Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dismisses SaaSpocalypse fears as company bets big on AI agents

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This isn't our first SaaSpocalypse | TechCrunch

Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution won't be its death when it announced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday. Salesforce reported a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the year, it reported $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% over the previous year, with both results boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May. Net income landed at $7.46 billion, and the company offered strong guidance for the year ahead, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion -- a 10% to 11% increase. It also said its "remaining performance obligation," or RPO, is over $72 billion. That's a figure that shows revenue under contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned revenue. The numbers, though, could only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been getting hammered lately. Investors fear the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The situation has been dubbed the "Saaspocalypse." The concept hung so heavily in the air during the earnings call that CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the term at least six times. "You've heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn't our first. We've had a few of them," he said, 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." In an attempt to convince the world of its continued health, Salesforce threw everything and the kitchen sink into this earnings report. The company increased its dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new $50 billion share buyback program. That's always a favorite with shareholders because it both creates a sturdy buyer of shares and reduces the number of shares in circulation (which can boost the stock price). The company also revamped the earnings call itself. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part normal Q&A with a few questions from Wall Street analysts. Instead of running through the numbers, Benioff interviewed three Salesforce customers on camera to testify to their love of its new agentic options: the CEO of home appliance company SharkNinja, the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts and, just to hammer the point, the CEO of SaaStr, the software industry conference and media company. We'll truncate the interviews to the shortest summary: they all love Salesforce's AI agent products. Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its agentic products: Agentic Work Units ("AWU"). The idea here is that rather than simply counting "tokens" -- the standard unit of AI processing volume -- AWU attempts to measure something more meaningful: whether an agent actually completed a task, like writing to a record, rather than just generating text. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds like a lot but really is not 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 said on the call. So AWU is intended to measure when the agent writes to a record or does some other verifiable task. On top of that, Salesforce also presented its own architectural vision of the coming world of agents. It shows SaaS software like itself owning most of the tech stack, with the AI model makers on the bottom as unseen, interchangeable, and commoditized work engines. This was a direct counter to one of the causes of a SaaSpocalypse sell-off earlier this month, after OpenAI released its enterprise agent, Frontier, platform. OpenAI's architectural vision shows OpenAI owning most of the stack, with systems-of-record SaaS providers (the databases and business-software platforms where companies store their core data) on the bottom as the unseen engines. And if all that wasn't enough to influence investors: Benioff was dressed in a black leather jacket, echoing the signature look of the CEO clearly crushing it in the AI world: Nvidia's Jensen Huang.

'You've heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn't our first. We've had a few of them': Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bullish over AI market potential

AI is doing to software what cloud did years ago, Salesforce CEO says * Marc Benioff says AI has created another "SaaSpocalypse", just as cloud did * Salesforce has changed direction to become an agentic AI platform * Agentic AI could increase company revenue by 50% in four years Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has warned of a "SaaSpocalypse", whereby traditional software vendors are coming under threat from AI tools, and particularly, agentic AI. The moment "isn't our first" SaaSpocalypse, Benioff said, referencing previous shifts such as the move from on-prem to cloud. However, just like the move to cloud, vendors who choose to get in on the action and modernize could actually benefit rather than being left behind. SaaS is now under threat from AI, not just cloud Speaking about Salesforce in particular, Benioff noted AI is actually making its platform more valuable by acting as an operating system for AI agents, indicating that AI isn't killing software as the term 'SaaSpocalypse' suggests - merely rewriting it, much like it's rewriting job roles. But the change has come at a cost, because Salesforce rebuilt itself for the agentic era, and many smaller SaaS providers may struggle to turn things around so quickly. The company has seen considerable success from its Agentic Work Units (AWUs), shifting away from per-seat billing to instead charge for the tasks that its AI agents complete. Benioff's observations came during the company's most recent earnings call, where it was revealed Salesforce drew in $11.2 billion in quarterly revenue, up 12% year-over-year, closing the full year with $41.5 billion in revenue, a 10% increase over the previous year. "We've rebuilt Salesforce to become the operating system for the Agentic Enterprise, bringing humans and agents together on one trusted platform," Benioff commented. Looking ahead, Salesforce has raised its fiscal 2030 revenue target to $63 billion, marking a more than 51% increase, citing agentic AI as a key driver. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

