Salesforce sought to reassure investors that the AI revolution won’t be the death of it when it reported fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Salesforce posted a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. It reported revenue of $41.5 billion for the year, up 10% from a year earlier, with both results boosted by the $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May.
Net income came in at $7.46 billion, and the company offered a strong outlook for the year ahead, with revenue forecast at $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — up 10% to 11%. It also said its “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, is more than $72 billion. This is the number that shows the revenue within the contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earnings.
However, numbers could only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, whose poster child is Salesforce, have been taking a hit lately. Investors worry that the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies and render their employee-based business models obsolete. The situation was called the “Saaspocalypse”.
The concept hung so heavily in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times.
“Heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it’s not our first. We’ve had a few,” he said, later adding, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it might be eaten by Sasquatch because a lot of companies use a lot of SaaS because it’s gotten better with agents.”
In an effort to convince the world of its continued health, Salesforce threw everything and the kitchen sink into this earnings report. The company raised its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new $50 billion share buyback program. This is always popular with shareholders because it creates a strong buyer of the stock and reduces the number of shares outstanding (which can increase the stock price).
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The company also revised the profit itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part normal Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts.
Instead of crunching numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to attest to their love for its new agent capabilities: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja, the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and, for the record, the CEO of SaaStr, a software industry conference and media company. We’ll cut the conversations to the briefest possible summary: everyone loves Salesforce’s AI agent products.
Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agent products: Agent Work Units (“AWU”). The idea is that instead of just counting “tokens”—the standard unit of AI processing volume—AWU is trying to measure something more meaningful: whether an agent actually completed a task, such as writing to a record, rather than just generating text. (Salesforce recorded 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot, but in the world of AI, it really isn’t.)
“You can ask it a question and it can write you a poem, but that’s not that valuable in the business world,” said Salesforce President and CMO Patrick Stokes. Thus, AWU is intended to measure when an agent writes to a record or does some other verifiable task.
In addition, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision for the coming world of agents. It shows that SaaS software like itself owns most of the technology stack, with AI modelers at the bottom as invisible, fungible and commoditized work engines.
This was in direct contrast to one of the reasons for the SaaSpocalypse selloff earlier this month after OpenAI released its Frontier enterprise agent platform. OpenAI’s architectural vision shows that OpenAI owns most of the stack, with providers of SaaS systems (database and business software platforms where companies store their core data) sitting at the bottom as invisible engines.
And if all that wasn’t enough to sway investors: Benioff was dressed in a black leather jacket that echoed the signature look of a CEO clearly crushing it in the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.