate high. How do you view the macro now on this environment? Right now heading to 2026 and anything that wish, any puts and takes that we should think about 2026.

Werner Andre

Well, I’ll start on the macro. It remains Robust. Now the backdrop is the same. The end markets are strong. There’s never been more demand for better, more resilient infrastructure around the world. The only exception we’ve talked about for, for a long time now is China. Yeah. And then I mentioned in my prepared remarks briefly Australia. And Australia, it’s a bit of a crosswind. You know, you have less investment in, in the transportation infrastructure that we’ve seen in the past few years. But on the other hand you have more investments going into, into mining. Yeah. So as we get into, we look start to look into 2026, we are not expecting a change of the overall demand environment.

We expect the demand environment overall to remain robust.

Greg Bentley

Now I’ll say that a difference from a year ago in the world if we step back is this notion unfortunately that each country needs to be self sufficient in its, in its resources and, and requires infrastructure investment if you like, even some redundant infrastructure investment to do that. And then the other factor, for instance the COP conference this year, the theme is on adaptation and adaptation as part of resilience is the work of civil and structural and geotechnical engineers. And it’s just understood we need to get on with that evermore. Those are changes that may be resulted from politics but they end up adding to the demand for the work of infrastructure engineers.

And again there aren’t enough of them without going digital.

Eric Boyer

Thanks. Next question comes from Guy Hardwick from Barclays.

Greg Bentley

Hi, good morning. Just a quick one for me. So last month there was speculators in the press of a merger between the number two and ENC firm globally and the number four player globally. I was just wondering, consolidation amongst your larger ENC customers, what are the kind of positive and negative implications potentially for Bentley? Well, some of that has taken place in the past and has not been to any disadvantage. The the, you know, if we in other types of, if you like design software it might be R and D functions that would be consolidated. The way that our software is used by the engineering and construction firms is in their throughput of production. It is the means of producing their product. It’s their factory floor if you like and, and combination makes them larger but need no less software. And we sort of tend to be the choice for larger firms.

The consolidation I think has ultimately benefited us because of the type of technical platform cooperation that we’re salivating now to do with expanding our APIs for AI to have our analytics and simulation engines be available for the development to be used to provide the engineering precision in context in AI developments that the larger Firms, as Nicholas pointed out, are more investing in. It’s going back to, as I was saying with Jay, this notion of being technically shoulder to shoulder as well as commercially shoulder to shoulder, I think that benefits from consolidation.

Guy Hardwick

Thank you. Given time constraints, this call’s gone for an hour, so I’ll leave anything else for follow ups. Thank you.

Eric Boyer

Thanks. Yeah. The next question comes from Koji Akita from Bfo A.

Koji Ikeda

Hey, guys, thanks so much for taking the question. Listening to the call and the commentary, you know, lots of commentary on external AI opportunities out there for Bentley. But I wanted to ask about an update on how you guys are internally using AI to drive productivity gains and sales, R D, gna. And longer term, what could the internal use of AI mean for margin expansion for Bentley? Thank you.

Nicholas Cumins

Yeah, thanks a lot for the question. I didn’t touch on it when it comes to our own internal use of AI for product development, but you’re right, we are actually expanding the use of AI across business functions. And we’ve seen some quality improvements in lead nurturing, for example, or user support. Yeah. So we see AI definitely as a way of making our existing colleagues more productive. And therefore it will help to increase both the top line and the bottom line. That’s our expectation going forward.

Eric Boyer

Thanks. Our last question comes from Joshua Tilton from Wolf Research.

Joshua Tilton

Thank you guys for sneaking me in. Can you hear me?

Eric Boyer

Yes.

Werner Andre

Yes.

Joshua Tilton

I’ve been jumping around this morning, so I apologize if it’s been asked, but I think it’s very important. Greg, you always stress how predictable this business is, and I think that’s what people really love and enjoy about it, or at least it’s one of the things I think they do. Last quarter, you had already told us that you expected this to be the low point of ARR growth for the year. And I guess my question is, was that in line with your expectations or did it come in even below what you guys thought? And the reason I’m asking is because should we just view this as right down the fairway with your expectations and continue confidence into Q4, or did things maybe trend a little bit worse than you were expecting, even below that low point you kind of guided us to last quarter?

