Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the artificial intelligence revolution won’t be the death of it when it reported 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 revenue of $41.5 billion, up 10% from a year earlier, 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 next year, forecasting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — an increase of 10% to 11%. He also said the “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, is more than $72 billion. This is a number that shows the revenue from a contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as revenue.
Numbers, however, could only do so much. Stock software as a service, with Salesforce as their poster childhave taken a hammering of late. Investors fear the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies, making their position per employee business models outdated. The situation has been called the “SaaPocalypse”.
The idea hung so much in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times.
“Have you 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 might get eaten by Sasquatch because there’s a lot of companies that use a lot of SaaS because it just got 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 a shareholder favorite because it both creates a robust stock buyer 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 informational, and part regular Q&A with some questions from Wall Street analysts.
Instead of going over the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to testify about their love for its new dealer options: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, for the record, the CEO of SaaStr, the software industry’s conference and media company. We’ll cut the interviews to the shortest summary: Everyone loves Salesforce’s AI products.
Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agent products: agent work units (“AWU”). The idea here 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. (Salesforce recorded 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot, but really is not in the world of artificial intelligence.)
“You can ask him a question and he can write you a poem, but that’s not really that valuable in the business world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes said on the call. Thus, AWU is intended to count when the agent writes to a file or does some other verifiable task.
In addition, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision for the coming world of agents. It shows the SaaS software as it is owning most of the tech stackwith AI model makers at the bottom as invisible, interchangeable and commoditized labor machines.
This was a direct counter to one of the causes of 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 SaaS providers’ systems of record (the databases and business software platforms where companies store their core data) at the bottom like the invisible machines.
And if all that wasn’t enough to sway investors: Benioff was dressed in a black leather jacket, echoing the signature of the CEO who’s clearly crushing it in the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
