Shares of DocuSign tanked 18% in trading on Friday, a day after the e-signature provider reported stronger-than-expected earnings but slashed its full-year billings outlook.

Here’s how the company performed in the fiscal first quarter, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:

• Earnings per share: 90 cents, adjusted, vs. 81 cents expected
• Revenue: $764 million vs. $748 million expected

Billings, a closely-watched sales metric, came in at $739.6 million in the fiscal first quarter, which ended April 30. That was lower than the $746 million expected by analysts, according to StreetAccount. It also fell short of the company’s own forecast, which guided for billings between $741 million and $751 million.

For the current fiscal year, DocuSign said it expects billings of $3.28 billion to $3.34 billion, down from a range of $3.3 billion to $3.35 billion.

In the first quarter of DocuSign’s 2026 fiscal year, revenue jumped 8% year over year to $764 million. Subscription revenue increased 8% from the same period a year ago to $746.2 million.

DocuSign reported net income of $72.1 million, or 34 cents per share, compared to net income of $33.8 million, or 16 cents per share, a year earlier.

For the fiscal second quarter, the company expects revenue to be between $777 million and $781 million, compared to consensus estimates of $775 million, according to LSEG. For the full fiscal year, DocuSign projected revenue of $3.15 billion to $3.16 billion. Analysts were expecting $3.14 billion, according to LSEG.

The company also announced an additional $1 billion stock buyback, taking its share repurchase plan to $1.4 billion.

DocuSign shares are down more than 16% year to date.

WATCH: AI-efficient and flush with capital: 2025 startups and a VC’s advice to founders

LONDON — The U.K. is set to lift a ban on a key type of crypto debt security in a bid to catch up to the U.S. and other financial hubs as it looks to become a global hub for digital assets.

On Friday, the Financial Conduct Authority, the U.K.’s main regulator for financial services, announced a proposal to reverse its ban on offering crypto exchange-traded notes to retail investors.

Exchange-traded notes are a type of debt instrument that are linked to one or more specified assets — cryptocurrencies, in this case. In essence, they allow investors to gain exposure to digital tokens through the use of a regulated exchange.

Sales of crypto ETNs to retail investors have been prohibited in the U.K. since the FCA put in place a ban in 2019 due to concerns over the potential harms they pose to consumers.

On Friday, however, the FCA said it proposed lifting the ban on crypto ETNs “to support UK growth and competitiveness.” A restriction on crypto derivatives will remain in place, the watchdog added.

“This consultation demonstrates our commitment to supporting the growth and competitiveness of the UK’s crypto industry,” David Geale, executive director of payments and digital assets at the FCA, said in a statement.

“We want to rebalance our approach to risk and lifting the ban would allow people to make the choice on whether such a high-risk investment is right for them, given they could lose all their money.”

In April, the U.K. government published draft legislation for the crypto sector with the goal of making the country a “world leader in digital assets.” The FCA is separately working through a detailed roadmap of consultations and discussion papers with a view to implement a regulatory regime for crypto by 2026.

“Until now, the UK has been an outlier on ETNs. We hope this move will improve consumer protections and we will continue to make the case for lifting the ban on retail investors from accessing highly-regulated derivative products,” said Ian Taylor, board advisor to crypto trade body CryptoUK.

Kraken’s U.K. General Manager Bivu Das said that the proposal to approve sales of crypto ETNs to consumers marked a “major milestone for the UK’s crypto ecosystem.”

The FCA is “acknowledging that the market has matured significantly and that outdated restrictions no longer serve their intended purpose,” Das added. “Regulatory moves like this are critical if the UK is to stay competitive in the race to lead in digital assets.”

One year ago, Apple announced Apple Intelligence, its response to the wave of sophisticated chatbots and systems kicked off by the arrival of ChatGPT and the age of generative AI.

Analysts said Apple’s installed base of more than 1 billion iPhones, the data on its device and its custom-designed silicon chips were advantages that would help the company become an AI leader.

But it’s been an underwhelming 12 months since then.

Apple Intelligence stumbled out of the gate while rivals like OpenAI, Google and Meta have continued to make headway launching new generative-AI models. 

Now, investors are calling for Apple to do something major to catch up in AI, which is rapidly transforming the tech industry.

When CEO Tim Cook speaks at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, investors on Monday, fans and developers will want to hear how the company’s approach to AI has changed. That’s especially important after some Apple executives have said that the technology could be the reason the iPhone gets supplanted by the next-generation of computer hardware.

“You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now,” Apple services chief Eddy Cue said in court last month in one of the government’s antitrust case against Google, adding that AI was a “huge technological shift” that can upend incumbents like Apple.

The Apple Intelligence rollout was rocky. The first features launched in October — tools for rewriting text, a new Siri animation and improved voice, and a tool that generates slideshow movies out of user photos — were underwhelming. One key feature, which came out in December, summarized long stacks of text messages. But it was disabled for news and media apps after the BBC discovered that it twisted headlines to display factually incorrect information.

But the biggest stumble for Apple came in early March, when the company said that it was delaying “More personal Siri,” a major improvement to the Siri voice assistant that would integrate it with iPhone apps so it could do things like find details from inside emails and make restaurant reservations.