Greg Bentley

Well, I think it’s the former. But, Werner, I think it’s worth wrapping up with a summary of the factors and how that’s different for Q4. Oh, you’re on mute, on mute.

Werner Andre

Can just repeat the, the, the.

Greg Bentley

The question.

Werner Andre

Sorry.

Joshua Tilton

Oh, yes, I was just, I was just asking. You know, you told us that this was going to be the low point for the year. And I think, you know, we’re just trying to understand was that low point in line with your expectations and we’re just as confident before as we were, you know, 90 days ago when you told us this was going to be the low point or was this low point worse than you were expecting and then we should adjust your expectations for Q4.

Werner Andre

Understand? Understood. Sorry. So I think we are exactly where we expected to be for, for Q3. It’s clear that Q4 is a big quarter for us. Like most of the the renewals are in Q4 or like not, not most of them, but a very significant amount of our annual contract renewals are in Q4. We see the pipeline is as we expected it in our outlook and we will focus on strong execution as we did year to date. And then we as we said like we have the opportunities within Asset analytics and Programmatic acquisitions that makes us confident that Q3 will be the lowest point.

And we are going up to from here, if you will feel the same as we felt like a quarter ago. So. So we are on target if you will.

Greg Bentley

I don’t know whether you caught it Joshua, but Werner quantified the year to date contribution from programmatic acquisitions in our year over year ARR growth is zero this year and it’s generally 40 or 70 basis points. And we actually may wind up there because we continue to strategically prioritize asset acquisition opportunities. And, and the asset acquisition opportunities, just to go back to that are the lumpy deals. And back when lumpy deals were part of our business, which has been a long time ago, we remember they usually occur in Q4 and this year doesn’t seem different.

Even though as we got started with asset analytics last year we had some big deals in Q2 and Q3. So again it is a big reliable flywheel. But it has on the margin these changes and I’m grinning because I think those are the right things for us to be doing. Asset analytics is the ground floor of a huge opportunity, AI enabled. And even though it’s going to be a bit of a nuisance, it’s volatile nature. Ultimately we’ll spread it all out as we gain critical mass and escape velocity there as I say and I feel that’s coming closer strategically.

Joshua Tilton

Makes sense. Very helpful. Maybe just one last one before you kick me off. You guys had the year in infrastructure conference lots coming out of it. We also had Autodesk University like a quarter ago. So announcements across the industry. I guess if there is one announcement that you think is going to be the most needle moving for the business that investors should be paying attention to. Like what would you call out from the year in infrastructure conference?

Nicholas Cumins

I would say short term Connect. Connect, yeah.

Joshua Tilton

You heard it guys. Thank you very much.

Nicholas Cumins

New foundation layer for building infrastructure cloud, you know, bringing a lot of capabilities that used to be in the different enterprise systems that we brought together under the umbrella of Bene Infrastructure Cloud and basically where data is being federated in order to be used for AI purposes.

Greg Bentley

And I would just say stepping back, a contrast among these announcements. You have other vendors out there whose products have always been separate and there’s been no way to get data from one to the other. Of course AI models enable them to say, okay, if you pay us now, we’ll actually help you get data from one application to another. Or you know, from our standpoint it’s all been integrated a common schema. We’re way ahead on that point. It’s not, it’s not a matter of monetization, it’s a matter of improving the form factor to make it even easier to use and even easier to use with AI agents and API consumption.

You know, I say AI and put the P in the middle. That’s how we want to be a platform vendor to fit that in to our existing enterprise accounts. And that’s of course a different go to market motion for AI for the, for the SNB firms. But the, the what I think Nicholas says that the connect is important because it brings this down to the level of every user so that it’s not. So that it’s intuitive and immersive and geospatial and, and, and, and new, but the back end of how things are integrated together. We’re not, we’re not inventing now, we’re leveraging now.

Eric Boyer

Thanks. That concludes our call today. We thank you for your interest in time in Bentley Systems. Feel please feel free to reach out to investor relations with further questions and follow up and we look forward to updating you on our performance in coming quarters. Thanks a lot.

Werner Andre

Thank you.