Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution won’t be the death of it when it announced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Salesforce reported a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the year, it reported $41.5 billion in revenue, 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 offered strong guidance for the coming year, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — an increase of 10% to 11%. It also said its “residual performance obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. It is a number that shows revenue during contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned revenue.
However, the numbers could only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been hammered lately. Investors fear that the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies and make their business models per se employed obsolete. The situation has been dubbed 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.
“You’ve heard of the SaaSpocalypse? And it’s not our first. We’ve had a few of those,” he said, later adding, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it could be eaten by Sasquatch because there’s a lot of companies that use a lot of SaaS because it’s just 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 increased its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new $50 billion share buyback program. It is always a favorite among shareholders because it both creates a solid buyer of shares and reduces the number of shares outstanding (which can increase the share price).
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The company also revamped earnings itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial and part normal Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts.
Instead of running through the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to testify about their love for its new agent capabilities: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja; CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, just to drive home the point, CEO of SaaStr, the software industry’s conference and media company. We cut the interviews down to the briefest summary: They all love Salesforce’s AI agent products.
Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agent products: agent work units (“AWU”). The idea here is that instead of simply counting “tokens”—the standard unit of AI processing volume—the AWU is trying to measure something more meaningful: whether an agent has actually completed a task, like writing to a record, rather than just generating text. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t in the AI world.)
“You can ask it a question and it can write you a poem, but it’s not really that valuable in the enterprise 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.
On top of that, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision for the coming world of agents. It shows SaaS software as itself owning most of the technology stack, with the AI modelers at the bottom as unseen, replaceable and commodified work engines.
This was a direct contrast to one of the reasons for a SaaSpocalypse selloff earlier this month after OpenAI released its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural vision shows that OpenAI owns most of the stack, with system-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 who’s clearly crushing it in the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.