On Wednesday, during its fourth-quarter earnings announcement, Salesforce made an extensive effort to assure investors that the AI revolution would not spell its demise.
Salesforce disclosed a robust quarter, achieving $10.7 billion in revenue, marking a 13% increase compared to the prior year. Annually, the company recorded $41.5 billion in revenue, a 10% rise from the preceding year, with both outcomes significantly enhanced by its $8 billion takeover of data management firm Informatica in May.
Net income reached $7.46 billion, and the corporation provided strong projections for the forthcoming year, forecasting revenue between $45.8 billion and $46.2 billion — representing a 10% to 11% expansion. It also stated that its “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, surpasses $72 billion. This figure signifies revenue under existing contracts that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned income.
Nevertheless, the figures alone had their limits. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, with Salesforce serving as their prime example, have recently endured significant pressure. Investors are concerned that the proliferation of AI agents will jeopardize these enterprises, rendering their per-employee-seat business frameworks obsolete. This predicament has been labeled the “Saaspocalypse.”
The notion loomed so prominently during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff uttered the term no less than six times.
“Have you heard of the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our initial one. We’ve encountered a few of them,” he remarked, subsequently adding, “If a SaaSpocalypse were to occur, it might be consumed by the Sasquatch because numerous companies are utilizing a great deal of SaaS, as it has simply improved with agents.”
In a bid to persuade the world of its ongoing vitality, Salesforce leveraged every possible resource in this earnings disclosure. The organization elevated its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It initiated a new $50 billion share repurchase initiative. This is consistently favored by shareholders because it both establishes a stable purchaser of shares and diminishes the quantity of outstanding shares (which can boost the stock’s valuation).
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The company also revitalized the earnings discussion itself. It was a blend of a podcast, an infomercial, and a typical Q&A session featuring a handful of inquiries from Wall Street analysts.
Rather than presenting the statistics, Benioff conducted on-camera interviews with three Salesforce clients who attested to their fondness for its new agent-driven capabilities: the chief executive of home appliance manufacturer SharkNinja, the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and, to reinforce the argument, the CEO of SaaStr, the software sector’s conference and media enterprise. We’ll condense these interviews to their briefest synopsis: all of them express admiration for Salesforce’s AI agent offerings.
Salesforce moreover unveiled a novel metric for its agentic offerings: Agentic Work Units (“AWU”). The underlying concept is that instead of merely counting “tokens” — the conventional measure of AI processing volume — AWU endeavors to quantify something more meaningful: whether an agent successfully finished a task, such as entering data into a record, rather than solely generating textual content. (Salesforce registered 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which appears substantial but is actually modest in the realm of AI.)
“You can pose a query to it, and it can compose a poem for you, but that holds limited true value in the corporate world,” Salesforce President and CMO Patrick Stokes remarked during the call. Thus, AWU is designed to assess instances where the agent modifies a record or accomplishes another verifiable objective.
Furthermore, Salesforce also put forth its distinct architectural perspective on the emergent era of agents. It portrays SaaS software, such as its own, as commanding the majority of the technological infrastructure, with AI model creators situated at the bottom as concealed, interchangeable, and commoditized operational engines.
This directly countered a factor contributing to a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, following OpenAI’s introduction of its enterprise agent, Frontier, platform. OpenAI’s architectural vision depicts OpenAI controlling most of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS providers (the databases and business-software platforms where corporations store their fundamental data) positioned at the base as the unseen mechanisms.
And if all those efforts weren’t sufficient to sway investors: Benioff was attired in a black leather jacket, mirroring the characteristic style of the CEO who is unequivocally excelling in the AI domain: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
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