Clarivate (NYSE:CLVT) held its first-quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday. Below is the complete transcript from the call.

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Summary

Clarivate reported Q1 2026 revenues of $586 million, with a 1.6% organic ACV growth and a 1.7% increase in subscription organic revenue.

Adjusted EBITDA was $241 million, representing a 41% margin, and free cash flow was $79 million, allowing $143 million of debt retirement.

The company continues to execute its Value Creation Plan focused on business model optimization, improved sales execution, accelerated AI innovation, and portfolio rationalization.

Clarivate is intensifying its AI investments, implementing AI efficiencies internally, and launching new AI-enabled products and collaborations, such as with Anthropic.

The company reaffirmed its full-year guidance with expectations of revenue decline due to disposals but anticipates adjusted EBITDA growth and margin expansion.

Management highlighted strong sales execution and product innovation, especially in the IP and life sciences segments, with a focus on transitioning to subscription-based offerings.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Clara event Q1 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, press Star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, press star then the number one. I will now hand today's call over to Mark Donahue to begin today's conference. Please go ahead sir.

Mark Donahue

Thank you and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us for the Clarivate first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and webcast and is copyrighted property of Clarivate. Any rebroadcast of this information in whole or in part without prior written consent of Clarivate is prohibited and the accompanying earnings call presentation is available on the investor Relations section of the Company's website. During our call we'll make certain forward looking statements within the meaning of the applicable securities laws. Such forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the business or developments in Clarivate's industry to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance, achievements or developments expressed or implied by such forward looking statements. Information about the factors that cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results or performance can be found in Clarivate's filings with the SEC and on the company's website. Our discussion will include non GAAP measures or adjusted numbers. Clarivate believes non GAAP results are useful in order to enhance understanding of its ongoing operating performance, but they are supplement to and should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures to GAAP measures are available in our earnings release and supplemental presentation on our website. With me today are Maddie Shemtov, Chief Executive Officer and Jonathan Collins, Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, we'll open up the call to your questions and with that, it's a pleasure to turn the call over to Mahdi.

Maddie Shemtov (Chief Executive Officer)

