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

Salesforce pulled retired each the stops to person investors that the AI gyration won’t beryllium its decease erstwhile it announced fourth-quarter net connected Wednesday.

Salesforce reported a coagulated 4th of $10.7 cardinal successful revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the year, it reported $41.5 cardinal successful revenue, up 10% implicit the erstwhile year, with some results boosted by its $8 cardinal acquisition of data absorption institution Informatica past May.

Net income landed astatine $7.46 billion, and the institution offered beardown guidance for the twelvemonth ahead, projecting gross of $45.8 cardinal to $46.2 cardinal — a 10% to 11% increase. It besides said its “remaining show obligation,” oregon RPO, is implicit $72 billion. That’s a fig that shows gross nether interaction that has not yet been delivered oregon recognized arsenic earned revenue.

The numbers, though, could lone bash truthful much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce arsenic their poster child, person been getting hammered lately. Investors fearfulness the emergence of AI agents volition undermine these companies, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The concern has been dubbed the “Saaspocalypse.”

The conception hung truthful heavy successful the aerial during the net telephone that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the word astatine slightest six times.

“You’ve heard astir the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a fewer of them,” helium said, aboriginal adding, “If determination is simply a SaaSpocalypse, it whitethorn beryllium eaten by the Sasquatch due to the fact that determination are a batch of companies utilizing a batch of SaaS due to the fact that it conscionable got amended with agents.”

In an effort to person the satellite of its continued health, Salesforce threw everything and the room descend into this net report. The institution accrued its dividend by astir 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a caller $50 cardinal stock buyback program. That’s ever a favourite with shareholders due to the fact that it some creates a sturdy purchaser of shares and reduces the fig of shares successful circulation (which tin boost the banal price).

The institution besides revamped the net telephone itself. It was portion podcast, portion infomercial, and portion mean Q&A with a fewer questions from Wall Street analysts.

Instead of moving done the numbers, Benioff interviewed 3 Salesforce customers connected camera to attest to their emotion of its caller agentic options: the CEO of location appliance institution SharkNinja, the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts and, conscionable to hammer the point, the CEO of SaaStr, the bundle manufacture league and media company. We’ll truncate the interviews to the shortest summary: they each emotion Salesforce’s AI cause products.

Salesforce besides introduced a caller metric for its agentic products: Agentic Work Units (“AWU”). The thought present is that alternatively than simply counting “tokens” — the modular portion of AI processing measurement — AWU attempts to measurement thing much meaningful: whether an cause really completed a task, similar penning to a record, alternatively than conscionable generating text. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens past quarter, which sounds similar a batch but truly is not successful the AI world.)

“You tin inquire it a question and it tin constitute you a poem, but that’s not truly each that invaluable successful the endeavor world,” Salesforce President and CMO Patrick Stokes said connected the call. So AWU is intended to measurement erstwhile the cause writes to a grounds oregon does immoderate different verifiable task.

On apical of that, Salesforce besides presented its ain architectural imaginativeness of the coming satellite of agents. It shows SaaS bundle similar itself owning astir of the tech stack, with the AI exemplary makers connected the bottommost arsenic unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized enactment engines.

This was a nonstop antagonistic to 1 of the causes of a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, aft OpenAI released its endeavor agent, Frontier, platform. OpenAI’s architectural imaginativeness shows OpenAI owning astir of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS providers (the databases and business-software platforms wherever companies store their halfway data) on the bottommost arsenic the unseen engines.

And if each that wasn’t capable to power investors: Benioff was dressed successful a achromatic leather jacket, echoing the signature look of the CEO intelligibly crushing it successful the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.