All right, good afternoon, everyone. Very happy to have Instructure with us today. Mitch Benson, Chief Strategy Officer. We're going to have a fireside chat, but if you guys have any questions, feel free to raise your hand. Make this very interactive. Mitch, maybe just to kick things off, a little bit of background on Instructure. I know you've been there a long time, but talk about what you guys are doing to kind of really innovate in the education space. Yeah. So those who have maybe been around for a minute probably think about Instructure as the company that makes Canvas, which is the learning management system in use predominantly across K-12 and higher ed here in North America and growing internationally. The reality is the business over the course of the last 5 or 6 years has become something quite different than just Canvas. Canvas is still a very important part of the business, still lots of room to grow versus the competitors that are out there. But we have begun to assemble a set of assets, software, that solves the real challenges around the whole life cycle of teaching and learning, not just simply the learning management, as some of you who may have used it in your college or high school careers. But it's not just about a repository of content. In learning today, you've got assessment that has to be delivered. You've got a lot of data that's generated that needs to be put to good use. You've got evidence of learning, whether they're badges or credentials or your diplomas. How do all of those things sort of feed off of one another to produce an environment that helps education become the beneficiary of what lots of other segments and industries have come to know as kind of the benefits of digitization? Not the disintermediation of teachers, not sort of the replacement with computers as tutors, but sort of the technological supports that make things more efficient, that actually produce better outcomes, that help folks learn at a broader scale. And then more recently, as in recently as in the last month, we've added Parchment, which is a business that we acquired. So the last 10 or 15 years have largely been around the delivery of teaching and learning and the digitization and the supports there. And with Parchment, we now have sort of access to the evidence of learning that follows people across their lifetime. So everything that gets issued from their credentials and the programs that they've taken to the diplomas, to the verification of those diplomas. One of the primary problems historically has been that when you transition in and out of these segments, whether you're a primary school student going to secondary, secondary to college, college to career, we lose all the data, all the information about those kids and about those learners. The same is true for folks who are in the workforce, from one job to another job. Where is the evidence of the things that I have done? If you've got the systems that deliver the teaching and learning, that produce all of the evidence of that learning, and you've now got a system that actually helps you organize it, store it, display it, validate it, verify it, you stay with a student now through their entire lifelong learning journey as opposed to just managing their in-classroom or remote activities in the one segment or the one course that they're in. So a lot to go on there. But as we think about Canvas and why you guys have a dominant market position in LMS. But talk about why you win and you're continuing to add new customers. What's really the reason that folks are kind of migrating over to Canvas? Yeah. So I think there's a few. One is if you look at the history of the company, born natively in the cloud, multi-tenant from the outset, highly scalable, many nines of availability, highly secure. There's the fundamental kind of risk management dimensions of this that are critically important. It's a modern set of software. So if you look at the kind of competitive analyses, if you go out and talk to folks, it's by far and away the system that the students prefer. It's highly mobile by its very nature. The experience that folks have feels a lot like the systems that they're used to using in their everyday life. It's not intrusive. It's highly efficient. So I think there's just modern sort of design principles and practices where technology supports, technology doesn't displace. It sort of fades into the background and makes everything better. You transition from sort of the infrastructure and the actual software into the company that we've built. We've got half of our population of employees are customer-facing employees. Probably half of those are former educators. You go talk to our customers and they will tell you that we are the company that sort of sets the bar for the way that they're serviced, the way that they're understood and engaged with. And so we've built a really healthy relationship with customers, which breeds this really great flywheel. When you've got a referential sale environment, which education is, you've got really, really happy customers because of the experience they're having and the software they're using, they talk a lot about it. They tell each other about it. And so we've built a base of customers who are our very greatest advocates. So when you get to, like we are in Higher Ed, 50% market share, what are you going to buy? You're going to buy Canvas. Yeah, right. So talk about in terms of the broader product evolution. Where are you spending more of your time? There's a lot of opportunities here, but where are you really kind of leaning into the product? Yeah. So we've been on this journey of kind of one product, which was Canvas, to multiple products that we've both built and acquired for a variety of purposes. But I think the real piece behind your question, at least for me, is the emergence of this company is truly a platform to support teaching and learning long-term that is built for, operates, behaves, and sort of engenders all of the things that platforms do. We've got 900 partners, more so than anybody else that's out there, who are innovating onto and with the platform and tying into it. But from our perspective, we want to be with the learner across their lifetime journey. We see the real opportunities in the ways that education is changing, the non-traditional students that are showing up, those folks that aren't knocking on the front door to the registrar's office, issuing an application, and seeking a 4-year degree. They want