Good morning and thank you for joining us. Today I will walk through our first quarter performance progress against our value creation plan and how execution across the business is positioning Clarivate for improved organic revenue growth, margin expansion and stronger free cash flow generation. This is our fifth consecutive quarter of improved performance. We are off to a solid start to the year and I am pleased to report that our first quarter financial results have us on pace to achieve our full year guidance. Revenues were $586 million supported by continued Value Creation Plan progress and execution across the portfolio. From a growth perspective, the quality composition of our revenue continue to improve. Organic ACV growth was 1.6% with subscription organic revenue growth of 1.7% reflecting increased adoption of subscription based solution across Clarivate. We are encouraged by the underlying momentum we are seeing due to stronger alignment between commercial execution and product strategy. Adjusted EBITDA was $241 million representing a 41% margin, up almost 200 basis points year over year, highlighting the benefit of our subscription first strategy and disciplined cost management. Free cash flow generation was also solid at approximately $79 million which allowed us to retire from $143 million of debt during the quarter. Most important, the value Creation plan is working. We are seeing positive execution across all pillars demonstrated by accelerating product adoption, improving sales effectiveness and an expanding cadence of new product introductions. This quarter reinforces our confidence that the actions we put in place are beginning to translate into more predictable performance, expanding margin and strong free cash flow generation. As a reminder, we launched the Value Creation plan in early 2025 to sharpen focus, accelerate execution and unlock long term shareholder value. The plan is built around four core pillars Business Model Optimization improved sales execution, accelerated AI innovation utilizing our proprietary data assets and portfolio rationalization. You can see these pillars showing up clearly in the numbers through subscription mix, margin expansion and debt reduction. Academia and government continue to be a strong engine for recurring revenue growth. We are executing well across all three pillars of the Value Creation Plan with clear evidence of progress. Business Model Optimization we are accelerating the shift towards subscription based offerings. Adoption of our ProQuest subscription solution remains strong with over 600 new subscriptions sold in the last 12 months, reinforcing the durability and predictability of our revenue base. Sales execution is also improving driven by more effective cross sell execution across content, research and analytics and software solutions. During the quarter we secured several key wins including a multi product institutional deal with FIO University, a new research oriented university in China. We are expanding our China footprint and this demonstrates our ability to deliver integrated solutions and address broader customer needs. We are leveraging the power of AI which is generating real measurable value for customers. Clarivate's Academic AI solutions are optimizing key library workflows resulting in 30 to 60% decrease in manual repetitive work and doubling or even quadrupling throughput. This demonstrates how combining AI with climate, unique content and extensive domain knowledge leads to a significant operational improvement for customers. Turning to intellectual property, our attention remains firmly on execution and and fundamentals. We are seeing encouraging signs that our increased focus on new subscription and renewal discipline is producing result. For the first quarter, renewal rates improved approximately 100 basis points helping organic ACV trends improve to nearly flat. This represents a clear improvement versus prior trends and support our confidence that the Intellectual Property business is moving forward and returning to sustainable recurring growth. Sales execution continues to strengthen, for example with national IT offices including the USPTO where we secured major trademark analytics contract and large scale digitization programs. These wins are advancing patent and trademark operation globally and reinforce Clarivate's role as long term strategic partner in IP ecosystem and analytics. During the quarter we released brand image search adding advanced AI capabilities such as clustering and multilingual support. This enhancement are expanding how IP professionals uncover insights, assess risk and make faster, more confident decision making at a global scale. Overall, the IP segment is operating with greater focus and discipline and we believe this improvement positions the business to future growth in life science and health. We are seeing steady progress with the value creation plan. The shift from transactional sales to subscription is on track supported by positive customer feedback and more consistent sales patterns. The successful changes we have made are reflected in an almost 1% rise in organic revenue during the first quarter. Notably, we won a new top 20 global pharmaceutical customer for DRG Fusion, our new real world data analytics platform. This reinforces the strength of our value proposition with large sophisticated customers. In addition, we secured six figure subscription win with Biotech company for ofex. Our platform for preclinical and clinical safety intelligence demonstrated continued momentum across customer sizes and use cases on innovation. We continue to expand access to our trusted regulatory and scientific intelligence through strategic partnership. During the quarter we integrated Cortellis Regulatory Intelligence with Anthropic Cloud Enterprise, combining Clarivate's proprietary data with advanced AI reasoning to deliver trusted insight directly within customer AI workflows. The collaboration underscores how Clarivate is extending the reach and relevance of its content across the broader AI ecosystem. In February we announced that we are actively pursuing the sales of the life science and healthcare business as part of a broader portfolio of innovation efforts. This is consistent with our broader strategy to concentrate capital and management attention on areas where we see the highest returns. The process is ongoing as always, there is no guarantee of the outcome and we will provide updates as appropriate. Our objective remains clear, maximizing value for shareholders while sharpening strategic focus on our remaining businesses. We have spoken over previous earnings calls about the investment we are making in AI product innovation. Today I want to highlight how we are scaling AI enablement across cloud ways to drive efficiency and support acceleration of free cash flow. This is core enabler of a value creation plan and a key lever for margin expansion as we return to healthier organic growth. Let me provide some color and examples across Go to Market function we are embedding AI within sales and customer care to accelerate revenue growth, streamline customer interaction, enhance service quality and experience and increase retention in technology. We are deploying AI throughout software engineering and content operation to accelerate innovation and shorten new product time to market. Within corporate functions, we are leveraging AI across finance, human resources and legal function to automate workflows and drive scalable efficiencies. We expect the deployment of digital agents will reduce manual effort, improve accuracy and create operating leverage. Taken together, this AI enabled cost efficiencies reinforce our core messages as organic growth improve this AI efficiency, give us confidence in sustained margin expansion and and growing cash flow. To close the first quarter demonstrate that the action we put in place through the value creation plan are translating into stronger execution, improving fundamentals and clearer path forward. We are operating with greater focus, strengthening our business model, improving sales effectiveness and delivering innovation yet matter to our customers, all while maintaining strong discipline around cost and cash generation. Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. I will now turn the call over to Jonathan for a review of our financial results and outlook.

