Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This isn’t our first SaaSpocalypse

Salesforce pulled out all the stops to reassure investors that the AI ​​revolution won’t be its death knell 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 revenue of $41.5 billion, up 10% from the previous year, and its overall results were boosted by its $8 billion earnings. data management company Informatica May is over.

Total revenue came in at $7.46 billion, and the company gave strong guidance for next year, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — an increase of 10% to 11%. It said that the “remaining operation,” or RPO, is more than $72 billion. It is a figure that shows the amount paid that has not been paid or recognized as income.

Statistics, however, can do more. Software-as-a-service stocks, and Salesforce as their post childthey have been beaten recently. Marketers fear that the rise of AI assistants will disrupt these industries, creating their own workplaces business models are over. This situation is called the “SaaSpocalypse.”

The concept was very much in the air at the time of the funding round and CEO Marc Benioff mentioned the phrase at least six times.

“You’ve heard of the SaaSpocalypse? And it’s not our first. We’ve had a few of them,” he said, then added, “If there’s a SaaSpocalypse, it could be eaten by Sasquatch because there are a lot of companies that use a lot of SaaS because it just got better with providers.”

Trying to convince the world that it continues to be healthy, Salesforce threw everything and the kitchen sink in this financial report. The company increased its dividend nearly 6% to $0.44 per share. It launched a new 50 billion share buyback program. This is always preferred by shareholders because it both creates a stronger buyer of the stock and reduces the number of shares distributed (which can increase the stock price).

The company also revised the call it receives. It was part podcast, part infomercial, and part Q&A with a series of questions from Wall Street experts.

Instead of going through the numbers, Benioff asked three Salesforce customers on camera to testify about their love for his new ways of working: The CEO of home electronics company SharkNinja; CEO of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts; and, just to emphasize the point, the CEO of SaaStr, a conference of software companies and media companies. We’ll cut the interview short: They both love Salesforce’s AI products.

Salesforce also introduced a new metric for its products: operational units (“AWU”). The idea here is that instead of just counting “tokens” – a standard part of AI’s volume – AWU tries to measure something more meaningful: whether the agent actually completed a task, such as writing a document, rather than just producing words. (Salesforce traded 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which seems like a lot but really is no in the world of AI.)

“You can ask a question and it will write you a poem, but it’s not really important in business,” Salesforce president and CMO Patrick Stokes said on the call. AWU therefore needs to measure the time that the agent has to write a document or perform some other specified task.

On top of that, Salesforce also presented its architectural vision for the upcoming world of agents. It presents SaaS applications as standalone having more technical equipmentand AI developers that are down as invisible, adaptive, and commercial engines.

This was in direct opposition to one of the reasons for the SaaSpocalypse sale earlier this month, after all. OpenAI released its business partner, Frontier. OpenAI’s architectural vision envisions OpenAI as more scalable, with SaaS offerings (databases and business software platforms where companies store their big data) down like invisible engines.

And if all that wasn’t enough to attract investors: Benioff was wearing a black leather jacket, simulating the signature look of a CEO clearly breaking into the world of AI: Jensen Huang of Nvidia.