Appian NASDAQ: APPN Chief Financial Officer Serge Tanjga said the company is seeing stronger traction with large enterprise and government customers as it positions its low-code automation platform around regulated, mission-critical workflows and embedded artificial intelligence.
Speaking at William Blair’s 46th Annual Growth Stock Conference, Tanjga described Appian as a “process automation platform” focused on complex, cross-functional processes in regulated industries. He said 80% of the company’s annual recurring revenue comes from four verticals: financial services, insurance, life sciences and the public sector.
Tanjga pointed to customer examples including a financial institution using Appian to monitor fraud and a branch of the U.S. military using the platform to manage ammunition supply-chain workflows. In the fraud example, he said the customer replaced six disparate systems with a single workflow, reducing investigation time by 98% and lowering fraud risk by three-quarters. In the military example, he said Appian is being used in a highly secure IL5 environment to support roughly one million transactions per month.
Focus on regulated industries and large customers
Tanjga said Appian’s customer base relies on the platform because of both product capabilities and trust built over more than 25 years. He highlighted automation tools, integrations, bots, AI capabilities, Data Fabric, Process Mining and compliance certifications as key parts of the company’s offering.
He said more than 70% of Appian’s business comes from customers spending more than $1 million annually. Those customers are often deeply embedded in the platform and use internal development teams to build additional workflows on Appian, Tanjga said.
The company has shifted more attention toward larger strategic deals, he said, after previously spending too much time on smaller deals in the lower end of enterprise and mid-market accounts. Appian reduced its sales organization more than two years ago and refocused on the high end of the market, Tanjga said.
William Blair analyst Pat McIlwee noted that Appian’s number of customers with more than $1 million in annual recurring revenue grew 22% last year to 140, up from 5% growth the prior year. Tanjga said the average spend per seven-figure customer also increased last year, despite growth in the number of customers in that cohort.
AI positioned as part of workflow automation
Tanjga said Appian views AI as “another type of worker” within a broader business process. He said AI can help with tasks such as information extraction, checking and reasoning through ambiguity, but its accuracy is not yet sufficient on its own for the highly regulated environments Appian serves.
Appian’s approach, he said, is to assign AI specific tasks within workflows, check its work and sometimes use multiple models to confirm outputs. If uncertainty remains, the workflow can route the exception to a human user.
“Our position to customers has always been, figure out how to use AI in processes that actually drive your business,” Tanjga said, adding that customers want to capture AI’s speed and cost benefits while managing its limitations.
Tanjga said customer conversations have shifted over the past year, with more enterprises asking late-stage questions about pricing, packaging, change management and implementation. He cited presentations at Appian’s customer conference from companies including Pfizer and CIBC Mellon as examples of customers discussing AI use cases.
Pricing, AI monetization and Composer
Tanjga said Appian’s pricing varies based on customer preference, including user-based pricing, per-application pricing, Appian Success Plans and consumption models. He said the company has raised prices consistently year over year for multiple years.
On AI monetization, Tanjga said customers need to upgrade their Appian licenses to access AI features in production. He said moving to the advanced tier can represent a 25% to 35% uplift. That tier includes a moderate amount of AI usage, with additional consumption available through incremental AI usage bundles.
He said 40% of Appian customers have access to the company’s AI features and that $100 million of annual recurring revenue is at that level.
Tanjga also discussed Composer, an AI-assisted development product that Appian made generally available in December. He said Composer uses natural language elements to help developers and business users build applications faster and at lower cost. Early modernization cases are showing more than 25% improvement compared with normal methods, he said, while adding that Appian aims to continue improving efficiency over time.
Government business and profitability
McIlwee said roughly one-third of Appian’s business now comes from government customers. Tanjga said changes in the federal government’s focus on efficiency have been positive for Appian, particularly as agencies look to work more directly with software vendors, reduce total cost of ownership and achieve faster time to value.
He also cited a framework agreement with the U.S. Army valued at $500 million over 10 years, saying it reflects both changes in how the government wants to buy software and the strength of Appian’s platform and AI features.
On profitability, Tanjga said Appian has improved adjusted EBITDA margin from negative 8% in 2023 to positive 11% in 2025. He said the company is guiding to more than 100 basis points of margin improvement at the midpoint of its latest outlook, with expected leverage in research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administrative expenses.
For the current year, Tanjga said Appian is guiding to 13% revenue growth at the midpoint, 31% EBITDA growth, a 12% EBITDA margin and non-GAAP earnings per share of $1, representing 60% year-over-year growth. He also noted that Appian increased its share repurchase authorization to $100 million and expects to shrink its share count.
Asked about stock-based compensation, Tanjga said Appian’s stock-based compensation has been 6% of revenue for the past three years, below peer medians he cited for similarly sized and larger software companies.
About Appian NASDAQ: APPN
Appian Corporation is a global technology company specializing in low-code automation platforms designed to streamline business processes. Founded in 1999 by Matt Calkins, the company provides an integrated suite of tools that enables organizations to build enterprise applications and workflows rapidly with minimal hand coding. The platform combines process management, robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and data integration into a single environment, allowing businesses to accelerate digital transformation initiatives.
The core offering, the Appian Low-Code Platform, empowers users—ranging from professional developers to business analysts—to visually model, design and deploy applications that can automate complex operations, orchestrate tasks across systems, and deliver real-time analytics.
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