Salesforce pulled out all of the stops to persuade traders that the AI revolution gained’t be its dying when it introduced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Salesforce reported a strong quarter of $10.7 billion in income, up 13% year-over-year. For the yr, it reported $41.5 billion in income, up 10% over the earlier yr, with each outcomes boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of information administration firm Informatica final Could.
Web earnings landed at $7.46 billion, and the corporate supplied robust steering for the yr forward, projecting income of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a ten% to 11% enhance. It additionally mentioned its “remaining efficiency obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a determine that reveals income underneath contact that has not but been delivered or acknowledged as earned income.
The numbers, although, might solely achieve this a lot. Software program-as-a-service shares, with Salesforce as their poster youngster, have been getting hammered recently. Buyers worry the rise of AI brokers will undermine these firms, making their per-employee-seat enterprise fashions out of date. The state of affairs has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.”
The idea hung so closely within the air in the course of the earnings name that CEO Marc Benioff talked about the time period not less than six occasions.
“You’ve heard in regards to the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a couple of of them,” he mentioned, later including, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it might be eaten by the Sasquatch as a result of there are loads of firms utilizing loads of SaaS as a result of it simply bought higher with brokers.”
In an try to persuade the world of its continued well being, Salesforce threw all the pieces 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 all the time 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 might enhance 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 a couple of questions from Wall Road analysts.
As an alternative of working via the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce prospects on digicam to testify to their love of its new agentic choices: the CEO of house equipment firm SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Resorts and Resorts; and, simply to hammer the purpose, the CEO of SaaStr, the software program business 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 models (“AWU”). The concept right here is that as an alternative of 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. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens final quarter, which feels like so much however actually just isn’t within the AI world.)
“You’ll be able to ask it a query and it could actually write you a poem, however that’s probably not 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 document or does another verifiable piece of labor.
On prime of that, Salesforce additionally introduced its personal architectural imaginative and prescient of the approaching world of brokers. It reveals SaaS software program like itself proudly owning many 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 launched its enterprise agent, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural imaginative and prescient reveals OpenAI proudly owning many of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS suppliers (the databases and business-software platforms the place firms retailer their core knowledge) on the underside because 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.
