Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff downplays SaaSpocalypse, noting past industry cycles

Salesforce made a full-court press to convince investors that the AI revolution would not be its undoing when it announced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

Salesforce delivered a solid quarter with $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the full year, revenue reached $41.5 billion, a 10% increase from the previous year, both figures bolstered 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 forward guidance, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — representing a 10% to 11% increase. It also reported that its “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, exceeded $72 billion. This metric reflects revenue under contract that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned revenue.

The numbers, however, could only go so far. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, have taken a beating lately. Investors worry that the rise of AI agents will undercut these companies, rendering their per-seat subscription models obsolete. This trend has been labeled the “SaaSpocalypse.”

The term loomed so large during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned it at least six times.

“You’ve heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a few of them,” he said, later adding, “If there is a SaaSpocalypse, it may be eaten by the Sasquatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents.”

In an effort to prove its ongoing vitality, Salesforce threw everything into this earnings report. The company raised its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It also announced a new $50 billion share buyback program—a perennial favorite among shareholders because it creates a steady buyer of shares and reduces the number of shares outstanding, which can boost the stock price.

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

Instead of running through the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to attest to their enthusiasm for its new agentic options: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, to drive the point home, the CEO of SaaStr, the software industry conference and media company. To summarize the interviews briefly: they all love Salesforce’s AI agent products.

Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agentic products: agentic work units (“AWU”). The idea is that instead of simply counting “tokens”—the standard unit of AI processing volume—AWU aims to measure something more meaningful: whether an agent actually completed a task. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot but is actually not in the AI world.)

“You can ask it a question and it can write you a poem, but that’s not really all that valuable in the enterprise world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes said on the call. So AWU is designed to measure when the agent writes to a record or performs some other verifiable piece of work.

On top of that, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision of the coming world of agents. It shows SaaS software like itself owning most of the tech stack, with the AI model makers at the bottom as unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines.

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

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