When Salesforce reported its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday, it pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution is not the end.
Salesforce reported solid quarterly revenue of $10.7 billion, up 13% from the previous year. This year, revenue rose 10% from the previous year to $41.5 billion, both thanks to the company’s $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica in May.
Net income came in at $7.46 billion, and the company gave strong guidance for revenue to rise 10% to 11% to $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion for the year. It also said it had “remaining performance obligations” (RPO) of more than $72 billion. This figure represents revenue from contacts that have not yet been delivered or recognized as revenue.
But numbers alone couldn’t do much. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) stocks, led by Salesforce, have been taking a hit recently. Investors are concerned that the rise of AI agents will weaken these companies, making their per-employee business models obsolete. This situation has been called the “SaaSpocalypse”.
The concept was floated so loudly during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times.
“Have you ever heard of the SaaSpocalypse? And we’re not the first. We’ve had a few of those,” he said, later adding. “If there is a SaaS apocalypse, it could be eaten up by Saasquatch, because there are a lot of companies that are using SaaS a lot because they have gotten better with agents.”
Salesforce put everything and the kitchen sink into this earnings report to convince the world of its continued health. The company increased its dividend by almost 6% to $0.44 per share. Launched a new $50 billion stock repurchase program. This is always preferred by shareholders as it creates strong buyers of the stock and reduces the number of shares outstanding (which can increase the stock price).
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The company also revamped its earnings reporting itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part standard Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts.
Instead of looking at the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to testify to their love for the new agent option. CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja; CEO of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts; And just to make the point, I’m the CEO of SaaStr, a software industry conference and media company. Let me reduce the interview to the shortest summary. They all love Salesforce’s AI agent product.
Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agent products: “Agent Work Unit” (“AWU”). The idea here is that rather than simply calculating “tokens,” which are standard units of AI throughput, we are trying to measure something more meaningful. That is, whether the agent actually completes a task, such as writing a record, rather than simply generating text. (Salesforce hit 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot, but in the AI world it really isn’t.)
“Ask a question and you can write poetry, but it’s not very valuable in the corporate world,” said Patrick Stokes, president and CMO of Salesforce. So AWU is intended to measure when an agent writes to a record or performs some other verifiable action.
Moreover, Salesforce has laid out its own architectural vision for the coming agent world. This shows the SaaS software owning the majority of the technology stack, with the AI modeler at the bottom being an invisible, interchangeable, commoditized task engine.
This was in direct opposition to one of the reasons for the SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month after OpenAI launched 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) as the invisible engines at the bottom.
And if that wasn’t enough to sway investors, Benioff donned a black leather jacket, echoing the signature look of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who clearly dominates the CEO in the world of AI.
