‘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.
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Salesforce Q4 Earnings
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.”
AI Upstarts’ Platform Challenge
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.”
AWU Measurement
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.”
Product Milestones
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.”
Q4, FY 2026 In Depth
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 Q1, FY27 Forecast
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.