How much is that worth in AWUs? Introducing a new metric to track agentic value as Salesforce turns in strong full year numbers

This isn't our first 'SaaSpocalypse'. We've had a few of them. I said yesterday that after Workday and SAP execs had aired their counter-arguments to the prevailing nonsense on Wall Street about the supposed 'SaaSpocalypse' about to bring down the traditional software industry, that next up would be Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. He didn't disappoint: If there is a "SaaSpocalypse' I think it might be being eaten by the 'Sasquatch', because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS, because SaaS just got a lot better with agents-as-a-service...Anthropic runs its whole global operation on Salesforce and Slack. I think, actually, every AI company does. But away from such distractions, the main order of the business was the announcement of the firm's latest quarterly and full year numbers. Q4 revenue came in at $11.2 billion, up 12% year-on-year, including Informatica whose acquisition closed during the quarter, with a profit of $1.87 billion. Full year revenue was $41.5 billion, up 10% year-on-year. Broken down into what used to be called clouds, but are now classed as Agentforce variants, full year revenue by product breaks down as: That might be the last time that sort of breakdown is made available, said Chief Operating and Finance Officer Robin Washington, as the firm is "re-evaluating our revenue by cloud disclosures" in order "to better reflect our Agentic Enterprise strategy". In terms of Agentforce take-up, more than 29,000 Agentforce deals have now closed, a 50% increase on last quarter. No data was provided on how many of those are paying deals as opposed to unpaid pilots. That said, Annual Recurring Revenue of $800 million is up 169% year-on-year. In Q4, all of the top ten wins included Agentforce 360, Data 360, Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service, Agentforce 360 Platform, and Agentforce Analytics. Salesforce also used its earnings to pitch the idea of a new AI metric: Agentic Work Units, defined as one discrete task accomplished by an AI agent. AI workloads are often measured in tokens, or fragments of text processed by Large Language Models (LLMs). Benioff said: Today we are one of the largest consumers of tokens in the world, to date now over 19 trillion tokens. We continue to show you that because we want you to see that we're actually doing what we say. I know that there's been some enterprise software companies who say they're doing agent, or they're doing AI, but then they're not showing up in the token rankings from the language model companies. But we really want to take this to another level, and another level is a token on its own doesn't know your customers, your pipeline, your org chart, but Salesforce does. The value isn't in the token, the value is what our platform does with it. That's why today we're introducing the Agentic Work Unit (AWU). AWUs quantify the amount of digital labor actually added by AI. They're the brainchild of recently-appointed Chief Marketing Officer Patrick Stokes, formerly EVP of Product. Stokes explained: As we started looking at how our customers were using Agentforce, we started looking at how we're consuming tokens from the model providers. All those models that sit at the bottom of our layer, from OpenAI and from Anthropic, what they're doing is they're providing intelligence into our system. We're able to measure that intelligence through the lens of a token, and that's how most of these model companies are charging, [by] the amount of tokens that your platform is consuming. But when we started looking at that across our customers, we could start to see, 'OK, our Top 10 customers are consuming this many tokens. We know how many tokens Salesforce is consuming internally. But it begs the question, 'Well, are they doing anything? Are they working? Are they providing any value, or is it just input and output of intelligence?'. So, you know, you can ask it a question, it can write you a poem, but that's not really all that valuable in the enterprise world. What's valuable is creating a document for you, or updating a record. That begged another question, he continued: We said, 'What if we could count those individual work units?', and then, 'What if we could look at those work units relative to the tokens?'. And we said, 'Oh, there's a relationship between the two'. We could start to see a ratio of tokens being consumed and work coming out.That ratio starts to become really interesting, because now we can look at our customers and say, 'Hey, Customer A, you have a really nice ratio. You're getting a lot of work done on the platform for the amount of tokens that you're consuming', and, 'Hey Customer B, your relationship is actually not so good. You're consuming a ton of tokens and not getting a lot of work done. What can we do to help you?'. So tokens are kind of a leading indicator, but the Work Unit, we think, is a much more valuable indicator in terms of where the value is actually coming from for our customers and for our own transformation into an Agentic Enterprise. A strong quarter and full year and Agentforce is showing definite traction among the customer base, so all good? Nah, it's 2026 and Wall Street is still being as short termist as ever and panicking at the drop of a hat. So Salesforce's stock price slid on the release of the earnings numbers, fuelled by forward looking comments that failed to live up to what financial analysts wanted to hear. We should be used to this by now, whatever metrics you use...

