Appian (APPN) Risk Analysis

Our success and ability to compete depend in part on our ability to protect our proprietary technology and intellectual property. To safeguard these rights, we rely on a combination of patent, trademark, copyright, and trade secret laws and contractual protections in the United States and other jurisdictions, all of which provide only limited protection and may not now or in the future provide us with a competitive advantage. As of December 31, 2024, we had 21 issued patents and 20 pending patent applications related to our platform and its technology. We have registered the "Appian" name and logo in the United States and certain other countries. We have registrations and/or pending applications for additional marks in the United States. We cannot provide assurance any current or future applications for registrations for patent or trademark applications will result in the grant of any valid, enforceable intellectual property rights. Further, we cannot provide assurance any granted patent or trademark will provide the protection we seek, will be valid if challenged, or will be sufficiently broad in actions against alleged infringers. Moreover, any of our granted intellectual property rights may be rendered invalid by future changes in the law, defects in our prosecution processes, or preexisting technology, rights, or marks. In order to protect our unpatented proprietary technologies and processes, we rely on trade secret laws and confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees, consultants, strategic partners, vendors, and others. Despite our efforts to protect our proprietary technology and trade secrets, unauthorized parties may attempt to misappropriate, copy, reverse engineer, or otherwise obtain and use them. In addition, others may independently discover our trade secrets, in which case we would not be able to assert trade secret rights or develop similar technologies and processes. Further, the contractual provisions we enter into may not prevent unauthorized use or disclosure of our proprietary technology or intellectual property rights and may not provide an adequate remedy in the event of any such unauthorized use or disclosure. Policing unauthorized use of our technologies, trade secrets, and intellectual property is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly in foreign countries where the laws may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States and where mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be weak. To the extent we expand our activities outside of the United States, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our platform and proprietary information may increase. We may be unable to determine the extent of any unauthorized use or infringement of our platform, technologies, or intellectual property rights. There can be no assurance the steps we take will be adequate to protect our proprietary technology and intellectual property, that others will not develop or patent similar or superior technologies, products or services, or that our trademarks, patents, and other intellectual property will not be challenged, invalidated, or circumvented by others. Furthermore, effective trademark, patent, copyright, and trade secret protection may not be available in every country in which our software is available or where we have employees or independent contractors. In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect these rights. Litigation brought to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights has been and could be costly, time-consuming, and distracting to management and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Furthermore, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims, and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights. Our failure to secure, protect, and enforce our intellectual property rights could seriously adversely affect our brand and impact our business.

The emerging technologies described as AI, which include machine learning, application of large language models, generative AI, and similar means of algorithm self-generation have the ability to affect the market for our software by directing what are now human-orchestrated processes into machine-orchestrated processes. In recent years, AI technologies have been the subject of great interest to our customers and to followers of our markets, and these technologies have been showcased and subject to substantial interest among our customer base. Should we either fail to adopt or integrate with emerging AI technologies that show benefits to our customers or AI technologies for code generation or application development reduce the demand for our process automation platform, we could struggle to continue to grow our business or lose business with existing customers to such technologies. We have incorporated, and may continue to incorporate, AI in our products and services, and this incorporation of AI in our business and operations may become more significant over time. The use of generative AI, a technology that has evolved significantly over the years, exposes us to additional risks such as damage to our reputation, competitive position, business, legal, and regulatory risks, and additional costs. For example, generative AI has been known to produce false or "hallucinatory" inferences or output, and certain generative AI uses machine learning and predictive analytics, which can create inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading content, unintended biases, and other discriminatory or unexpected results, errors, or inadequacies, any of which may not be easily detectable by us or any of our related service providers. While we make efforts to implement and use AI products and services to improve the accuracy and reduce the chances of hallucinatory outputs, we cannot completely eliminate the chances of inaccurate or false outputs. Moreover, given we rely on third party providers for underlying large language model technology, as do many others in the software industry, we do not have full access to the underlying software code to address such issues. If the content, analyses, or recommendations produced by any of our products or services that use or incorporate generative AI are, or are perceived to be, deficient, inaccurate, biased, unethical or otherwise flawed, our reputation, competitive position and business may be materially and adversely affected. In addition, new laws and regulations, or the interpretation of existing laws and regulations, in any of the jurisdictions we operate may affect our ability to leverage AI in any of our products and services and may expose us to government enforcement or civil suits. As the legal and regulatory framework encompassing AI matures, it may result in increases in our operational and development expenses that impact our ability to develop, earn revenue from, or utilize any products or services incorporating AI. Additionally, if any of our employees, contractors, vendors or service providers use any third-party software incorporating AI in connection with our business or the services they provide to us, it may lead to the inadvertent disclosure or incorporation of our confidential, sensitive or proprietary information into publicly available training sets which may impact our ability to realize the benefit of, or adequately maintain, protect and enforce our intellectual property or sensitive or confidential information, harming our competitive position and business. Our ability to mitigate risks associated with disclosure of our proprietary, sensitive or confidential information, including in connection with the use of AI, will depend on our implementation, maintenance, monitoring and enforcement of appropriate technical and administrative safeguards, policies, and procedures governing the use of AI in our business. In the U.S., a number of civil lawsuits have been initiated related to the foregoing and other concerns, any of which may, amongst other things, require us to limit the ways in which AI tools and technologies are trained, refined or implemented, and may affect our ability to develop products or services using or incorporating AI. Furthermore, our competitors, customers, or other third parties may incorporate AI into their products more quickly or more successfully than us, which could impair our ability to compete effectively. Given we rely on third party providers for underlying large language model technology, our ability to differentiate our AI offerings from our competitors could be limited. Further, to the extent other, larger technology companies with greater resources and market power gain exclusive or advantageous access to large language model providers, our ability to offer competing AI services could be negatively impacted. The increasing use of generative AI by third parties may also negatively impact the integrity of our own proprietary data, data sets, and content databases if and to the extent any invalid, inaccurate, biased, or otherwise flawed data produced by any such AI systems may inadvertently be incorporated in our proprietary data, data sets, or content databases, negatively affecting our reputation, and the value of our proprietary data, data sets, or content databases. As generative AI and other AI tools are relatively new, sophisticated, and evolving quickly, we cannot predict all of the risks that may arise from our current or future use of AI in our business. Any of the foregoing and any similar issues, whether actual or perceived, could negatively impact our customers' experience and diminish the perceived quality and value of our products and services. This in turn could damage our brand, reputation, competitive position, and business.