to take a program in data science from insert your favorite named university here that's 6 courses as opposed to 15 credit hours in my first semester to get my 4-year degree. The returning learners, those folks who are coming in online, who are coming in hybrid, who are not going to take up residency for the 4 years, those are the real opportunities kind of for expanding the footprint that exists above and beyond the core. There's still lots of room to grow in the LMS, but those non-traditional students internationally with the same sort of agenda, and then again, with the acquisition of Parchment into this lifelong relationship that we've got with students. So when you get on Parchment a bit, I'd love to understand the rationale for the acquisition and why you guys are excited about what that brings to the table from a product perspective. For sure. We've got a really great installed base. I mean, I think our last numbers were more than 8,000 customers, institutional customers, K-12 and Higher Ed. Parchment has a relationship with nearly 15,000 more across K-12 and Higher Education, where they are the system of record for the issuing and the validation of transcripts and diplomas. So you think about all the workloads that exist between K-12 and Higher Ed and Higher Ed and Higher Ed and Higher Ed and employers. As a K-12 student, I want to apply to college. And that's a transaction that occurs where I have to provide a transcript from my K-12 experience. Or I'm now in college and I want to transfer and I might be applying to several universities. That's several transcripts that have to be moved. That's an interesting business. It gets way more interesting when you say what people really want is not what historically was a sheet of paper or now might be a secure PDF or actual digital payloads. That's just a course with a course title and a number and a grade, but actually becomes something rich with evidence and data of my learning. I didn't just complete a Java programming course. Here's the actual code that was written. Here's the websites that were built. Here's the take-your-pick. Or I'm a comms major. Here are the artifacts that are the press releases that I've written. So the sort of synergy between the business becomes the richness of the credential that you now get to carry with you over a lifetime. The amount of times that that credential gets transacted is currency for you in your work to improve your outcomes, whether that's a job, whether that's a different school. The marrying of those two things together, system of learning with the system of record for the evidence, becomes super interesting. You think about your role overseeing the product, the strategy. What do you think about building on top of the platform in longer term? Is there opportunity for future acquisition? How do you kind of think about the product investments? Yeah. I mean, I think there are a number of areas where we've got a lot of interest or appetite. I think we're still very early days in the whole process of digitization of assessment. And not only in K-12, but across Higher Ed and certainly across the world. People are starting to rethink what that looks like. Is it more formative in nature? Is it lower stakes, but is it more rigorous and it's sort of in the classroom on a regular basis? We think there's a bunch of stuff to do there. As you think about the changing demographic or the enrollment types of students and the kind of supports that they require, it's not easy, but it's a well-defined set of things you have to do if you've got a resident on your campus at a university. You've got to deliver them food, probably health and wellness, career planning and support, those kinds of things. What does that look like when you're trying to help students succeed, that is, to complete whatever program of study they're in, in an omnichannel world, which might be entirely residential or blended or entirely online? What kind of systems need to be put into place to help scale the kinds of supports and services that students need to be successful? That whole universe of student success is going to be critically important. Data and analytics, how to power insight and knowledge, make it actionable for teachers, for professors, for students, for their families, for leaders. We've assembled a number of assets that produce a lot of information that will be very useful to those people who have the special care and custody of those students and those relationships. Certainly, AI is interesting. I can't imagine we're not going to get through this without a question about AI. Well, I also wanted to understand too, because I think a lot of investors are focused on AI as sort of a monetization aspect. But I'd actually love to understand, maybe we'll start with what do you think it could do internally for you and how you guys are looking at products? And I'd love to maybe start there on AI. Yeah. Let me give you a really concrete example. For those of you who followed our business, know that we do have a sizable business in assessments, specifically in K-12. We also own the country's largest item bank of formative assessment items. Those are items that have been written that assess a particular concept, a standard, a whatever it is. So if I want to know whether you know how to multiply fractions. I don't. Me either. I can go to the item bank and I can say, give me a series of items that are supposed to help me assess whether or not you have this skill. I can pick from them. I can assemble a quiz and then I can deliver that quiz electronically. The creation of that content, it's more than 1 million items today in the item bank, is a labor-intensive process historically. Managing it on an annual basis to update it, to expand it, to make it more relevant to all of the things, also a very labor-intensive process. I hope everybody can see the opportunity that exists when you apply generative AI to that particular problem, the level of efficiency that we can gain and the sort of growth in our capabilities to expand and make that more modern, more useful, more relevant contextually to today versus yesterday versus five years ago. All of those things are made easier and more efficient with the application of Generative AI. So, to what extent are customers kind of looking to you as a guidepost to filter that? Because it was out of the user conference. It was interesting. People were talking about people submitting work that wasn't their own in AI. So how does that