Chegg, Inc. (NYSE:CHGG) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Josh Baer: Great. Thank you for the question. Wanted to ask one on competition. I think historically, you had a pretty favorable competitive landscape as the clear leader and maybe students used a few different solutions sort of in a complementary fashion. I’m just wondering how to think about the new competitive landscape, maybe ignoring ChatGPT for a moment? Like how does the future Chegg compared to other education-specific companies that are leveraging similar language models or open AI, APIs thinking about Conmigo or Quizlet or what might come from learning. Like any thoughts on the new competitive landscape as these education vendors use AI as well?

Dan Rosensweig: Yes. No, great question. And I think from our perspective, they don’t — we have such a big moat — and the moat is only going to get stronger, because really, what we’re learning is the speed of the computing, NVIDIA, thank goodness for everything that they have done, they really have sort of changed the game here. And then sort of the conversational nature that the analysis that ChatGPT has shown. But at the end of the day, the next set of value is being created by companies that already exists that already have very big brands, incredible loyalty are known for doing something and are able to leverage against their own datasets and their own customers. So nobody in the education space from our perspective has a more relevant or better dataset than we do.

We’re learning it’s running the AI against the data that creates the differentiated experience not the AI itself on its own. Without the data, it’s irrelevant, that’s why these generalists can’t do what we do. And so by keeping it proprietary, and as Andy said, building our own LLMs, we think our moat gets only bigger. The second thing is, it does take capital to invest and none of them really have it. I think we generate more free cash flow than most of them generate revenue in total. So the actual size of these companies is insignificant versus what Chegg has in terms of the business, the datasets and the capabilities to do. What you’ve seen is mostly just sort of chat bots versus what we’re building, and I think you’ll be able to compare our concept video as where we’re going with what you see from them.

I think you’ll leave with similar perspective that we do, which is our moat only gets bigger and it was already big.

Josh Baer: Thanks Dan, that’s helpful. And then one quick one for Andy on CapEx. The lowest quarterly level since 2018, I think. Just wondering how much of that was lower engagement or Q&A from students versus leveraging Gen AI for your own content creation. Essentially, like is this level that we saw sustainable? Or how should we think about CapEx going forward? Thanks.

Andrew Brown: No, it was fairly seasonally low without a doubt. And as you know, we have — it’s probably the — is the quarter where we have the fewest students actually in school, right? Some school, while we went — it seems to have gone well for us. It’s still a small period of time. So no, I wouldn’t expect that. But we do expect CapEx efficiencies beyond this. We do believe that as we start implementing some of these — some of our AI solutions that will have a benefit on CapEx as we move into call it into 2024 for the sake of argument at this point.

Dan Rosensweig: And so the reason for that, by the way, I think Andy explained it perfectly. The reason for that is the cost of content each particular piece of content should get less for us being able to leverage AI versus everything always being human. So the cost of content we’ll actually be able to answer more questions than we’ve ever answered before at a lower rate on a per question basis and therefore, overall spending. So I think some of the other areas that we were investing in, like professor led content and things of those nature become much less important in this new world and the ability to leverage the data we have with ChatGPT and scale AI to create unique learning paths is really going to be the differentiator. And so that’s the reason for what Andy was saying.