RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 2 sourcesSalesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Bloomberg/Getty Images
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dismissed fears of SaaSpocalypse after the company's latest earnings report.
Salesforce's stock dropped 19% this year, but after-hours trading rose over 12% post-earnings.
Salesforce also announced a partnership with Anthropic to add Salesforce data and actions in Claude.
Marc Benioff is going on the offensive about the so-called SaaSpocalypse.
"This nonsense of this SaaSpocalypse , I think it's time for it to stop," the Salesforce CEO said during the company's second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday.
Benioff used the call to push back on fears that AI threatens traditional software companies.
"Our seats were supposed to decline. Instead, Agentforce Sales, Services, Slack all saw year-over-year growth," Benioff said. "We were told customers would abandon us. But attrition is near its lowest level ever."
Benioff's comments land in the middle of one of Silicon Valley's biggest debates: the SaaSpocalypse. Investors have spent the past year questioning whether AI agents will eventually replace the software that many workers use today, threatening the subscription model that built companies like Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow.
If employees increasingly interact with AI agents rather than individual applications, companies may need fewer traditional software seats. AI agents could also potentially perform work across systems without users opening those systems themselves, putting pressure on the per-user subscription model that helped create some of the technology industry's most valuable companies.
Salesforce's stock has fallen over the past year amid those concerns, dropping nearly 19% so far this year at market close on Wednesday.
Benioff argued that the company's latest results disprove those concerns, citing net new annual order growth, which Salesforce said was its strongest in four years. Salesforce also said subscription and support revenue rose 12% year over year, though that figure included a contribution from its Informatica acquisition.
"This is not the SaaSpocalyps," Benioff said. "We've been hearing about this for the last two quarters, these dire predictions about the end of software, and how the models eat everything, but none of them have come true for us."
Shares were up more than 12% in after-hours trading following the earnings release and announcement from Salesforce and Anthropic. The companies are partnering on a plugin called Claudeforce to make Salesforce data available or take Salesforce actions within Claude. Salesforce is also an investor in Anthropic, and reported a $2.6 billion gain in the quarter due to the investment.
The partnership is interesting as it captures the tension at the center of the SaaSpocalypse debate. Salesforce is betting that its underlying data and workflows will remain essential even as Claude becomes the interface employees use. Workers may spend less time inside Salesforce, but AI agents could still depend on Salesforce to get work done.
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