Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff didn’t mince his words on the latest earnings call: “This nonsense of the SaaSpocalypse, I think it’s time for it to stop.”
The Salesforce share price is up 75% from the lows of June 2026 and the company has recovered all its year-to-date losses. The market seems to be elevating Salesforce above the SaaSpocalypse narrative that is still plaguing companies such as Adobe and Intuit.
Benioff’s confidence was no doubt boosted by Salesforce reporting record revenue and earnings in the latest quarter, accompanied by an 81% increase in free cash flow. But perhaps the more important news was the joint announcement by Anthropic and Salesforce about the creation of Claudeforce, a name that clearly didn’t take long to think of.
Anthropic has been at the centre of the argument that AI will replace traditional software vendors. When a major new Claude product is announced, it can send shockwaves through a sector. Benioff understands the value of partnering with Anthropic rather than downplaying the impact of AI.
To drive the point home, Benioff even invited client CEOs onto the call to talk about their experience with trying to vibe-code a CRM product. There’s a great line from the transcript where the customer says: “If everyone else is using Microsoft Excel, I’m not going to go build Microsoft Excel.”
Cute analogies aside, we are in a hyper-competitive world where products are being built at breakneck speed. Founders who allocate engineers and token budgets to recreating infrastructure software are wasting their time — and their investors’ money. Venture capitalists aren’t going to be impressed by a vibe-coded CRM solution at the expense of core product enhancements.
But this doesn’t mean that all the SaaS names are suddenly safe. A critical nuance is that Salesforce has aggressively embraced AI, recognising the opportunity to build agentic layers that can use the underlying data in a trusted environment.
Benioff also referred to Slack as “the best acquisition we’ve ever made, regardless of all the financial analyst reports that I read about six years ago”. Slack gives conversational context to the AI models, while Salesforce is an organisation’s source of truth when it comes to customer data. Bring it together and you have Slackbot as Salesforce’s fastest-adopted AI product, with 1-million active users just five months after launch.
Another proof point is the Agentforce offering, which is experimenting with pricing strategies. Salesforce is trying to respond to varying customer needs around payment models based on users, agents, consumption and outcomes. With an additional 2,000 paying customers in the latest quarter (and an increase in total paying customers of 70% quarter on quarter), there is evidence of adoption, though off a small base.
The questions around return on investment still linger. Benioff tackled them by quoting a statistic that customers on the agentic journey with Salesforce are running at double the company’s average order value (AOV). He believes that they can get as high as four times the AOV. There’s a huge opportunity at Salesforce from converting the current user base, not just attracting new users.
For all this excitement, it’s important to remember that Salesforce is a relatively mature company. Although financial 2027 revenue guidance has been raised by an incremental $300m, it implies growth of only about 12%. Operating and free cash flow growth is expected between 4% and 5%, so the latest quarter isn’t indicative of sustainable growth.
Nonetheless, we are back to a storytelling environment in SaaS — and Benioff is one of the best storytellers you’ll find in the tech sector.
He even flexed on the call by pointing out that Salesforce achieved higher revenue growth rates than Costco, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Ford, Disney and Pepsi — all before thanking each of these blue-chip names for being great customers!
The narrative is certainly more positive at Salesforce than at Adobe, where the share price is down nearly 17% year to date. Adobe is going through a leadership transition at the worst possible time while making sweeping changes to its business model to respond to an onslaught of competition in areas like image and video creation.
Adobe isn’t the only example. Things are even worse at Intuit, down 43% year-to-date and battling negative sentiment around workforce cuts and slashed revenue guidance in core businesses like TurboTax.
Is Salesforce evidence that the SaaSpocalypse is overblown, or is it the exception that proves the rule? Either way, Benioff has the wind in his sails — and that’s very dangerous for his competitors.
