Earnings AI

Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah said organic Google referrals to its sites fell about 37% year over year in the third quarter. Over the same quarter, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode cited its content roughly 2.7 billion times, nearly 10 times the clicks those sites got from Google Search.

Shah said the job now is turning that visibility into revenue. The plan is to build direct audiences, push into social commerce and stay open to licensing deals for AI use of its content. He said revenue fell far less than traffic because the company also runs subscription, app and newsletter businesses.

AirSculpt said leads from Google search fell 16% from a year earlier, which it attributed to Google’s AI Overviews keeping consumers on the search page. CFO Michael Arthur said the rise in customer acquisition cost came mainly from the same place: fewer people and leads reaching the company’s website.

CEO Yogi Jashnani said AirSculpt is starting to see early signs of improvement in how it shows up in AI-generated search results. It’s optimizing its website for AI search and strengthening its digital content, customer reviews and educational resources. It’s also spending more on brand and local marketing to drive traffic that doesn’t depend on Google, about $3 million more than last year, down from the $5 million it had planned.

Citi’s Fatima Boolani asked how Cloudflare’s restructuring six months ago changed its go-to-market. CEO Matthew Prince said sellers used to lose a big chunk of their week to meeting prep and Salesforce reports. He used 60% as an example of how bad it could get. AI now does much of that work, and sellers spend far more time in front of customers.

Prince said headcount is shifting toward builders and sellers. Sales productivity set a record and grew year over year for the 11th straight quarter. Quota attainment was the highest in more than five years. He didn’t give figures for either.

US Foods CFO Dirk Locascio said AI is driving about $75 million of adjusted EBITDA this year, rising to more than $110 million next year. Melius Research’s Jacob Aiken-Phillips pushed on whether that overlaps with savings programs the company already runs. Locascio said it doesn’t.

The biggest portion comes from added sales and margin over time, he said, with productivity a smaller piece. The capabilities behind it are suggested sales, product recommendations, AI search and forecasting. CEO Dave Flitman pointed to two seller tools, Visit Assistant and Scout AI, and to a new compensation plan that’s catching on faster than expected. About 40% of sellers are now fully on variable pay.

Rockwell’s call covered a lot of what it sells to factories and data centers. The internal AI story came in pieces. When Bank of America’s Andrew Obin asked why recurring revenue in its services business disappointed, CEO Blake Moret pointed to simplifying how Rockwell quotes and delivers, including internal agentic tools that cut keystrokes. He framed it as a revenue play. Quote more efficiently and you win more.

CFO Christian Rothe said AI sped up software development enough to finish products that weren’t on this year’s plan, and that hard savings are offsetting some of AI’s cost. No AI-specific numbers. When Citi’s Andy Kaplowitz asked about 2027 productivity, the answer was to wait for Investor Day.

CEO Ariane Gorin said traffic from AI agents is still very small but high intent, and it isn’t eating into Expedia’s direct traffic. When Bank of America’s Justin Post pushed, she said it’s either new demand or coming out of other paid channels, and the economics are still being worked out. Expedia partnered with Google in AI Mode, announced an integration with Meta’s Muse, and is testing OpenAI’s ad products.

Inside its own products, AI recommendations helped drive record attach rates for the Expedia brand. Travelers who used a new activity agent were twice as likely to book an activity within seven days. A Vrbo voice agent resolved more than 15% of inbound contacts in its first two months. Half the analysts on the call asked about AI, by one count.

HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan said customers are navigating a major AI platform shift that’s changing how they evaluate software, discover HubSpot and buy. Inbound demand is under pressure as AI changes how buyers find software. Upmarket, CFO Kate Bueker said, there are more decision-makers and longer sales cycles. Down market, buyers are more price sensitive because AI is a new line item. Customers want proof of AI before they buy, so HubSpot added trials and outcome-based pricing.

Asked by Barclays about its upmarket approach, Rangan said win rates are nearly three times higher in deals with five or more buying-committee members when HubSpot engages multiple stakeholders. When Evercore’s Kirk Materne asked whether its go-to-market needs to change, she said HubSpot combined sales and customer success under one organization upmarket. Answer engine optimization is a new demand channel, but early and not yet offsetting the inbound decline.

LegalZoom CEO Jeff Stibel said AI referral traffic is still small but growing. Traffic from AI platforms grew almost 50% quarter over quarter. He said those visitors arrive with high intent and convert at meaningfully higher rates than traditional organic search, and early customers from ChatGPT are generating higher lifetime value than its traditional paid channels.

Search is the pressure. LegalZoom lowered its profit outlook, and more than half of the change reflects spending to diversify channels, including partnerships, affiliates and AI. About a quarter reflects higher costs in paid customer acquisition. Last quarter, AI platforms made up about 3% of its business formation traffic.

Booking Holdings CFO Ewout Steenbergen said travelers who use the company’s AI assistants at Priceline and Agoda convert at about twice the rate of those who don’t. Agoda assistant users also have average booking values about 20% higher. Booking recently launched a proactive AI travel agent that helps travelers from planning through booking and beyond.

Asked whether personal AI agents send more referrals than the big AI platforms, Steenbergen said traffic from both is still very small. Marketing spend rose 11% to $2.6 billion, slightly faster than gross bookings. The company tied that partly to faster growth in affiliate marketing and declining organic search traffic. CEO Glenn Fogel also said regulation could slow personal AI agents in parts of the world, especially Europe.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping, its AI shopping assistant, over the past 12 months. Interactions were up 570% year over year. U.S. customers who use it spend 50% more per order than those who don’t. In July, the figure Amazon gave was more than 40%.

The assistant researches products, compares options, checks a year of price history and tracks deals for the shopper. Jassy said Amazon expects to work with outside AI agents, but wants its own to be the main way people shop Amazon. The company also launched an Ads Agent for advertisers and announced more than 100 new shopping assistant features ahead of the holidays.

ServiceNow’s CFO, Gina Mastantuono, told investors the company’s own use of AI is now worth more than $1 billion a year. That’s more than double where it ended 2025.

When Bernstein’s Peter Weed asked where that shows up in the front office, the answer was specific. Sales operations is down significantly. Quota-carrying sellers are up by double digits, even as total sales and marketing headcount may fall. CEO Bill McDermott said work that used to keep about 100 people in sales ops busy is now handled by AI, and every seller has an AI coach. The bar for new sellers went up, and total company headcount slightly declined.

C.H. Robinson CEO Dave Bozeman said the company expects AI to automate more of the quote-to-cash life cycle of a load. Michael Castagnetto, who runs its North American business, said agentic AI lets it reprice its contract portfolio much faster than it used to, and credited it with faster, more reliable service. Shipments handled per person per day rose more than 15% year over year, and average headcount fell 10.4%.

Arun Rajan, its chief strategy and innovation officer, said the company’s annual token cost is still under $2 million on a run-rate basis. He said only a fraction of the hundreds of processes in quote-to-cash are automated so far. When Jefferies’ Stephanie Benjamin Moore asked how the company would offset inflation, management pointed to more AI agents.

Coca-Cola grew unit case volume 5% and organic revenue 7% in the third quarter, and raised its outlook. Marketing was a big part of the story. CFO John Murphy pointed to double-digit growth in above-the-line marketing investment, funded partly by productivity elsewhere in the business.

CEO Henrique Braun said the technology, data and AI the company built for the FIFA World Cup are now showing up in campaigns like Fanta Halloween, which uses connected packaging to carry content across the path to purchase. In Q&A, management said it is turning those event investments into ongoing campaigns aimed at deeper consumer engagement and direct transactions. No AI-specific numbers.