FRSH Boosts Customer & Employee Service With Freddy Agentic AI Platform
A key aspect of this release is the Freddy AI Agent Studio — a no-code platform empowering support teams to build and launch AI agents without needing technical expertise. The Studio empowers support teams to reduce ticket backlogs, minimize handoffs and maintain consistent, high-quality customer experiences without coding. Key components of this tool are Skills Library, which is a collection of pre-built action templates for popular platforms like Shopify and Stripe and Skills Builder — a visual environment to design custom skills for agents to autonomously handle actions such as returns or refunds.
Email remains a core support channel, and Freddy AI is transforming it with automation that understands and acts. The Freddy AI Agent for Email reads and interprets incoming emails, generates contextual replies and automatically closes tickets when issues are resolved. This helps reduce first-response times from hours to minutes. Repetitive email issues are resolved autonomously, and support capacity increases without growing headcount.Freddy AI is also transforming employee experience with a smarter, unified search agent that fetches answers from enterprise platforms. It integrates with tools like Slack, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. Support is also available in 40+ languages, ensuring global inclusivity and is backed by enterprise-grade security.For IT and service desk teams, Freshworks is also introducing Freddy AI Insights for Freshservice, which replaces manual analysis with intelligent monitoring. Key highlights are Root Cause Analysis maps, anomaly detection and trend monitoring and metrics for SLA compliance, workforce planning and satisfaction.Freddy AI Copilot helps service teams work faster and smarter by handling support tasks such as writing clear replies, linking related issues and creating helpful documents. New features include Intelligent Related Changes, which identify likely causes of problems by checking recent system changes in Freshservice. Reply Suggestions Copilot reads tickets, checks the knowledge base and recommends responses in Freshdesk. With these updates, Freddy becomes a smart support partner.
Since its debut in 2023, Freddy AI has helped more than 5,000 organizations automate and enhance their service operations. Among the beneficiaries are Hobbycraft, which has automated 30% of customer queries and boosted CSAT by 25%. Bergzeit auto-triaged 200,000+ tickets and cut translation workloads by 75% and Five9 deflected 65% of IT requests, saving 200+ hours/month. iPostal1 resolved 54% of queries with Freddy AI and scaled to 1.3 million accounts without extra cost, enabling it to expand to 3,500+ locations.These success stories prove that Freddy delivers measurable outcomes that matter.
To help organizations onboard Freddy quickly, Freshworks is rolling out a suite of resources, including Freshworks University, with tutorials, real-world use cases and live help. AI Academy for Partners is training channel partners to accelerate sales and deployment, and AI Professional Services facilities custom rollout support for enterprise clients. In addition, the company provides In-product assistance with videos, workflows and step-by-step guides.Freshworks' Freddy Agentic AI is especially valuable for growing companies that lack deep AI engineering teams offering enterprise-grade automation without complexity. With Freddy, even resource-constrained teams can deploy autonomous resolution at scale, driving higher efficiency, faster resolutions and better customer experiences without heavy investments.
FRSH currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Shares of the company have gained 23.5% in the past year compared with the Zacks Internet – Software industry's growth of 35.8%.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Some better-ranked stocks from the broader technology space are Juniper Networks, Inc. JNPR, Arista Networks, Inc. ANET and Ubiquiti Inc. UI. JNPR presently sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), while ANET and UI carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.
Juniper is leveraging the 400-gig cycle to capture hyperscale switching opportunities inside the data center. The company is set to capitalize on the increasing demand for data center virtualization, cloud computing and mobile traffic packet/optical convergence. Juniper also introduced new features within the AI-driven enterprise portfolio that enable customers to simplify the rollout of their campus wired and wireless networks while bringing greater insight to network operators. In the last reported quarter, it delivered an earnings surprise of 4.88%.Arista delivered a trailing four-quarter average earnings surprise of 11.82% and has a long-term growth expectation of 14.81%. Arista currently serves five verticals, namely cloud titans (customers that deploy more than 1 million servers, cloud specialty providers, service providers, financial services and the rest of the enterprise. It supplies products to a prestigious set of customers, including Fortune 500 global companies in markets such as cloud titans, enterprises, financials and specialty cloud service providers.Ubiquiti's effective management of its strong global network of more than 100 distributors and master resellers improved its visibility for future demand and inventory management techniques. In the last reported quarter, Ubiquiti delivered an earnings surprise of 33.3%. Its highly flexible global business model remains well-suited to adapt to the changing market dynamics to overcome challenges while maximizing growth.