Salesforce beats expectations as it doubles down on AI agents, but investors are still worried - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce beats expectations as it doubles down on AI agents, but investors are still worried Salesforce Inc. clocked up its highest-ever quarterly revenue as it delivered its latest financial results, beating expectations, but its revenue guidance for the new fiscal year trailed Wall Street's projections. The customer relationship management software giant crushed Wall Street's expectations, delivering fourth-quarter earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of $3.81 per share, well ahead of the $3.04 analyst consensus estimate. Revenue grew 12% from a year earlier to $11.2 billion, surpassing the Street's $11.18 billion estimate. Investors would have been encouraged to note that Salesforce's revenue grew at the fastest rate in over two years, and that growth helped to boost its bottom line too. The company reported net income of $1.94 billion in the quarter, rising from the $1.71 billion profit it posted one year earlier. Salesforce Chair and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff (pictured) hailed the company's performance, explaining that artificial intelligence is the driving force behind its renewed growth. "We've rebuilt Salesforce to become the operating system for the agentic enterprise, bringing humans and agents together on one trusted platform," he said. "And the more intelligence moves to where work happens, the more valuable Salesforce becomes. Agentforce ARR reached $800 million, up 169% year-over-year, and we've closed 29,000 deals, up 50% quarter-over-quarter." There were more impressive numbers, with the company reporting remaining performance obligations of $35.1 billion, above the Street's $34.53 billion consensus. RPO refers to the sum of contracted but so far unrecognized revenue that the company expects to receive over the next year. For the current quarter, Salesforce said it's looking at earnings of between $3.11 and $3.13 per share on sales of $11.03 billion to $11.08 billion. Wall Street is seeking a profit of exactly $3 per share on sales of $10.99 billion. So far so good, but the company's fiscal 2027 revenue forecast wasn't as encouraging. The company said it's looking for annual sales of $46 billion at the midpoint of its guidance range, trailing the Street's forecast of $46.06 billion. Unfortunately for Salesforce, that lone blot on its copybook was all it took to send investors running to the hills. Its stock nosedived after hours, declining more than 5%, erasing a gain of 3% made during the regular trading session. So far this year, Salesforce's stock has declined more than 27%, partly due to broader economic trends, but mostly because investors have become extremely worried about what the future holds for software companies amid the rise of autonomous AI agents. The fear is that agentic tools such as Anthropic PBC's Claude Cowork and OpenAI Group PBC's Frontier might make software-as-a-service platforms "invisible" and consequently less valuable. Basically every publicly-traded software-as-a-service company has seen its stock decline in the last few weeks. There are even fears that enterprises might one day just use AI coding tools to build their own software platforms entirely. That's partly why IBM Corp.'s stock fell more than 13% on Monday, when Anthropic updated Claude Code, giving it the ability to modernize mainframe applications written in the Cobolt programming language. However, Benioff rejected these fears as unrealistic. On a conference call with analysts, he said he is taking advantage of Salesforce's reduced value to allocate another $50 billion for stock buybacks "because these are some low prices." Meanwhile, Salesforce continues to confront the agentic AI threat head on, doubling down on the development of its own agentic automation tools. During the quarter, the company debuted a new Slackbot assistant in the Slack team communication app for paying customers. The company completed its $8 billion acquisition of Informatica LLC, and also announced its intention to buy the agentic marketing startup Qualified. Benioff offered a bullish long-term forecast too, saying he believes the company can hit $63 billion in annual sales by the end of fiscal 2030, up from a target of $60 billion it first revealed in October. Valoir analyst Rebecca Wettemann told SiliconANGLE that she's also optimistic about Salesforce's long-term prospects, citing the $800 million in annual recurring revenue generated by its Agentforce platform. She pointed to the company's focus on building specific industry cloud verticals as a key differentiator. "Industry adoption is going to be an important driver for Agentforce," she said. "The Life Sciences Cloud growth is important because it's a customer retention story against Veeva and other competitors, and because adopting industry clouds reduces the cost and friction of AI adoption and accelerates time to value for Agentforce." However, Wettemann also said Salesforce still has much more work to do on the agentic front. She believes investors want to see it doing more than just talking about new customer wins and contract sizes, and start showing real customer success stories. "To make AI a reality for customers and the market, and cement Salesforce's position in it, it needs to be able to show how customers are moving AI agents into production at scale with governance, observability, and trust needed, as well as ROI," the analyst said. Meanwhile, Salesforce scored some significant victories in its battle against other SaaS vendors, if Benioff is to be believed. He said five customers of ServiceNow Inc. dropped that vendor in favor of Salesforce's alternative information technology service management platform during the quarter. All told, the platform gained 180 new customers, he said. Wettemann said this is a significant and welcome development for the company's broader strategy. "The ITSM story is a key part of Salesforce's 'apps plus agents' message and it's a way for the company to own more of the service automation pie beyond CRM," she explained. The good news for Salesforce is that not everyone is buying into the AI-is-eating-software story. Analysts from Morgan Stanley, who have a buy rating on the company's stock, said in a note to clients this week that its conversations with partners suggest "we are in the early innings" of the agentic push. It's notable that Salesforce is seeing a significant benefit from its investment in Anthropic, too. The company generated an $811 million gain on that investment in the quarter, up from just $96 million in the same quarter one year earlier. "I think we just put another $100 million into the new round," Benioff told analysts. "We're at about $330 million into Anthropic invested. It's almost 1% of Anthropic, and believe me, I wish we have invested a lot more."