Jonathan Collins (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you Mahdi. Slide 14 is an overview of our first quarter results. Compared with the same period last year, Q1 revenue was 586 million. Change over the prior year was due to the inorganic disposals, partially offset by organic growth and a favorable foreign exchange impact. First quarter net loss was 40 million. The 64 million improvement over the prior year was driven by a foreign exchange benefit as well as lower restructuring income tax and interest expenses. Adjusted diluted eps was up nearly 30% or 4 cents over the prior year to 18 cents. The increase was attributed to adjusted EBITDA growth, lower interest expense, lower tax expense and a lower share count due to last year's repurchases which each contributed about a cent to growth. Operating cash flow was 135 million in the quarter. The change compared to last year was driven by higher working capital due to incentive compensation payments, partially offset by higher adjusted EBITDA. Please turn with me now to page 15 for a closer look at the drivers of the first quarter top and bottom line changes from the prior year. The changes over the prior year were driven by three primary factors. First, organic revenues grew modestly as subscription growth of nearly 2% was partially offset by lower reoccurring and transactional revenues. We delivered a strong profit conversion on the growth as operating expenses were lower than the prior year despite the higher revenues as we achieved cost efficiencies across the business. Second, the businesses we are disposing decreased revenue by 24 million but was almost entirely offset by cost reductions due to the wind downs yielding a net 3 million reduction in adjusted EBITDA. And finally, the US dollar remained relatively weaker against a basket of foreign currencies compared to the first quarter of last year which caused a foreign exchange tailwind on the top line. The mid teens profit conversion is due to transaction gains last year that did not recur this year. In total, disciplined cost management led to an adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of nearly 200 basis points, which is in line with our full year guidance. Please turn with me now to page 16 for a look at how the adjusted EBITDA converted to free cash flow and how we allocated the capital. Free cash flow was 79 million in the first quarter which was 31 million lower than the prior year. The change was due to higher working capital as a result of incentive compensation payments partially offset by the adjusted EBITDA growth. We used the free cash flow and excess cash on hand to Redeem the remaining 100 million of bonds that were due later this year, repurchased 43 million of bonds due in 28 and 29 at a blended discount of about 10% and repurchase 7 million shares of stock to offset the dilutive impact of stock compensation investing. Please turn with me now to page 17 for a look at our full year financial guidance which remains entirely unchanged from February. Today we are reaffirming our full year financial guidance for all metrics beginning at the top of the page. We anticipate the acceleration of our organic annual contract value last year will continue in 2026, resulting in growth of between 2 and 3% representing continued steady progress and an increase of about 3/4 of a percentage point at the midpoint of the range. We expect recurring organic growth of about 1.5% at the midpoint of our range, which is an improvement of nearly a percentage point over last year due entirely to the wind down of the businesses we are disposing. We expect revenue to decline by about 100 million at the midpoint of range to 2.36 billion and that our organic recurring revenue mix, which excludes the impact of the disposals, will improve to between 88 and 90%. Moving down the page, we expect adjusted EBITDA will grow modestly despite the lower revenue, increasing our profit margin to nearly 43% at the midpoint of the range. We anticipate adjusted diluted EPS will grow about 9% at the midpoint of the range to 75 cents, largely due to the share repurchases we completed last year. Finally, free cash flow is expected to grow by about 10% to $400 million at the midpoint of the range. Please turn with me now to page 18 for a reminder of the full year top and bottom line changes we are expecting compared to last year we expect adjusted EBITDA margin will expand by about 200 basis points at the midpoint of our ranges, driven by a return to organic growth, continued cost discipline and completing the disposals. We anticipate organic growth of about 1% led by subscription revenue growth from continued ACV acceleration. We have plans in place to achieve cost efficiencies to fully offset inflation, resulting in a full flow through of the approximately 25 million of revenue growth to profit. This will account for about a third of the profit margin expansion. The inorganic disposals are expected to lower revenue this year by approximately 130 million, and we are reducing operating expenses by