Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This is not our first SaaSpocalypse

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

Salesforce reported a stable 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 revenue landed at $7.46 billion, and the corporate provided sturdy steerage for the yr forward, projecting income of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a ten% to 11% improve. It additionally mentioned its “remaining efficiency obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a determine that exhibits income beneath contact that has not but been delivered or acknowledged as earned income.

The numbers, although, might solely accomplish that a lot. Software program-as-a-service shares, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been getting hammered currently. Buyers worry the rise of AI brokers will undermine these firms, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The state of affairs 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 at the very least six occasions.

“You’ve heard in regards to the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had just a few of them,” he mentioned, later including, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it might be eaten by the Sasquatch as a result of there are lots of firms utilizing lots of SaaS as a result of it simply bought higher with brokers.”

In an try to persuade the world of its continued well being, Salesforce threw all the things 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 at all times 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 enhance the inventory worth).

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

As an alternative of operating via the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce prospects on digicam to testify to their love of its new agentic choices: the CEO of dwelling equipment firm SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Motels 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 thought right here is that moderately than 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 really accomplished a activity, like writing to a document, moderately than simply producing textual content. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens final quarter, which appears like so much however actually is not within the AI world.)

“You may ask it a query and it could actually write you a poem, however that’s not likely all that worthwhile within the enterprise world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes mentioned on the decision. So AWU is meant to measure when the agent writes to a document or does another verifiable activity.

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 owning most 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 firms retailer their core information) on the bottom as 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.