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

Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI ​​revolution won’t be the death of it when it announced its quarterly results on Wednesday.

Salesforce reported a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year over year. For the full year, it reported revenue of $41.5 billion, up 10% from the previous year, with both results boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May.

Net income came in at $7.46 billion, and the company provided strong guidance for the year ahead, with revenue expectations of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion – up 10% to 11%. It also said the “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, is more than $72 billion. This is a figure that represents the turnover under contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned turnover.

However, the numbers could only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster childare being hammered lately. Investors fear that the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies, pushing them toward per-employee pricing business models outdated. The situation is called the ‘SaaSpocalypse’.

The concept was so heavy in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times.

“Have you heard of the SaaSpocalypse? And it’s not our first. We’ve had a few,” he said, later adding, “If there is a SaaSpocalypse, it could be eaten by the Sasquatch, because there are a lot of companies that use a lot of SaaS, because things have only gotten better with agents.”

In an effort to convince the world of the company’s continued health, Salesforce threw everything into this earnings report. The company increased its dividend by almost 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new share buyback program worth $50 billion. That’s always a shareholder favorite because it both creates a strong buyer of shares and reduces the number of shares outstanding (which can increase the share price).

The company also revamped the earnings call itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part regular Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts.

Instead of crunching the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to testify to their love for the new agentic options: home appliance company CEO SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, just to drive home the point, the CEO of SaaStr, the software industry conference and media company. We’ll cut the interviews down to the shortest summary: They all love Salesforce’s AI agent products.

Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agentic products: agentic work units (“AWU”). The idea here is that rather than simply counting ‘tokens’ – the standard unit of AI processing volume – AWU is trying to measure something more meaningful: whether an agent has actually completed a task, such as writing to a record, rather than just generating text. (Salesforce registered 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which seems like a lot, but it really is not in the AI ​​world.)

“You can ask him a question and he can write you a poem, but that’s not as valuable in the business world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes said on the call. So AWU is intended to measure when the agent writes to a record or performs some other verifiable task.

Additionally, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision of the coming world of agents. It shows SaaS software as itself owns most of the tech stackwith the AI ​​modelers at the bottom as invisible, interchangeable and commoditized work engines.

This was a direct counter to one of the causes of a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, after OpenAI released its enterprise agent Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural vision shows that OpenAI owns the majority of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS providers (the databases and enterprise software platforms where companies store their core data) at the bottom as the invisible engines.

And if all that wasn’t enough to sway investors, Benioff was dressed in a black leather jacket, mirroring the signature look of the CEO who clearly crushed him in the AI ​​world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.