Marc Benioff mocks AI "SaaSpocalypse" fears in leather jacket

On Wednesday, Salesforce announced fourth-quarter financial results that showcased significant revenue growth and a strategic push to counter investor anxiety regarding the impact of artificial intelligence on traditional software models. The company reported quarterly revenue of $10.7 billion, representing a 13% increase compared to the same period last year. For the complete fiscal year, Salesforce posted revenue of $41.5 billion, a 10% year-over-year rise. These figures were bolstered by the integration of Informatica, a data management company acquired for $8 billion in May. The company also reported a net income of $7.46 billion for the period. Management provided an optimistic outlook for the current fiscal year, forecasting revenue between $45.8 billion and $46.2 billion, which would constitute a growth rate of 10% to 11%. Additionally, Salesforce highlighted its remaining performance obligation, a metric indicating future revenue under contract, which stands at over $72 billion. Despite these strong financial results, Salesforce and other SaaS providers face mounting pressure from investors concerned that the rise of AI agents could render the per-employee-seat subscription model obsolete. Market participants have colloquially termed this phenomenon the "SaaSpocalypse." CEO Marc Benioff directly addressed this sentiment multiple times during the earnings call, framing the current environment as a cyclical challenge rather than an existential threat. "You've heard about the SaaSpocalypse? And it isn't our first. We've had a few of them," Benioff stated. He further argued that the integration of agents enhances the utility of existing software platforms, suggesting that legacy systems would not be easily displaced. "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," he added. To bolster shareholder confidence, the company announced specific financial actions designed to return capital to investors and signal balance sheet strength. Salesforce increased its quarterly cash dividend by nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. Furthermore, the board of directors authorized a new share repurchase program valued at $50 billion. Buyback programs are typically viewed favorably by markets as they reduce the total number of shares outstanding, which can increase earnings per share and support the stock price. These measures indicate a focus on capital allocation alongside product innovation as the company navigates a competitive market landscape. The structure of the earnings call itself was modified to serve as a hybrid of a traditional financial update and a product showcase. Rather than strictly adhering to a numerical review, Benioff conducted on-camera interviews with executives from three major customers. Participants included the CEO of SharkNinja, a home appliance manufacturer; the CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and the CEO of SaaStr, a prominent software industry conference and media outlet. Each executive expressed satisfaction with Salesforce's AI agent capabilities, providing third-party validation for the company's product roadmap. This format shifted the focus from purely financial metrics to real-world application and customer testimonials. Salesforce also introduced a new measurement standard intended to better quantify the value generated by its AI offerings. The company unveiled the metric "agentic work units" (AWU) to track successful task completion by AI agents. This approach contrasts with the industry standard of counting tokens, which represents the volume of data processed by AI models. Salesforce reported processing 19 trillion tokens in the previous quarter, a figure that, while large, does not necessarily correlate with business value. Patrick Stokes, Salesforce's president and chief marketing officer, explained the distinction on the call, noting, "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." AWU is designed to track verifiable actions, such as writing to a database record, thereby providing a clearer picture of agent productivity. Underpinning these announcements was a distinct architectural vision intended to challenge the dominance of foundational AI model providers like OpenAI. Salesforce presented a hierarchy where SaaS platforms occupy the top layer of the technology stack, utilizing AI models as commoditized engines at the bottom. This perspective directly counters the vision outlined by OpenAI regarding its "Frontier" agent platform, which positions OpenAI at the top and relegates SaaS providers to the role of backend data repositories. By asserting the primacy of the application layer, Salesforce is positioning itself as the indispensable interface for enterprise AI operations. In a visual nod to the current AI industry landscape, Marc Benioff wore a black leather jacket during the earnings presentation. This attire mirrored the signature style of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company has become the dominant supplier of hardware powering the AI boom. The choice of clothing appeared to be a deliberate signal that Salesforce intends to remain a central player in the evolving AI ecosystem, adopting the aesthetics of the sector's current market leaders while asserting a distinct strategic direction.

