Salesforce pulled out all of the stops to persuade buyers that the AI revolution received’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 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 Might.
Web revenue landed at $7.46 billion, and the corporate supplied sturdy 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, might solely accomplish that a lot. Software program-as-a-service shares, with Salesforce as their poster little one, have been getting hammered recently. Traders concern the rise of AI brokers will undermine these firms, making their per-employee-seat enterprise fashions out of date.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 a minimum of six instances.
“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 variety of firms utilizing a variety of SaaS as a result of it simply obtained 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 increase the inventory worth).
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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 a substitute of operating by means of 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 Lodges 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 models (“AWU”). The thought right here is that slightly 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 process, like writing to a report, slightly than simply producing textual content. (Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens final quarter, which feels like quite a bit however actually will not be 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 useful 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 report or does another verifiable process.
On prime of that, Salesforce additionally offered 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 buyers: 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.
