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 strong 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 information administration firm Informatica final Could.
Web revenue landed at $7.46 billion, and the corporate supplied 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 below 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 youngster, have been getting hammered currently. Buyers concern the rise of AI brokers will undermine these firms, making their per-employee-seat enterprise fashions out of date. 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 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 a whole lot of firms utilizing a whole lot of SaaS as a result of it simply acquired higher with brokers.”
In an try and 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 almost 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 a couple of questions from Wall Avenue analysts.
As an alternative of operating via the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce prospects on digital camera to testify to their love of its new agentic choices: the CEO of residence equipment firm SharkNinja; the CEO of Wyndham Lodges 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 somewhat 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 job, like writing to a file, somewhat than simply producing textual content. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens final quarter, which seems like so much however actually shouldn’t be within the AI world.)
“You possibly can ask it a query and it might probably write you a poem, however that’s probably not all that priceless 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 file or does another verifiable job.
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 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 exhibits 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 information) 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.