Apple had been advertising the feature on television as a key reason to buy an iPhone 16, but after delaying the feature until the “coming year,” it pulled the ads from broadcast and YouTube. The company now faces class-action suits from people who claim they were misled into buying a new iPhone.

Although Apple Intelligence had a rough first year, the company hasn’t said much publicly. However, it’s reportedly reorganized some of its AI teams.

JPMorgan Chase analyst Samik Chatterjee said in a note this week that investor expectations were set for a “lackluster” WWDC, as the company still needs to bring to market the features it announced last year, versus “addressing the more material issue of lagging behind other large technology companies in relation to advancements in AI.”

Meanwhile, Apple is facing renewed competition in its core business.

OpenAI in May acquired the startup io for about $6.4 billion, bringing in former Apple chief designer Jony Ive to build AI hardware. The company hasn’t provided details about its future devices.

Meta has made a splash with its Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, selling over 2 million units since launching in 2021. The devices use Meta’s Llama large language model to answer spoken questions from the user. 

And last month, Android maker Google said its Gemini models will become the default assistant on Android phones. The company showed Gemini doing things that go beyond Siri’s capabilities, such as summarizing videos. Google also announced a $150 million partnership with Warby Parker to develop its own pair of AI-powered smart glasses.

A working Apple Intelligence is important for the company to encourage its users to buy new iPhones since devices released before the iPhone 15 Pro in 2023 don’t support the suite of features. But AI hasn’t been a key driver of sales for smartphones yet, and may not be for years, said Forrester analyst Thomas Husson.

“There’s been some new cool features and services, but I don’t think it has drastically changed the experience yet,” Husson said.

Apple declined to comment.

Apple focused its efforts on what could efficiently run on its battery-powered phones. The AI race, led by OpenAI and Google, was about bleeding-edge capabilities that required high-powered servers based on Nvidia graphics-processing units, or GPUs.

Then ChatGPT launched in late 2022, making AI the most important term in Silicon Valley. Soon after, Cook was telling investors that Apple was spending “a tremendous amount of time and effort” on the technology.

While Apple Intelligence is based on a series of language and diffusion models that the company trained itself, Apple hasn’t publicly competed with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, or other companies in what are called “frontier models,” or the most capable AI systems that often have to be trained on large server clusters packed with Nvidia chips and fast memory.

The difference between the way Apple and its rivals approach AI can be seen in the company’s approach to capital expenditures. Apple spent $9.5 billion on capital expenditures in its fiscal 2024, or about 2.4% of its total revenue. 

The iPhone maker has rented the computing power needed to train its foundation models, it revealed last year, from Google Cloud and other providers. Apple’s rivals are gobbling up billions of dollars of GPUs to push the technology forward. 

Meanwhile, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft are planning to collectively spend more than $300 billion this year on capital expenditures, up from $230 billion last year. Amazon alone is aiming to spend $100 billion, and Microsoft has allocated $80 billion.

Apple’s best chance to quickly catch up up may be to do what it’s done many times in the past: Buy a company, and turn it into a killer feature.

It bought PA Semi in 2008 for $278 million, and turned it into the seed for its semiconductor division. Ahead of releasing the Vision Pro headset, Apple bought over 10 startups that worked on virtual and augmented reality. Even Siri was a startup before Apple bought it for more than $200 million in 2010.

With $133 billion in cash and marketable securities on hand as of the start of May, there isn’t much Apple can’t buy, assuming it could get regulatory clearance. However, OpenAI, Apple’s current Siri partner, is likely out of reach with a valuation of $300 billion. And given OpenAI’s new relationship with Ive to build hardware, there are reasons for Apple to slow the partnership down.

Anthropic, whose Claude chatbot is powered by one of the leading AI models, was valued at $61.5 billion in a funding round in March. In the Google antitrust case, Cue, a senior vice president at Apple, mentioned Anthropic as a potential replacement for Google as the default search option in the iPhone’s Safari browser.

“They probably need to acquire Anthropic,” said Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster, who has followed Apple for decades, in an interview.

That would be by far Apple’s largest acquisition. To date, the most the company has paid is $3 billion, when it bought Beats Electronics in 2014 for $3 billion, part of an effort to catch Spotify in the music streaming market.

Apple could buy a company that’s developing AI-based apps, even if they’re on open-source or other company models. Perplexity, which is currently fundraising at a $14 billion valuation, has shown strong interest in the smartphone market and understanding of the value of being a default AI service.

In April, Perplexity announced a partnership with Motorola, and it’s reportedly in talks with Samsung to integrate its technology into the South Korean company’s version of Android, as well as take investment from the Apple rival. Cue mentioned that Apple had been in discussions with Perplexity about its technology at the May trial.

It’s also possible for Apple to treat frontier AI like it treated search — as a service that can be filled with a partnership. Apple software chief Craig Federighi implied as much last year at a panel discussion during WWDC, saying that Apple would like to add other AI models, especially for specific purposes, into its Apple Intelligence framework.

Federighi specifically mentioned Google, whose Gemini can now fluidly speak to the user and handle input that comes from photos, videos, voice or text. Documents revealed during the Google trial showed executives from Apple, including Cue and M&A chief Adrian Perica, were involved in the negotiations over Gemini. 

While Apple is still pushing “App Intents” — the same system powers stuff like lock screen widgets — the framework for how they work with Siri hasn’t been released yet.