Salesforce Q4 Earnings: CEO Benioff Downplays AI Upstart Fears, 'Not Our First SaaS‑pocalypse'

'We're going to make it through this one as well,' Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff said. Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff dismissed fears around artificial intelligence upstarts including Claude maker Anthropic and ChatGPT maker OpenAI potentially wrecking his company's traditional software-as-a-service business, touting SaaS' survival through past market disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic. "This is not our first SaaS-pocalypse," Benioff said Wednesday during the San Francisco-based enterprise software vendor's fourth fiscal quarter earnings call. "We have been through many SaaS-pocalypses. You know, I remember the horrible SaaS-pocalypse of 2020 when not only the software industry was dying, but we were all dying. But we made it through that. And now everyone is back, doing great. So we're so grateful to make it through that. And we're going to make it through this one as well." Wednesday's call covered the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended Jan. 31. [RELATED: Nvidia Hits Record Quarterly Growth, Says It's The 'World's Largest Networking Business'] Benioff called Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI model makers partners whose models are usable with Salesforce's Data 360, which allows users to harmonize, integrate and federate data. Salesforce's Slackbot AI-powered personal agent has more than 350 AI applications and agents in its marketplace, including those by "the great Anthropic." Salesforce is also an investor in Anthropic. "We love Anthropic," Benioff said. "We love (brother and sister co-founders) Dario (Amodei, CEO), Daniela (Amodei, president). ... It's about agents and apps. Humans, agents-it's all working together. You can see it in (Dario Amodei's product) demos. You can see it in our demos. By the way, Anthropic runs its whole global operation on Salesforce and Slack. I think, actually, every AI company does." Benioff also took shots at fellow established enterprise software vendors ServiceNow and Microsoft during the call. Only months into challenging ServiceNow's IT service management (ITSM) business with a competing Salesforce offer, Benioff said that Salesforce has persuaded five customers "to leave the purgatory of ServiceNow." Salesforce ITSM has more than 180 customers. Salesforce's life sciences cloud product has been taking customers from rival Veeva Systems, Benioff said on the call, naming AstraZeneca and Novartis among the customers Salesforce has won over. And the Salesforce co-founder gave a slight dig at Microsoft's Teams collaboration application that rivals Salesforce's Slack product, saying that the Slackbot can leverage data in "Salesforce. It looks through Google. It looks even at Microsoft Teams, as hard as that is for some agents to go and do. But we've told them how to do it." "I've never been more excited about our business here at Salesforce," Benioff said. "No one else is delivering this level of capability at this scale to this many customers. And we are taking the power of the agentic enterprise of these apps and Salesforce, and we're giving them the security, reliability, availability, scalability that you need to make them successful in business." Even if Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools become platforms of their own and try to challenge Salesforce, Benioff said, his company still has 150,000 core customers, 1 million Slack customers and 15,000 sales representatives that work with customers on future-proofing and new technology adoption. Salesforce has the pre-existing customer relationships and is at work automating contact centers and sales organizations and allowing businesses to unleash AI agents in a compliant, secure, available, scalable and reliable manner. "Our job as a software company is to help our customers to create success and to take that and help them connect with their customers in a whole new way," Benioff said. "Our job is to take what's available today and make it successful. And that isn't where those platforms are today." Patrick Stokes, Salesforce president and chief marketing officer, added that Slack remains a powerful user interface even against Claude and other AI chatbots because users never have to leave the communications platform when leveraging agents with existing company data. "We love and are partners of Anthropic, but it (Slack) knows all of the context of your business, not just the context of your systems of records," he said. "All of the conversations happening inside of Slack and has access to all of that. And the knowledge that it gains from that is truly unmatched. It might be our most important piece of data that we have. And so when you put all that together into this brand-new user interface, you know, that's really where we see this big transformation in SaaS happening." On Wednesday's call, Salesforce executives discussed a new agentic work unit to better measure how Agentforce affects customers' operations. Salesforce defines AWUs as a discrete task accomplished by an AI agent, including updating a record, triggering a workflow and making a decision. Salesforce has consumed nearly 20 trillion tokens, converting them into more than 2.4 billion agentic work units to date across Agentforce and Slack, according to the