more than 100 million, which yields a profit impact of about 25 million, delivering the remaining 2/3 of the profit margin expansion. As a reminder, our financial guidance for this year assumes we will own the LS&H business for the entire year and if an agreement is reached to sell the business, a revision to our guidance for this potential divestiture may be necessary later this year. We continue to anticipate a modest foreign exchange translation benefit to the top and bottom lines of 10 million and 5 million respectively, most of which we already experienced in the first quarter. Please turn with me now to page 19 to step through the expected seasonality of our revenues and profits this year, which we have refined based on our first quarter results. We continue to expect to make steady progress on the top and bottom lines as we move through the year. As we projected in February we experienced a slight sequential pullback in our annual contract value organic growth in Q1, but anticipate steady acceleration through the balance of the year to arrive near the midpoint of our range. Recurring organic revenue growth in Q1 of 1% was higher than we expected due largely to the timing of patent renewals. We do expect a slight pullback in Q2 as a result of this phasing, leading to accelerated growth in the second half of the year. We expect revenue will remain relatively stable over the next couple of quarters and then tick up in Q4. Due to the normal seasonality of reoccurring and transactional revenues, we do anticipate profit margins will continue to expand as we move through the remainder of the year due to the organic growth and the impact of the disposals. Please turn with me now to page 20 to review how we expect the more than 1 billion of adjusted EBITDA will convert to about 400 million of free cash flow and how we plan to allocate this capital at the midpoint of our range. We expect free cash flow to grow about 35 million or 10% over last year. One time costs are expected to abate primarily on lower restructuring costs. As noted a couple of pages ago, our guidance does not contemplate the sale of the LS&H segment if we reach an agreement, this is an area we would update later this year. We expect cash interest to improve by about 20 million over the prior year as a result of the debt we prepaid last year and last quarter. Additional debt we plan to prepay the remainder of this year and some savings associated with the projected forward base rate curve. Cash taxes are expected to be 5 to 10 million higher than last year due largely to the new corporate tax in Jersey. We anticipate the change in working capital this year will be a use of approximately 20 million, primarily due to the incentive compensation payments in Q1. We're also expecting a 10 million benefit associated with lower impaired contractual costs. And while we remain committed to investing in product innovation, the disposals and cost efficiencies will improve capital spending by about 15 million from a capital allocation perspective, we plan to use the free cash flow we generate in the remainder of the year for debt reduction. Please turn with me now to page 21 for more specifics on our deleveraging plan this year and beyond. The chart at the top of the page outlines our debt maturity profile. As you can see, we have a favorable Runway with no near term maturities. Over the past three years 23 through 25 we generated 1.2 billion of cumulative free cash flow, just over 100 million per quarter on average. As I highlighted on the prior page, we expect to generate approximately 400 million this year at the midpoint of our range and we expect to generate at least this amount next year and the following this outlook results in a similar average quarterly rate of about 100 million. Given the current debt market conditions, we plan to use our free cash flow moving forward towards the early retirement of our bonds. Over the next nine quarters, we expect to retire our secured notes in their entirety before their maturity in July of 28. Once those have been redeemed, we plan to use our quarterly free cash flow to begin to retire the 29 notes, leaving only a half a billion of the 1.8 billion of midterm maturities and to be refinanced in the next few years. It's worth noting that as with all of our forward looking guidance, this outlook includes our LS&H business. If the potential sale does materialize, we expect it would eliminate the need for a future bond refinancing. We anticipate these debt reduction actions will lower our net leverage from four turns at the end of Q1 of this year to approximately two and a half turns in a few years. We continue to be very encouraged by the improved results we are delivering as we implement the value creation plan and the durable cash flows we generate. I'd like to finish by thanking all of you for listening in this morning. I'll now turn the call back over to the operator to take your questions and as a reminder, please limit yourself to one question and then return to the queue for additional Please go ahead

