Wix (WIX) unveiled accelerated progress on its artificial-intelligence initiatives at Citi's 2026 Global TMT Conference on September 8, including a sharp ramp in its Base44 platform and a new standalone business-operations tool.
Base44 annual recurring revenue rose to $150 million by mid-May from $100 million in early March, representing a roughly 50% increase in about 2½ months, said Nir Zohar, president and COO. The product, which offers natural-language app building through what the company describes as "vibe coding," began selling annual subscriptions in August 2023.
Zohar attributed much of the momentum to proprietary models. Wix's internal Harmony large-language model and its Base 1 system cut inference costs to approximately 5% of comparable frontier-model alternatives, he said, lowering a key barrier to scaling AI-native features across the business.
Lior Shemesh, CFO, reported that Base44 gross margins reached 60% in the second half of 2024. He framed the relationship between margins and time-to-return-on-investment as a risk-management lever rather than a fixed metric, noting the company expects a payback period slightly longer than 12 months.
Also introduced roughly three weeks before the conference was Symphony by Wix, an AI operations platform the company intends to sell to businesses that are not current Wix customers, giving it an independent total addressable market outside its core website builder.
Wix outlined a broader set of creation pathways. Customers can still use traditional drag-and-drop site building — now integrated with Google Gemini — or build on Base44's AI-native interface, while headless integrations are aimed at engineers who want to layer external front ends onto Wix's commerce and services stack.
On the go-to-market side, the company hired a vice president of sales to lead enterprise outreach for Base44 and said it is speaking with "tens of top agencies" that it hopes will evolve into strategic advisors for AI-enabled business operations.
Shemesh acknowledged near-term booking pressure from partner-channel headwinds, noting a $50 million impact absorbed in June. Zohar cautioned that AI adoption would raise — not reduce — the complexity of how people interact with websites, reflecting the company's view that the technology deepens rather than simplifies digital workflows.
When pressed on forward guidance, Zohar declined to offer detailed forecasts, telling the audience: "I do not think my job at this time is to try to foresee the future. First of all, I am happy that is not my job because I am going to miserably fail." He also quipped that replacing a CFO was "really, really hard."