vendor. That token count is up fivefold year on year, and that AWU milestone is up 57 percent quarter on quarter. AWUs allow the vendor to see what different models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others actually power an action by an AI agent, CMO Stokes said on the call. Salesforce measures the ratio of tokens consumed and work coming out and tells customers whether their own ratios are good or bad-and makes sure its own model consumption ratios are favorable as well. Benioff also pointed out on the call that the company's traditional subscription business continues to see renewals and provides Salesforce a level of predictability for future fiscal years. "We are innovating," Benioff said. "We're creating the future. We're adding to the future. We're also renewing our customers." Robin Washington, Salesforce president and chief operating and financial officer (COFO) said on the call that new bookings for the premium Agentforce 1 Edition and Agentforce for Apps nearly tripled quarter over quarter. Salesforce's traditional business also accelerated, with seat counts growing year on year and quarter on quarter, Washington said. "We're just seeing incremental value to our software," Washington said. "Some of it's going to be consumption based. But we're going to have a hybrid model. Seats will continue to be a key component of our growth going forward." Salesforce revealed that its Agentforce AI agent creation platform-which some solution providers also sell and work with-has reached annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $800 million, more than double year on year, according to the vendor. The number of Agentforce accounts in production increased nearly 50 percent quarter on quarter. The vendor has closed 29,000 Agentforce deals, up 50 percent quarter over quarter. Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue exceeds $2.9 billion, tripling year on year. That revenue includes $1.1 billion in ARR from the cloud business of newly acquired Informatica. It also includes that $800 million in Agentforce ARR. More than 60 percent of Agentforce and Data 360 fourth quarter bookings came from existing customer expansion, according to Salesforce. For the fiscal year, Data 360 ingested 112 trillion records, more than double year on year and processed 18 terabytes of unstructured data. Those records include 53 trillion ingested through the zero copy direct, real-time access to data stored in external data warehouses without moving, duplicating or creating extract, transform and load (ETL) pipelines. The number of zero copy ingested records more than quadrupled year on year. Benioff said to expect more acquisitions in the future by Salesforce, although the company has "a much better understanding of how to do acquisitions that are accretive to the business, but not dilutive to investors." Salesforce reported current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) of $35.1 billion, up 13 percent ignoring foreign exchange. Newly acquired Informatica contributed 4 points to that growth. The vendor reported $72.4 billion in RPO, up 14 percent year on year. The vendor brought in subscription and support revenue of $10.7 billion for the fourth quarter up 11 percent year on year ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica contributed $388 million to that revenue. Salesforce brought in $11.2 billion in total revenue for the fourth quarter, up 10 percent year on year ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica contributed $399 million to that amount. The vendor delivered a record fiscal 2026 with $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10 percent year over year. For the fiscal year, Salesforce brought in an operating cash flow of $15 billion, up 15 percent year on year. Its free cash flow was $14.4 billion, up 16 percent year on year. Collectively, Salesforce industry businesses finished the year at $6.6 billion ARR, up nearly 20 percent year on year. Salesforce expects first quarter revenue between $11.03 billion and $11.08 billion, which would mark 10 percent to 11 percent growth year on year ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica should contribute about 4 points to that growth. The vendor expects cRPO of about 13 percent ignoring foreign exchange. Salesforce forecasts fiscal year 2027 revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion, up 10 percent to 11 percent year on year. Informatica should contribute 3 points. The vendor expects organic revenue re-acceleration in the second half of its 2027 fiscal year. It expects subscription and support revenue growth of about 11 percent ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica should contribute about 3 points. Salesforce expects a FY27 GAAP operating margin of 20.9 percent and 34.3 percent without using GAAP. The vendor expects FY27 operating cash flow growth of about 9 percent year on year. Salesforce expects to reach $63 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2030, according to the vendor. Salesforce's stock fell about 4 percent after market close Wednesday, trading at about $192 a share. The company's stock-alongside those of other enterprise software vendors that work with the channel-had already gotten hit by market fears over AI upstarts like Claude maker Anthropic disrupting their businesses. On Tuesday, Salesforce's stock had already fallen 27 percent year to date.