The markets for process automation platforms, business process management, case management software, and custom software are highly competitive, rapidly evolving, and have relatively low barriers to entry. The principal competitive factors in our market include the following: platform features, reliability, performance, and effectiveness; ease of use and speed; data fabric; utilization of AI; platform extensibility and ability to integrate with other technology infrastructures; deployment flexibility; robustness of professional services and customer support; price and total cost of ownership; strength of platform security and adherence to industry standards and certifications; strength of sales and marketing efforts; and brand awareness and reputation. If we fail to compete effectively with respect to any of these competitive factors, we may fail to attract new customers or lose or fail to renew existing customers, which would cause our operating results to suffer. Our main competitors fall into four categories: (1) providers of custom software and customer software solutions that address, or are developed to address, some of the use cases that can be addressed by applications developed on our platform; (2) providers of low-code development platforms; and (3) providers of one or more automation technologies, including BPM, case management, process mining, and RPA and (4) potential customers using their own internal technology departments to develop, build, and modify their own proprietary systems. Some of our actual and potential competitors have advantages over us such as longer operating histories, more established relationships with current or potential customers and commercial partners, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing, or other resources, stronger brand recognition, larger intellectual property portfolios, and broader global distribution and presence. Such competitors may make their solutions available at a low cost or no cost basis in order to enhance their overall relationships with current or potential customers. Our competitors may also be able to respond more quickly and effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards, or customer requirements, including with respect to AI. With the introduction of AI and new market entrants, we expect competition to intensify in the future. In addition, some of our larger competitors have substantially broader offerings and can bundle competing products with other software offerings. As a result, customers may choose a bundled offering from our competitors, even if individual products have more limited functionality than our platform. These larger competitors are also often in a better position to withstand any significant reduction in capital spending and will therefore not be as susceptible to economic downturns.

We believe our future success will depend in large part on growth in the demand for process automation platforms to drive software-enabled process automation. It is difficult to predict customer demand for our platform, renewal rates, the rate at which existing customers expand their subscriptions, the size and growth rate of the market for our platform, the entry of competitive products, or the success of existing competitive products. Any expansion in our addressable market depends on a number of factors, including businesses continuing to desire to differentiate themselves through software-enabled process automation, increasing their reliance on process automation solutions, changes in the competitive landscape, technological changes, including due to advancements in AI, budgetary constraints of our customers, and changes in economic conditions. If our platform does not achieve widespread adoption or there is a reduction in demand for process automation solutions caused by these factors, it could result in reduced customer purchases, reduced renewal rates, and decreased revenue, any of which will adversely affect our business, operating results, and financial condition.

We derive, and expect to increasingly derive in the future, a substantial portion of our revenue from the sale of software subscriptions. For 2024, 2023, and 2022, approximately 79.5%, 75.6%, and 72.7%, respectively, of our total revenue was subscriptions revenue. In order for us to improve our operating results, it is important our customers renew their subscriptions with us when their initial term expires as well as purchase additional subscriptions from us. In general, our customers have no renewal obligation after their initial term expires, and we cannot provide assurance we will be able to renew subscriptions with any of our customers at the same or higher contract value. Further, while we offer access to our platform primarily through multi-year subscription agreements, some agreements may have shorter durations. Additionally, some of our contracts limit the amount we can increase prices from period to period or include pricing guarantees. If our customers do not renew their agreements, terminate their agreements, renew their agreements on terms less favorable to us, or fail to purchase additional software subscriptions, our revenue may decline and our operating results would likely be harmed as a result.

