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AIPROPX ReportCNBC · 3h ago
Marc Benioff is getting his mojo back as Salesforce's AI strength quiets skeptics
For the better part of a year, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been hearing that his company could get wiped out by AI. He's scoffed anytime someone has asked him about it.
"This is not our first SaaSpocalypse ," Benioff said on an earnings call in February. "We have been through many SaaSpocalypses."
Those comments followed a 21% slump in the company's stock price last year, a trend that continued for most of 2026, as Salesforce and the rest of the software sector underperformed the broader market. With Anthropic and OpenAI rolling out a dizzying number of artificial intelligence models and services for businesses, concerns grew about the sustainability of traditional software.
But if this week is any indication, Wall Street may finally be coming back around to Benioff's side.
On Thursday, Salesforce shares shot up almost 23%, their best day since 2020 and second-biggest jump since the company went public in 2004. The rally erased most of the stock's loss for the year, though it's still down about 5%.
Investors were responding to a beat-and-raise quarter and a new tie-up with Anthropic that's dubbed "Claudeforce." The earnings announcement was fortuitously timed, coming just as reports were surfacing of high-level OpenAI employees joining the company.
In a post on X last week, Benioff said Kaylin Voss was returning to Salesforce after just five months at OpenAI, where she was vice president of the Americas. Peter Doolan, who was there for about the same amount of time as global head of AI transformation, is also returning.
According to a report on Wednesday from The Information , citing a person familiar with the matter, another 22 former Salesforce employees at OpenAI are in talks to return.
"Boomerang talent is a celebrated part of our culture," a Salesforce spokesperson said in an emailed statement, without commenting on those coming from OpenAI. An OpenAI spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment.
In Wednesday's earnings report, Salesforce said revenue for the quarter climbed 11% from a year earlier, topping estimates. Its forecast for the current period calls for closer to 12% growth at the midpoint of the range, also just ahead of expectations.
It's by no means runaway growth, and it's about in line with where Salesforce has been over the past four years. But the numbers were good enough to ease some investor fears, especially with annualized revenue from Salesforce's Agentforce AI products soaring 240% from a year ago to over $1.5 billion.
"This SaaSpocalypse narrative has been such nonsense," Benioff told CNBC's Jim Cramer after the company reported results. "Frontier models depend on CRM. They don't replace it."
Salesforce's bottom line is directly benefiting from AI, as the company recorded a $2.6 billion gain from its three-year-old investment in Anthropic. That figure could go up, as Anthropic is marching toward a highly anticipated IPO.
Benioff's overarching message to investors has been centered around the scale and power of his company's software, which Salesforce says is used by over 150,000 corporate customers, and the inconceivability that clients would rip it out and decide to use AI to build their own services for customer relationship management and other critical functions.
On this week's earnings call, Benioff brought on David Friedberg, the CEO of biotech startup Ohalo, who confessed to vibe-coding a CRM tool in a weekend.
"You quickly realize just how much it takes to do maintenance, to do accounts, to do security," said Friedberg, who's better known as the co-host of the "All-In" podcast. "We're already on Slack. We're not going to go vibe-code Slack. We're not going to vibe-code CRM."
Slack, which Salesforce acquired for almost $28 billion, already integrates with Claude, and will be more closely tied to it in the future as part of the Anthropic partnership this week. With Claudeforce, Salesforce says users will have a plugin with 37 pre-built sales skills that will allow Claude to compose emails, update records and take other relevant actions.
"I think that this is the way all enterprise systems are going to run in the future," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNBC as part of a joint interview with Benioff.
It's also the first time that Salesforce has ever added its "force" suffix to the end of another company's product name.
Arjun Bhatia, an analyst at William Blair who recommends buying Salesforce shares, said investors who turned negative on cloud software companies or eliminated their exposure altogether due to AI concerns, are starting to come back.
"I think there was a lot of sort of AI mania," Bhatia said, adding that sentiment pointed to there being just "two companies in the world that exist in the next five years, which are OpenAI and Anthropic."
"Anthropic basically is saying, "Look, we still need Salesforce,'" he said.
Bhatia said investors are now seeing opportunities for revenue growth at Salesforce increasing from the low double digits, along with margin expansion.
"Could they hit 15%?" he said. "I think it's very possible."
His peers aren't nearly that bullish in the short term. Analysts on average expect growth of 11% this fiscal year, before its dips down to 10% in the next two years, according to LSEG.
Michael Monaghan, partner and portfolio manager at Founder ETFs, remains a believer in Benioff, who turns 62 in September.
"I have every confidence that as long as he wants to keep coming in every day, he's going to do well," Monaghan said.
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