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 strong segment revenue of $10.7 billion, up 13% year over year. For the year, it reported revenue of $41.5 billion, up 10% from last year, both results boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May.
Total revenue reached $7.46 billion, and the company gave strong guidance for next year, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — an increase of 10% to 11%. It also said its “remaining operating obligation,” or RPO, is more than $72 billion. That is the figure that shows the income under communication that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned income.
Prices, however, can only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been getting hammered lately. Investors fear the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies, rendering their individual worker-seat business models obsolete. This situation has been called the “SaaSpocalypse.”
The concept hung so much in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff said the word at least six times.
“You’ve heard of the SaaSpocalypse? And it’s not our first. We’ve had a few of them,” he said, later adding, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it might be eaten by Sasquatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents.”
In an effort to reassure the world of its continued existence, Salesforce threw everything and the kitchen sink into this earnings report. The company increased its dividend by 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new plan to buy back 50 billion shares. That’s always a favorite with shareholders because it both creates a stronger buyer base and reduces the number of shares outstanding (which can increase the stock price).
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The company also updated its own earnings call. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part regular Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts.
Instead of running with the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to prove their love for its new agent options: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja; CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, just to make a point, the CEO of SaaStr, a software industry conference and media company. We’ll reduce the interviews to a short 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 rather than just 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 a record, rather than just producing text. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot but isn’t really in the AI world.)
“You can ask it a question and it can write you a poem, but that’s not all that important in the business world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes said on the phone. So AWU is intended to measure when an agent writes a record or performs some other verifiable activity.
In addition, Salesforce is also introducing its own architectural vision for the future world of agents. It shows SaaS software as the one that owns most of the technology stack, AI modelers below as abstract, scalable, and commercialized work engines.
This was a direct contradiction to one of the causes of the SaaPocalypse sale earlier this month, after OpenAI released its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architecture view shows OpenAI owning most of the stack, with SaaS providers of systems of record (database and business software platforms where companies store their master data) at the bottom as abstract engines.
And if all that wasn’t enough to sway investors: Benioff was wearing a black leather jacket, echoing the signature look of a CEO clearly crushing on the world of AI: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
