Salesforce orchestrated a comprehensive effort to assure investors that the burgeoning AI revolution poses no existential threat to its business, coinciding with the announcement of its fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
The company reported a robust quarter, achieving $10.7 billion in revenue, marking a 13% increase year-over-year. For the full fiscal year, Salesforce generated $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% from the prior year. Both figures received a notable boost from its $8 billion acquisition of data management firm Informatica last May.
Net income for the period reached $7.46 billion. Looking ahead, the company provided strong guidance, projecting revenues of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion for the coming year, representing a 10% to 11% increase. Furthermore, Salesforce disclosed its “remaining performance obligation” (RPO) now exceeds $72 billion, a metric indicating revenue under contract that has yet to be delivered or recognized.
Despite these solid financial indicators, the figures alone proved insufficient to fully assuage market anxieties. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, with Salesforce often seen as a bellwether, have recently faced significant pressure. Investors are increasingly concerned that the proliferation of AI agents could disrupt these companies by rendering their traditional per-employee-seat business models obsolete, a scenario colloquially termed the “Saaspocalypse.”
The specter of this "Saaspocalypse" loomed so large during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff referenced the term no fewer than six times.
“You’ve heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a few of them,” Benioff stated, later asserting, “If there is a SaaSpocalypse, it may be eaten by the Sasquatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents.”
To decisively counter these market fears and demonstrate its enduring vitality, Salesforce deployed a multi-pronged strategy within its earnings report. The company announced a nearly 6% increase in its dividend to $0.44 per share and initiated a new $50 billion share buyback program. Such buybacks are typically well-received by shareholders as they establish a consistent demand for shares while simultaneously reducing the total number of outstanding shares, which can positively impact stock price.
The earnings call itself was reimagined, blending elements of a podcast, an infomercial, and a traditional Q&A session featuring questions from Wall Street analysts.
Rather than simply enumerating financial results, Benioff conducted on-camera interviews with three Salesforce customers, each testifying to their positive experiences with the company's new "agentic" solutions. These included the CEOs of home appliance giant SharkNinja, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, and, to underscore the point, SaaStr – the software industry conference and media company. The overarching message from all three was a resounding endorsement of Salesforce’s AI agent products.
Salesforce also unveiled a novel metric for its agentic products: Agentic Work Units (“AWU”). This innovative approach aims to provide a more meaningful measure of AI processing by focusing on whether an agent successfully completed a specific task, such as writing to a record, rather than merely counting "tokens"—the conventional unit of AI processing volume. (For context, Salesforce processed 19 trillion tokens last quarter, a figure that, while sounding substantial, is not particularly significant in the broader AI landscape.)
“You can ask it a question and it can write you a poem, but that’s not really all that valuable in the enterprise world,” explained Salesforce President and CMO Patrick Stokes during the call. Thus, AWU is designed to quantify instances where an agent performs verifiable tasks like updating a record.
Further bolstering its narrative, Salesforce articulated its own architectural vision for the evolving agent-centric world. This vision positions SaaS software, such as its own offerings, as owning the majority of the technology stack, with AI model creators relegated to the bottom as largely unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines.
This strategic positioning directly challenges a key factor behind a "Saaspocalypse" sell-off earlier in the month, which followed OpenAI's release of its enterprise agent platform, Frontier. OpenAI's competing architectural vision depicts itself as controlling most of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS providers (the foundational databases and business software platforms for core company data) serving as unseen engines at the base.
As a final symbolic flourish intended to sway investors, Benioff appeared in a black leather jacket, a clear sartorial homage to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a figure widely recognized for his success in the AI sector.
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