OPERATOR

at this time. If you would like to ask a question, press Star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If your question has been answered and you would like to remove yourself from the queue, press star followed by the number one. We'll pause for a brief moment to compile the Q and A roster. Your first question is from the line of Tony Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Thank you. You've talked about your new AI capabilities that you've launched and reducing some of the manual repetitive work through AI efficiencies. I was hoping you could talk about the traction of the new AI products, the reception from customers, how much growth you're getting from them at this point, and similarly any ability to quantify the efficiency benefits that you can get from AI as well. That'd be great. Thank you so much.

Tony Kaplan (Equity Analyst)

Yeah, thank you Tony. I'll start and Jonathan will continue. So first of all we are intensifying our investment in AI. In the last 15, 18 months we

Jonathan Collins (Chief Financial Officer)

invest more and more into AI and it goes two ways. The first one that we started was a major product introduction and innovation around the three segments and then now we are shifting or moving also to internal cost efficiencies with AI. So I start with internal cost efficiencies. Our opportunities in go to market, customer support, sales operation. There are opportunities in technology to help us innovate and develop product faster with support of AI. There are Also opportunities around the corporate to rationalize some of our corporate costs, whether it's going to be finance, agile, legal. So there's a lot of opportunities internally, externally the product and this is what my patient is delivering innovation to our customer when it really matter. So three buckets of product innovation that we have on AI. One is the first wave of product that we improved were AI Assistant. So product by product. Many of our products we have implemented, we have implemented research assistant, we have implemented in different products in Engineering and then in life science and we are doing the same with ip. That was wave one, wave two was agent AI. We are implementing AI agent capabilities across our product where it matters and then just coming back from some of the feedback we get from some measurement that we've done in implementing agentic AI within our ALMA Prime Library product. Basically we have managed to reduce the manpower or to quadruple the throughput of some of our customers using agentic AI capabilities and it's just a start. And the third wave is ecosystem implementation. Ecosystem implementation. We all know that this generation, especially students, researchers, but also lab science scientists and IT professionals are consuming AI through the major LLM providers. So we've started the journey. We announced about a month ago that we are collaborating with Anthropic to provide AI capabilities within anthropic enterprise customers. Taking the CRI proprietary products that we have or CRI proprietary data that we have and collaboration with Anthropic, we are enabling the consumption of this data in the anthropic environment. In a way we are turning the LLM into a sales agent meaning our customers where they are on top of this. Yesterday we have announced another product from the NG called Nexus Connect. If you think about universities, they subscribe to a lot of different content and again students researchers are consuming this content through different type of LLM. And Nexus Connect is our new offering from Ang that brings the data into ChatGPT Copilot, whatever your designated LLM using our technology will bring the content, our content, but also other people content very close to our customers. So overall a lot of energy going into and a lot of resources going into AI innovation. And you know that we just been awarded from outsell recognition that we are the front leader in terms of AI innovation in the academic ecosystem. It's been a long answer but I'll move it over to Jonathan to talk a little bit about the financials. Yeah, I appreciate the part of the question Tony. With respect to the opportunity size in the AI efficiency, internally we outlined the areas that we're focusing on there and at this point we are confident that the opportunity set here gives us a really good opportunity to continue to expand our margins and grow our cash flows. I think we're likely going to look to further dimension this probably later this year. Thank you for the questions.

OPERATOR

Thank you. Thank you. Your next question is from the line of Manavik Patnik with Barclays.

Manavik Patnik

Thank you, Maddie. I was hoping you could just give us an update on how you see the competitive environment out there. You know, presumably they are using AI and enhancing their products as well. And just curious if you've seen, you know, any change, a way to compare your initiatives versus what you're seeing in the market.