kind of look through the ecosystem? Because you're very plugged in there, but I'd be curious to understand the feedback there. Yeah. I mean, I think we have from the outset taken a, I'll say cautious, but that doesn't mean slow, but a cautious approach given the sector that we work in, which is education, which is rich with PII and sort of the ethical use of data issues, the commercialization of products on top of student data that they should otherwise own. There's a whole bunch of these questions that exist, never mind academic integrity. So we convened very early on a set of leaders from across our customer base to serve as a customer advisory board and have begun to, over the course of the last year, invest deeply in understanding the principles that should guide our collective both development in and use of AI. So we've got a lot of publicly available sort of artifacts associated with all of the work that we've done there to try and be an active participant, if not leader, with our industry colleagues, both competitors as well as customers, in setting in place what is our practice as it relates to equity? Because these things can go far off the rails if not well-trained and well sort of managed. How do we make sure that there's appropriate use of data and personally identifiable information? What are the commercialization parameters around these things? Should they be used primarily for efficiency gains and/or what happens when you start to use them to actually derive intelligent action based on the results of assessments? All of these are really hard questions that we're digging into and sort of working with customers around. Do you think that AI, does that maybe accelerate at all the pace of kind of like, hey, we're on a legacy solution and you're not forward-thinking? Does AI change the thought process for customers and how they're looking at their technology investments? Well, I mean, I think in a number of ways, for sure. Do you want to be on the path with an innovator? Yes. If you're going to make a leap from a legacy provider to something else and you want to endure the pain of change, are they playing in the places where you think the Gretzky analogy, where's the puck going? Let's align with those that are skating to it. Certainly, it factors into the cost profiles. Can we do things more efficiently? And are they building stuff that's going to overcome the, well, it's not that much better. So maybe we should stay here. We think that there are things that are being done that we're doing which are going to change the level of evaluation that folks have of what their system should do for them. If I've got teachers that can issue natural language queries against a dataset to get information back and not have to implement some enterprise-level reporting system or have a whole office that's designed to build custom reports off a data warehouse for me or, and I can get the information back on all of those students who scored less than 70% on the last assessment and target an intervention for them with a simple sentence query, that promise is pretty intriguing. Yeah. What are you most excited about in terms of the product and what you guys are going to be able to accomplish over the next few years? Yeah. Sorry. Tough question. It's a tough question for a guy who likes to talk to not take an hour and a half to explain it. I've been doing this, as you know, for a long time, almost three decades now in this space. The one thing that I think that this sector needs is a series of providers. I'd like for us to be, I believe we are one of them, who's going to be around for the long haul, who doesn't make a bunch of promises and then disappear because they couldn't figure out how to build a great business to support it for the long term. As an adjunct in that discussion of the kind of business that I think we've built, one that's highly profitable, that has built great technology, that has great relationships with customers, is that much like in other industries where a provider of that caliber has emerged as the platform player, it makes everything more efficient and it drives innovation well beyond what a whole bunch of people could do by themselves. The thing that excites me, I think, the most is that we are emerging as that player. We are building a partner community of innovators who are going to bring a scale of really cool things to education that they haven't seen before because now there is a way for them to actually commercialize it, to get it to market, to make it stable and saleable by playing in the ecosystem that we've built as opposed to trying to figure out how to do all of these things on their own. We're almost at time, so I'll wrap it up after this. But in terms of, you mentioned the partner channel, not really a channel, but the partner ecosystem a couple of times now. How important is that to the business? And as you guys scale and look at things internationally, talk about the importance of the partners. Yeah. So I mean, I think there's partners, we talk about them in two ways. One is the channel and how we take the business that we have to more broad geographies. And I think that's an important part of our growth strategy. But the real question is, there's a lot of flexibility in the education space. A lot of people like to make their own choices, a lot of tools that do the same thing. But with preference, people want to build their environment that's unique to them. Our strategy really is to enable an ecosystem of all of those providers to flourish, which give the actual customers lots and lots of choice. But to give them choice in an environment that we know is going to scale, is going to be there with them for the long haul, and to help them provide the evidence of the effectiveness. As these partners come in, are the things that they're doing actually going to deliver the results that they say that they're going to deliver? And so we made an acquisition of LearnPlatform a little over a year ago, which puts us in a position to help those partners deliver the evidence of the impact that they say that they're going to have. And so long term, not only just an ecosystem that's rich with partners, but with people and companies and tools that do what they say that they're going to do so that as systems develop and deploy them, adopt and deploy them, they're going to have an impact on the learning outcomes of students, which is really what we're here to change. Awesome. Appreciate the time. Thank you.