There’s a term floating around Wall Street right now that sounds like it belongs in a zombie apocalypse movie: SaaSpocalypse. And honestly, it makes sense. Software-as-a-service companies are watching their business models get picked apart by AI, and they’re rightfully freaking out.
Salesforce just held its earnings call, and CEO Marc Benioff spent the whole time trying to convince everyone that the death of SaaS has been greatly exaggerated. The company reported solid numbers: $10.7 billion in quarterly revenue, up 13% year-over-year, with $41.5 billion for the full year. They’re projecting $45.8 to $46.2 billion in revenue ahead, which is solid growth. But here’s the thing about good numbers in today’s market: they can only do so much.
When Revenue Isn’t Enough
The real problem isn’t Salesforce’s balance sheet. It’s the existential panic sweeping through the entire SaaS sector. Investors are convinced that AI agents will obliterate the per-employee-seat model that these companies have built their fortunes on. Why pay for expensive software for every employee if an AI agent can do the work of ten?
Benioff mentioned the term “SaaSpocalypse” at least six times during the earnings call. At one point, he said something like: “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.”
Which is either brilliant or desperate. Probably both.
The Full Court Press
Salesforce didn’t mess around. They threw everything at this earnings call. A 6% dividend increase. A brand new $50 billion share buyback program. These are the moves of a company trying to create a safety net under its stock price while it convinces people the ground isn’t falling out.
But the real theater was in the format itself. Benioff ditched the typical earnings call structure and went full infomercial mode. Instead of just walking through the numbers, he interviewed three customer CEOs on camera. SharkNinja’s CEO, Wyndham Hotels’ CEO, and even SaaStr’s CEO all showed up to basically say “yeah, we love Salesforce’s new AI agent stuff.”
It was like watching a product launch masquerading as a financial earnings call.
The Metric Nobody Asked For
Then came the new metric: agentic work units, or AWU. This is where things get interesting. Salesforce logged 19 trillion tokens last quarter, which sounds massive until you realize it’s basically meaningless without context. A token could be used to write a poem, a haiku, or absolutely nothing useful.
So Salesforce invented AWU to measure something tangible: whether an agent actually completed a task. Did it write to a database? Did it finish something real? That’s what AWU tracks. It’s a clever move because it shifts the conversation from raw processing power to actual business value.
Patrick Stokes, Salesforce’s president and CMO, put it plainly: “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.”
The Architecture Wars
Here’s where this gets genuinely competitive. Salesforce presented its own vision of how the AI world should be structured. In their version, SaaS platforms like Salesforce sit at the top, controlling most of the technology stack. AI model makers? They’re relegated to the bottom, commoditized and interchangeable.
This is a direct counter to OpenAI’s competing vision, which emerged after they released Frontier, their enterprise agent. OpenAI’s model puts OpenAI at the top controlling the stack, with SaaS companies relegated to being the unsexy backend.
It’s essentially two tech giants arguing about who gets to own the future. And for companies like Salesforce, losing that positioning could be genuinely catastrophic.
The Leather Jacket Energy
Oh, and one more thing: Benioff wore a black leather jacket during the call. The same signature look that’s become synonymous with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who’s basically the coolest guy in the AI room right now.
You could read this as either confidence or desperation. Probably both.
The real question isn’t whether Salesforce will survive the next few years. They’ll probably do fine. The question is whether the SaaS business model as we know it survives the transition to AI agents, or whether Benioff’s repeated mentions of the SaaSpocalypse become a self-fulfilling prophecy despite his best efforts to laugh it off.