Maddie Shemtov (Chief Executive Officer)

I think I've just mentioned that, you know, outsource did recognize us as AI innovator. We see a great adoption for our AI product across the, you know, the three different segments. You know, you mentioned this. We have in AMG we have more than 400 institutions using academic AI solution. I mentioned Nexus Connect, lab science. Over 10,000 researchers and users are using some of our AI product innovation including I mean recently announced the cloud Entropic collaboration. We're doing well with IP as well with the recent brand image set that we have introduced. So we look forward, we always look forward. We try to set the scene as opposed to look at what competition do. But we feel good about our product innovation. We come from a background of products and engineering, many of us and I think we see a lot of improvement and great feedback from from our customers across the three different segments. Thanks.

Scott Wurtzel

Your next question is from the line of Scott Wurtzel with Research.

Matthew

Good morning guys. Thank you for taking my question. Matthew, I think in your prepared remarks you talked about sort of the China opportunity and expanding there and wondering if you can maybe just talk about that, you know, China sort of ang space, space more broadly and the opportunity that presents to you guys. Thanks.

OPERATOR

Yeah, China, China is a great contributor to our AI, to our ang capabilities and performance. It's been the. We just, you know, came back from a meeting with some of our Chinese top sales executive. We have sold 15 new web of Science did this in China last year. So there's a lot of great momentum going for ang in China, specifically in Web of Science and more recently also in Web of Science, research, intelligence, some development, collaboration. We do, we feel very good about our ang prospect in China. Not only amg, also life science in ip. We have different ideas that we are currently contemplating. We share more than once we have, but we feel good about the China market. Thanks for your question, Scott. As a reminder to ask a question, press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question is from the line of Ashish Sabhadra with RBC Capital Markets.

Ashish Sabhadra

Hey, good morning guys. This is Will Chi on first Chiefs of Padre. Appreciate you guys taking our question. Great to see kind of the continued sequential improvements on the organic sales metrics. I think IP kind of continues to execute in a bit of a more muted environment. I think you guys have noted in the past that there are some expectations for that to improve maybe kind of back half 26 into early 27 as some of those historical batch renewal cycles come back. Is that the general kind of trend that you expect for that segment? And you guys have had kind of great wins as well. How do you kind of, kind of combine all those together?

Jonathan Collins (Chief Financial Officer)

I'll start and after Jonathan to add. So just remind us that we are the market leader in ip. We tend to forget this and we are the only company and this has been a lot of my focus and a lot of my discussion has been around we are the only company that have all the three or four sub, you know, offering that we have in IP. We are very big on IP. We have great IPMS product and we have great intelligence products both for the trademark and for the patent as well. We brought in new management team, we brought in Maroon as a new manager and we have an enhanced focus, very strong focus in two things, sales execution. We've gone through some kind of changes or some changes into our sales organization, renewals, territory alignment and other things that we've done in the sales execution is much stronger and much, it's better focused and then AI innovation, very strong AI innovation momentum that we are building with the management of, with the management team of IP Riskmark was one product we mentioned. We're now talking about brand image search as I mentioned as well. We are confident in the return for IP back to future growth. And Jonathan, if you can give some more color here. Yeah. As Marty highlighted the continued investment in AI, we help, we expect to help accelerate growth in our subscription products there. So we noted that we've made some steady progress. We saw slight improvement in renewal rates in the first quarter and we've got an organic ACV that's getting pretty close to flat after a few years of decline. So steady progress based on the investments that we're making there. The biggest part of the IP business, the reoccurring revenue stream, which is our patent renewal business, that's a business that two years ago declined a few percent last year, was flat first half of this year due to the comps and some timing from the first half of last year will be down slightly. But we do expect that business to return to growth in the second half of this year and a good trajectory heading into next year. Market conditions there, the patent stock growth has improved over the last few years, which is a good leading indicator and the team, as Maddie said, has done a very good job on sales execution, improving our competitive position in that part of the market. So it's continued progress and we look forward to better performance from IP in the, in the coming quarters and into next year. Thanks for the question, Will.

Will Chi

Thank you very much.