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That's over 12% higher than the prior price target of $136.66 in my July 16 Barchart article ("Shopify Stock is a Bargain - How to Make a 3% One-Month Yield with SHOP"). Shopify's Strong Free Cash Flow and FCF Margins Shopify reported $422 million in free cash flow (FCF) for Q2 on Aug. 6. That was +26.7% higher than last year's $333 million and +16.3% higher than the $363 million in Q1. However, this was also a very high percentage of sales, despite the latter rising +31% Y/Y. This can be seen in the company's Q2 and Q1 tables below. The point is that FCF was 15.75% of revenue, on par with last year's 16.3% and higher than the 15.37% FCF margin in Q1. However, over the trailing 12 months (TTM) ending June 30, the FCF margin was even higher at 18.14% (i.e., $1.817 billion on $10.014 billion in TTM sales). That was even higher than the 18.0% FCF margin in 2024. This data can be seen in Stock Analysis's TTM Cash Flow data. The point is that Shopify is squeezing out ever higher portions of its revenue even as sales increase very strongly. For example, management said in its Outlook section on page 2 of the Q2 earnings release that it expects Q3 FCF margins to be in the mid to high teens in Q3. That implies its Q3 margins could rise to 18% or higher. We can use that to project its next 12-month (NTM) FCF and then set a price target. Forecasting Shopify's FCF For example, analysts now forecast that 2025 sales will be $11.25 billion. That is higher than the $10.88 billion forecast quoted in my July 13 Barchart using the same source, Seeking Alpha. So, using an 18% FCF margin estimate for 2025: $11.25 billion 2025 revenue x 0.18 = $2.025 billion FCF 2025 And for 2026, using analysts' $13.66 billion sales estimates: $13.55 billion 2026 revenue x 18% = $2.439 billion FCF 2026 As a result, the average NTM FCF estimate is $2.232 billion. That is almost 12% higher than the $1.817 billion in TTM FCF. As a result, Shopify's valuation could likely rise. Let's see why. Price Target for SHOP Stock Shopify does not pay a dividend. But, if it were to do so, the payments would come out of the free cash flow the company generates. Let's assume that it pays out 50% of its FCF over the coming 12 months. What would the dividend yield be? That will allow us to value SHOP stock. For example, the market already values Shopify stock at less than a 1.0% FCF yield. This can be seen by dividing the $1.8 billion in TTM FCF by its present market cap of $194.8 billion. $1.817b / $194.8b = 0.0093 = 0.93% yield Therefore, if we assume that its future FCF is valued at 1.0% of its present market cap, here is what that means: $2.232 billion / 0.01 = $223.2 billion market cap For example, if it paid out $1.116 billion and the market gave the stock a 0.5% dividend yield, its implied market cap is: $1.116b / 0.005 = $223.2 billion market cap That market cap is +14.6% higher than today's market cap of $194.8 billion. That means that SHOP stock is worth +14.6% more: $149.70 x 1.146 = $171.55 per share How to Play This Shorting OTM Puts One way to play this is to sell short out-of-the-money (OTM) puts in nearby expiry periods. I discussed this in my July 13 Barchart article. For example, I suggested shorting the Aug. 15 $100 put strike price for a midpoint price of $3.28 per put contract. That provided an immediate 3.28% yield on investment for the short seller. There is every indication that this put will expire worthless on Friday, as it is trading today for just 2 cents, so the trade will be successful. This high-yield short-put play can now be repeated to set a lower potential buy-in point for an investor in SHOP stock. For example, the Sept. 5 put expiry period shows that the $144.00 strike price, 4% below today's trading price, has a midpoint premium of $3.50. That provides an immediate yield of 2.43% (i.e., $3.50/$144.00). This allows a new potential investor in SHOP stock to set a lower buy-in point. For existing investors, it provides additional income and a way to potentially reduce their average cost. For example, to do this trade, an investor first secures $14,400 in cash and/or buying power with their brokerage firm. That acts as collateral to potentially buy 100 shares at $144.00 in case the account is assigned to buy those shares if SHOP falls to $144.00 on or before Sept. 5. But, in return, the account also immediately receives $350.00. So the investor has made an immediate yield of $350/$14,400, or 2.43% on the collateral posted. If SHOP does not fall to $144.00, the investor's account still keeps that income. As a result, the net potential breakeven point, even if SHOP falls to $144.00, is just $140.50. That is 5.8% below the trading price today. So, this is a way to set a lower buy-in point with good downside protection. The bottom line is that SHOP stock looks undervalued here, given its huge FCF margins. One way to profitably play this is to short out-of-the-money (OTM) puts in nearby expiry periods. On the date of publication, Mark R. Hake, CFA did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
