Salesforce Battles the “SaaSpocalypse” with Record Earnings, Bold AI Strategy, and a $50 Billion Bet on the Future

In a high-stakes earnings call that felt more like a Hollywood blockbuster than a quarterly financial report, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff pulled out every trick in the book to convince Wall Street that the company is not just surviving the AI revolution—it’s thriving in it.

Salesforce delivered a solid fourth quarter, reporting $10.7 billion in revenue, a 13% year-over-year increase. For the full fiscal year, the company posted $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% from the previous year. These numbers were supercharged by the company’s blockbuster $8 billion acquisition of data management powerhouse Informatica last May.

But the real headline? Net income soared to a staggering $7.46 billion, and Salesforce offered aggressive guidance for the year ahead, projecting revenue between $45.8 billion and $46.2 billion—a 10% to 11% increase. The company also revealed its “remaining performance obligation” (RPO) has ballooned to over $72 billion, a figure that represents contracted revenue yet to be delivered—a strong indicator of future growth.

Yet, in the volatile world of software-as-a-service (SaaS), numbers alone weren’t enough. SaaS stocks, with Salesforce as their undisputed poster child, have been under siege. Investors are gripped by fears that AI agents will render traditional per-employee-seat subscription models obsolete—a phenomenon being dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.”

The term hung so heavily in the air during the earnings call that Benioff mentioned it at least six times. “You’ve heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had a few of them,” he quipped, later adding, “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 combat these fears, Salesforce unleashed a dazzling array of announcements and strategies designed to prove it’s not just weathering the storm—it’s rewriting the playbook.

First, the company increased its dividend by nearly 6%, raising it to $0.44 per share. Then came the bombshell: a new $50 billion share buyback program. This move, a favorite among shareholders, not only creates a robust buyer for shares but also reduces the number of shares in circulation—potentially boosting the stock price.

But Salesforce didn’t stop there. The earnings call itself was transformed into a multimedia spectacle, blending elements of a podcast, an infomercial, and a traditional Q&A session. Instead of the usual dry recitation of numbers, Benioff interviewed three high-profile Salesforce customers on camera, each testifying to their love of the company’s new agentic AI offerings:

• The CEO of home appliance giant SharkNinja
• The CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts
• And, in a masterstroke of messaging, the CEO of SaaStr, the software industry’s premier conference and media company

Their message was clear and unanimous: Salesforce’s AI agent products are game-changers.

To further solidify its AI credentials, Salesforce introduced a new metric: Agentic Work Units (AWU). Rather than simply counting “tokens”—the standard unit of AI processing volume—AWU aims to measure something more meaningful: whether an AI agent actually completed a task, like writing to a record, rather than just generating text. (For context, Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds impressive but is actually modest in the AI world.)

“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,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes explained. “AWU is intended to measure when the agent writes to a record or does some other verifiable task.”

On top of that, Salesforce unveiled its own architectural vision for the future of AI agents. In this vision, SaaS software like Salesforce sits at the top of the tech stack, with AI model makers relegated to the bottom as unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines. This was a direct counter to the narrative pushed by OpenAI earlier this month when it released its enterprise agent, Frontier, positioning itself as the central player in the AI stack.

And if all that wasn’t enough to sway investors, Benioff made a subtle yet powerful fashion statement: he wore a black leather jacket, echoing the signature look of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the CEO of the company currently dominating the AI hardware space.

The message was clear: Salesforce is not just playing defense against the SaaSpocalypse—it’s positioning itself as the architect of the AI-driven future of enterprise software.

As the dust settles on this blockbuster earnings call, one thing is certain: Salesforce has thrown down the gauntlet. The company is betting big—$50 billion big—that it can not only survive the AI revolution but lead it. Whether Wall Street buys into this vision remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: the battle for the future of SaaS has officially begun.

Tags:

Salesforce earnings, SaaSpocalypse, AI agents, Marc Benioff, Informatica acquisition, Agentic Work Units, SaaS stocks, enterprise AI, share buyback, dividend increase, Nvidia Jensen Huang, OpenAI Frontier, remaining performance obligation, RPO, SharkNinja, Wyndham Hotels, SaaStr, Patrick Stokes, software-as-a-service, AI revolution, tech earnings, enterprise software

Viral Phrases:

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