George Tong

Your next question is from the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs.

Jonathan Collins (Chief Financial Officer)

Hi, thanks. Good morning. Transactional revenues were down this quarter because of lower A and G activity. Can you talk a little bit more about what you're seeing there and what would need to happen for activity to rebound? Yeah, thanks for the question, George. Look, our transactional revenues were down a couple percent in Q1 as you noted. A and G was the primary driver in the quarter. I will start by saying we do expect on a full year basis. Our guidance does contemplate that the transactional business will be down slightly compared to the prior year. So it was as expected in the quarter. Some of that in AMG was due to the timing of software implementations. That can be a little lumpy quarter to quarter. And then on a full year basis as we continue to have success in Life Sciences with the migrations to subscription, we will expect to see a little bit of a headwind there on the transactional side. But Q1's slight decline was in line with what we expected and is in line with what we expect for the full year. As we move into next year, continue to build that sales pipeline on the software products. There's some opportunity to improve that heading into next year. But that was the primary driver in Q1.

George Tong

Very helpful. Thank you.

Andrew Nicholas

Your next question is from the line of Andrew Nicholas with William Blair.

Jonathan Collins (Chief Financial Officer)

Good morning. Appreciate you taking my question. I was hoping to hone in a little bit more on AMG growth. You know that's, that's been a segment that's, that's hung in there pretty well over the past handful of quarters. Within that 2% organic growth and the expectation for, you know, improvement in 26 are there is research, analytics and content aggregation kind of leading the way there or is it a software led growth or are they all kind of around that 2% number? Just curious if there's an underlying kind of subsegment there where you have more expectation for growth acceleration. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question, Andrew. I think the bright spot for us as of late in A and G from an organic growth contribution standpoint has been the success in our research and analytics category, which is led by our flagship product, the Weta Science. As Mahdi touched on in his comments around AI innovation, this is where we've seen a lot of the new innovation come into the product. So very encouraged by the adoption of the research assistant last year, some of the agents that we've deployed that we're getting great feedback on, such as the literature review agent and then we're also very thrilled about this year's growth that will help to be driven from the Web of Science research intelligence platform. So that's the new AI native multi agent platform that helps to measure research success across the university ecosystem. So really encouraged by what we've seen there, the content business is held in, that usually grows at or slightly below the average for A and G. And then the software business is doing well, very high renewal rates. You know, we've got some new product innovation happening there that can help to catalyze further growth there. But those are the three main areas and really the strong performance has been in our research and analytics category. Thanks for the question, Andrew.

Adam Parrington

Our last question comes from the line of Adam Parrington with Stifel.

Jonathan Collins (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, Adam, thanks for the question. You know, this is our, this is our segment that has the highest proportion of transactional revenue. So just as a reminder, you know, our consulting practice for commercialization which sits in the life sciences business is a, is an important part of the go to market motion for this. But it, it creates a lower organic recurring revenue mix within life sciences. What Mari touched on slide 10 is that we have continued to invest in product innovation to migrate some of these solutions to a subscription. We started to see progress on that last year, that continues into this year. And we expect to continue to make steady progress making that business more predictable with a higher renewal base every year to help accelerate and return it to growth. So it's a combination of the commercial motion where we're focused in the marketplace and the product innovation that's helping to lead that so we expect to see continued traction there. And as Marty's touched on before, over time we think we can see the recurring revenue mix get into the, into the low 90s and life science will Thanks for the question, Adam.

Maddie Shemtov (Chief Executive Officer)

Maybe just if I'm allowed a few words of, you know, wrap up. Just as I mentioned over the call, the VCP plan is working. This is the fifth quarter of improvement. Our subscription mix has gone to 80, 89%. We have better execution and sales execution and we are industry innovator in terms of AI. We're very pleased to be here today and thank you for your time.

OPERATOR

Thank you all for your time today. That concludes our call and we look forward to speaking you with any follow up questions in the coming days. Thank you. This does conclude today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines. Thank you.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.