When Salesforce released its fourth-quarter results on Wednesday, it went out of its way to convince investors that the AI revolution won’t spell its death.
Salesforce reported a strong quarter with revenue of $10.7 billion, up 13% year over year. For the year, it reported revenue of $41.5 billion, up 10% from a year earlier, 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 provided strong guidance for the coming year, forecasting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion, an increase of 10% to 11%. It also said its “remaining performance obligations” (RPO) were more than $72 billion. This is a number that represents revenue during a contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned revenue.
However, there are limits to what you can do with numbers. Software-as-a-Service stocks, led by Salesforce, have fallen in value recently. Investors worry that the rise of AI agents will weaken these companies and make employee-based business models obsolete. This situation is called a “SaaSpocalypse”.
The concept was heavily floated during the earnings call, with CEO Marc Benioff mentioning the word at least six times.
“Have you heard of SaaSpocalypse? And this isn’t new to us. We’ve been through some,” he said, then added, “If you have SaaSpocalypse, it might get eaten up by Sasquatch, because a lot of companies are using SaaS a lot, because the use of agents has just gotten better.”
Salesforce went all out in this earnings report, trying to convince the world of its continued health. The company increased its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. Launched a new $50 billion share buyback program. This is always preferred by shareholders, as it creates a strong pool of buyers for the stock and reduces the number of shares outstanding (which can potentially drive up the stock price).
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The company also revamped its financial reporting itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part regular Q&A with some questions from Wall Street analysts.
Rather than spell out the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera attesting to their love for the new agent option. CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts. And, just to get to the point, I’m the CEO of SaaStr, a conference and media company for the software industry. A short summary of the interview. They all love Salesforce’s AI agent product.
Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agent products: Agent Work Units (“AWU”). The idea here is that rather than simply counting “tokens,” which is the standard unit of AI processing, AWU attempts to measure something more meaningful: whether the agent actually completed a task, such as writing to a record, rather than just producing text. (Salesforce hit 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot, but not really in the world of AI.)
“You can ask questions, you can write poetry, but in the corporate world, that’s not really valuable,” Patrick Stokes, president and CMO of Salesforce, said on a conference call. Therefore, AWU is intended to measure when an 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 agent world. This shows that the SaaS software itself owns most of the technology stack, and the AI modeler underneath is an invisible, fungible, commoditized engine of work.
This was a direct response to one of the reasons why SaaSpocalypse plummeted earlier this month after OpenAI released its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural vision shows that OpenAI owns the majority of the stack, with systems of record SaaS providers (databases and business software platforms where enterprises store core data) sitting at the bottom as the invisible engine.
And if that wasn’t enough to sway investors, Benioff wore a black leather jacket, mirroring the signature look of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the CEO who is clearly crushing it in the world of AI.
