Salesforce pulled out all of the stops to persuade traders that the AI revolution gained’t be its loss of life when it introduced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Salesforce reported a stable quarter of $10.7 billion in income, up 13% year-over-year. For the 12 months, it reported $41.5 billion in income, up 10% over the earlier 12 months, with each outcomes boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica final Might.
Internet earnings landed at $7.46 billion, and the corporate provided robust steerage for the 12 months forward, projecting income of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a ten% to 11% improve. It additionally mentioned its “remaining efficiency obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a determine that exhibits income underneath contact that has not but been delivered or acknowledged as earned income.
The numbers, although, may solely accomplish that a lot. Software program-as-a-service shares, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been getting hammered recently. Traders concern the rise of AI brokers will undermine these firms, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The scenario has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.”
The idea hung so closely within the air through the earnings name that CEO Marc Benioff talked about the time period not less than six instances.
“You’ve heard in regards to the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had just a few of them,” he mentioned, later including, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it might be eaten by the Sasquatch as a result of there are a whole lot of firms utilizing a whole lot of SaaS as a result of it simply acquired higher with brokers.”
In an try to persuade the world of its continued well being, Salesforce threw all the things and the kitchen sink into this earnings report. The corporate elevated its dividend by practically 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a brand new $50 billion share buyback program. That’s at all times a favourite with shareholders as a result of it each creates a sturdy purchaser of shares and reduces the variety of shares in circulation (which may increase the inventory value).
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The corporate additionally revamped the earnings name itself. It was half podcast, half infomercial, and half regular Q&A with just a few questions from Wall Avenue analysts.
As an alternative of operating via the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce prospects on digicam to testify to their love of its new agentic choices: the CEO of residence equipment firm SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Motels and Resorts; and, simply to hammer the purpose, the CEO of SaaStr, the software program trade convention and media firm. We’ll truncate the interviews to the shortest abstract: All of them love Salesforce’s AI agent merchandise.
Salesforce additionally launched a brand new metric for its agentic merchandise: agentic work items (“AWU”). The thought right here is that quite than merely counting “tokens” — the usual unit of AI processing quantity — AWU makes an attempt to measure one thing extra significant: whether or not an agent truly accomplished a process, like writing to a report, quite than simply producing textual content. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens final quarter, which seems like rather a lot however actually is not within the AI world.)
“You possibly can ask it a query and it could possibly write you a poem, however that’s not likely all that worthwhile within the enterprise world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes mentioned on the decision. So AWU is meant to measure when the agent writes to a report or does another verifiable process.
On prime of that, Salesforce additionally introduced its personal architectural imaginative and prescient of the approaching world of brokers. It exhibits SaaS software program like itself owning most of the tech stack, with the AI mannequin makers on the underside as unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines.
This was a direct counter to one of many causes of a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, after OpenAI released its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural imaginative and prescient exhibits OpenAI proudly owning a lot of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS suppliers (the databases and business-software platforms the place firms retailer their core information) on the bottom as the unseen engines.
And if all that wasn’t sufficient to affect traders: Benioff was wearing a black leather-based jacket, echoing the signature look of the CEO clearly crushing it within the AI world: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