Salesforce Sees Stable Growth; CEO Dismisses Talk of AI-Fueled 'SaaS-Pocalypse' -- 2nd Update

Salesforce expects revenue to grow in the current fiscal year at about the same rate as it did the year before, as investors worry about AI's threat to software. Chief Executive Marc Benioff told investors on a call Wednesday he wasn't fazed by the selloff across software companies in recent weeks, which was driven by concerns that AI companies would replace software services. He said the stock's price--which hit a three-year low earlier this month--created the opportunity to authorize a $50 billion share buyback. "This is not our first SaaS-pocalypse," Benioff said. "We are going to make it through this one as well, so this is a great marketing opportunity and a great buying opportunity." The new buyback will replace all previously unused authorizations, Salesforce said. In the new fiscal year, Salesforce expects annual revenue to be $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion, while analysts were projecting $46.11 billion. The company expects adjusted earnings per share to be $13.11 to $13.19, while the consensus estimate from Wall Street was $13.15. At the midpoint, the full-year revenue guidance would represent roughly 10% growth, in line with the 10% sales increase Salesforce logged in the just-ended fiscal year. The stock fell 5% to $181.25 in after-hours trading. Benioff highlighted the growth of Salesforce's AI product Agentforce, which made its debut in the fall of 2024. He said more companies, including SharkNinja and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, are adding agents at a rapid pace and turning to Agentforce to do that work for them. Agentforce reached $800 million in the quarter, up from $540 million the quarter before. Salesforce said it closed 29,000 deals during the quarter, a 50% jump from the third quarter. Agentforce made its debut in the fall of 2024. "If there is a SaaS-pocalypse, it may be eaten by the SaaS-quatch because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents-as-a-service," Benioff said. Even before February's software selloff, investors have been questioning Salesforce's ability to stay relevant in the age of AI. Agentforce has been growing but some investors worry it isn't catching on fast enough. Despite consistently beating estimates with its financial results last year, Salesforce shares have lost 38% of their value in the past 12 months. Revenue rose 12% to $11.20 billion in the fourth quarter. Analysts surveyed by FactSet forecast revenue of $11.19 billion. Salesforce posted a profit of $1.87 billion, or $2.07 a share, compared with $1.82 billion, or $1.75 a share, a year earlier. Adjusted per-share earnings were $3.81, ahead of the $3.05 anticipated by analysts, according to FactSet. In the current quarter, Salesforce anticipates revenue of $11.03 billion to $11.08 billion, ahead of the $11.0 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings per share are set to be $3.11 to $3.13, also ahead of Street estimates of $3.01. Write to Katherine Hamilton at [email protected]