Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This isn’t our first SaaSpocalypse

Salesforce pulled out all of the stops to persuade traders that the AI revolution gained’t be its loss of life when it introduced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

Salesforce reported a strong quarter of $10.7 billion in income, up 13% year-over-year. For the yr, it reported $41.5 billion in income, up 10% over the earlier yr, with each outcomes boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of knowledge administration firm Informatica final Might.

Internet earnings landed at $7.46 billion, and the corporate provided sturdy steering for the yr forward, projecting income of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a ten% to 11% enhance. It additionally stated its “remaining efficiency obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a determine that exhibits income underneath contact that has not but been delivered or acknowledged as earned income.

The numbers, although, might solely achieve this a lot. Software program-as-a-service shares, with Salesforce as their poster baby, have been getting hammered these days. Buyers worry the rise of AI brokers will undermine these corporations, making their per-employee-seat enterprise fashions out of date. The scenario has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.”

The idea hung so closely within the air throughout the earnings name that CEO Marc Benioff talked about the time period not less than six instances.

“You’ve heard concerning the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a number of of them,” he stated, later including, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it could be eaten by the Sasquatch as a result of there are loads of corporations utilizing loads of SaaS as a result of it simply received higher with brokers.”

In an try to persuade the world of its continued well being, Salesforce threw every little thing and the kitchen sink into this earnings report. The corporate elevated its dividend by practically 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a brand new $50 billion share buyback program. That’s all the time a favourite with shareholders as a result of it each creates a sturdy purchaser of shares and reduces the variety of shares in circulation (which might increase the inventory worth).

The corporate additionally revamped the earnings name itself. It was half podcast, half infomercial, and half regular Q&A with a number of questions from Wall Road analysts.

As an alternative of working via the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce clients on digicam to testify to their love of its new agentic choices: the CEO of dwelling equipment firm SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Lodges and Resorts; and, simply to hammer the purpose, the CEO of SaaStr, the software program business convention and media firm. We’ll truncate the interviews to the shortest abstract: All of them love Salesforce’s AI agent merchandise.

Salesforce additionally launched a brand new metric for its agentic merchandise: agentic work models (“AWU”). The concept right here is that as an alternative of merely counting “tokens” — the usual unit of AI processing quantity — AWU makes an attempt to measure one thing extra significant: whether or not an agent truly accomplished a process. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens final quarter, which feels like lots however actually isn’t within the AI world.)

“You possibly can ask it a query and it could possibly write you a poem, however that’s not likely all that priceless within the enterprise world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes stated on the decision. So AWU is meant to measure when the agent writes to a file or does another verifiable piece of labor.

On high of that, Salesforce additionally introduced its personal architectural imaginative and prescient of the approaching world of brokers. It exhibits SaaS software program like itself proudly owning a lot of the tech stack, with the AI mannequin makers on the underside as unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines.

This was a direct counter to one of many causes of a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, after OpenAI launched its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural imaginative and prescient exhibits OpenAI proudly owning a lot of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS suppliers (the databases and business-software platforms the place corporations retailer their core information) on the underside because the unseen engines.

And if all that wasn’t sufficient to affect traders: Benioff was wearing a black leather-based jacket, echoing the signature look of the CEO clearly crushing it within the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.