The future success of our business, and particularly our cloud offering, depends upon the continued use of the internet as a primary medium for commerce, communication, and business applications. Federal, state, or foreign government bodies or agencies have in the past adopted, and may in the future adopt, laws or regulations affecting the use of the internet as a commercial medium. Changes in these laws or regulations could require us to modify our platform in order to comply with these changes. In addition, government agencies or private organizations may begin to impose taxes, fees, or other charges for accessing the internet or commerce conducted via the internet. These laws or charges could limit the growth of internet-related commerce or communications generally, resulting in reductions in the demand for internet-based solutions such as ours. In addition, the use of the internet as a business tool could be adversely affected due to delays in the development or adoption of new standards and protocols to handle increased demands of internet activity, security, reliability, cost, ease of use, accessibility, and quality of service. The performance of the internet and its acceptance as a business tool have been adversely affected by viruses, worms, and similar malicious programs, along with distributed denial of service and similar attacks. As a result, the internet has experienced a variety of outages and other delays as a result of such damage to or attacks on portions of its infrastructure. If the use of the internet is adversely affected by these issues, demand for our platform could suffer.

We currently collect and remit sales and use, value added, and other transaction taxes in certain of the jurisdictions where we do business based on our assessment of whether tax is owed by us in such jurisdictions. However, in some jurisdictions in which we do business, we do not believe we owe such taxes, and therefore we currently do not collect and remit such taxes or record contingent tax liabilities in those jurisdictions. Further, due to uncertainty in the application and interpretation of applicable tax laws in various jurisdictions, we may be exposed to sales and use, value added, or other transaction tax liability. A successful assertion that we are required to pay additional taxes in connection with sales of our platform, or the imposition of new laws or regulations requiring the payment of additional taxes, would create increased costs and administrative burdens for us. If we are subject to additional taxes and determined to offset such increased costs by collecting and remitting sales taxes from our customers, or otherwise passing those costs through to our customers, companies may be discouraged from using our platform. Any increased tax burden may decrease our ability or willingness to compete in relatively burdensome tax jurisdictions, result in substantial tax liabilities related to past sales, or otherwise harm our business and operating results. In addition, as a multinational organization, we may be subject to taxation in several jurisdictions around the world with increasingly complex tax laws and the amount of taxes we pay in these jurisdictions could increase substantially as a result of changes in the applicable tax principles, including increased tax rates, new tax laws, or revised interpretations of existing tax laws and precedents. Furthermore, the authorities in these jurisdictions could review our tax returns and impose additional tax, interest, and penalties, and the authorities could claim various withholding requirements apply to us or our subsidiaries or assert benefits of tax treaties are not available to us or our subsidiaries, any of which could have a material impact on us and the results of our operations.

General worldwide economic conditions have experienced significant instability due to the global economic uncertainty and financial market conditions caused by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and unrest in the Middle East. In addition, inflation rates in the recent past rose to historically high levels. The existence of inflation in the U.S. and global economy has, and may continue to result in, higher interest rates and capital costs, increased costs of labor, fluctuating exchange rates, and other similar effects. These conditions make it extremely difficult for customers and us to accurately forecast and plan future business activities and could cause customers to reduce or delay their software spending. At this time, the potential impact on customer spend from an economic slowdown is difficult to predict and, therefore, it is not possible to fully determine the impact on our future results. Historically, economic downturns have resulted in overall reductions in software spending. If macroeconomic conditions deteriorate or are characterized by uncertainty or volatility, customers may curtail or freeze spending on software in general and for software such as ours specifically, which could have an adverse impact on our business, financial condition, and operating results. Furthermore, we cannot predict the timing, strength, or duration of any economic slowdown or recovery. In addition, even if the overall economy is robust, we cannot provide assurances the market for services such as ours will experience growth or that we will experience growth.

Our software incorporates certain third-party software obtained under licenses from other companies, including database software from Kx Systems. We anticipate we will continue to rely on such third-party software and development tools from third parties in the future. Although we believe there are commercially reasonable alternatives to the third-party software we currently license, including open source software, this may not always be the case, or it may be difficult or costly to migrate to other third-party software. Our use of additional or alternative third-party software would require us to enter into license agreements with third parties. In addition, integration of the third-party software used in our software with new third-party software may require significant work and require substantial investment of our time and resources. Also, any undetected errors or defects in third-party software could prevent the deployment or impair the functionality of our software, delay new updates or enhancements to our platform, or result in a failure of our platform, injuring our reputation.