Salesforce pulled out all of the stops to persuade traders that the AI revolution received’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 yr, it reported $41.5 billion in income, up 10% over the earlier yr, with each outcomes boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica final Could.
Web earnings landed at $7.46 billion, and the corporate supplied robust steerage for the yr forward, projecting income of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a ten% to 11% improve. It additionally stated its “remaining efficiency obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a determine that reveals 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 child, have been getting hammered recently. Traders concern the rise of AI brokers will undermine these corporations, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The state of affairs 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 at the least six occasions.
“You’ve heard concerning the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn’t our first. We’ve had just a few of them,” he stated, later including, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it could be eaten by the Sasquatch as a result of there are quite a lot of corporations utilizing quite a lot of SaaS as a result of it simply received higher with brokers.”
In an try and 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 almost 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 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 Road analysts.
As a substitute of operating by way of 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 concept right here is that fairly 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 really accomplished a process, like writing to a file, fairly than simply producing textual content. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens final quarter, which seems like so much however actually is not within the AI world.)
“You may ask it a query and it may possibly write you a poem, however that’s not likely all that invaluable within the enterprise world,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes stated on the decision. So AWU is meant to measure when the agent writes to a file 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 reveals 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 reveals OpenAI proudly owning a lot of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS suppliers (the databases and business-software platforms the place corporations retailer their core knowledge) 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.
