Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is facing an SaaSpocalypse due to AI, but says he is not worried.
For those not in the know, Salesforce is the biggest name in a category that the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street think could get smashed by artificial intelligence.
Its model has long been flogging software to big firms on a per-employee basis, while those same firms are expected to cut headcount as AI agents get better at real work.
Salesforce stock is down 28 per cent year-to-date, while the worst-hit SaaS names are down about twice that.
Benioff says the bears have it wrong about the whole “SaaSpocalypse” idea, and especially about his shop. AI, he argues, is making Salesforce more valuable, not less.
He claims the top AI labs could not replace what Salesforce delivers, even if they fancied it, and that they would rather partner with him for now. Customers, he adds, cannot just vibe-code a secure, compliant rival without falling into a regulatory ditch.
Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff said: “People think we have our back against the wall when in fact the opportunity has never been greater.”
An early investor in Anthropic, Salesforce has been building and flogging AI tools for years. By the end of this year, it wants to unveil a new platform, code-named Agent Albert, that studies users and acts on their behalf.
That effort kicked off three years ago after ChatGPT landed, when Benioff set up a standing Saturday meeting to crank up the company’s AI push.
The earlier flagship, Agentforce, has been slow to catch fire. Launched in late 2024, it is used by 23,000 customers out of 150,000 to build custom autonomous agents for workflows.
Salesforce’s annual revenue growth is hovering around 10 per cent, down a bit from recent years. There are hints that the buyers are starting to bite. In the past three months, big AI spenders lifted their median spend on Salesforce by three per cent, according to Andreessen Horowitz data.
That beats Zoom, Dropbox and Adobe, but lags Canva, Cloudflare, DocuSign, and a few others, which is hardly a victory lap.
Benioff has claimed the company was heading for an AI-first future as far back as 2014, when it launched an AI research unit. Still, ChatGPT’s late 2022 arrival caught it flat-footed.
Benioff said Salesforce would have invested in OpenAI, but the startup’s initial contract with Microsoft blocked the deal.
Pushing back on the idea that customers can vibe-code replacements using Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex, Benioff argues brand safety, data security and compliance make that route risky. Salesforce’s experience in those trenches is, in his view, the point.
