Marc Benioff isn't buying into the software apocalypse.
Speaking on the company's Q4 earnings call on Wednesday, the Salesforce CEO downplayed fears that AI would wipe out software-as-a-service companies.
"If there is a 'SaaSpocalypse', it may be eaten by the 'SaaS-quatch' because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents," Benioff said on the call.
Fears of a SaaS AI wipeout have risen in recent weeks after Anthropic rolled out new agentic AI tools, hitting software stocks including Salesforce and Asana. Those concerns were compounded this week by a research report that painted a bleak picture of a possible AI-driven recession.
Benioff suggested that the company's focus on AI agents would counter the threat to software, telling investors that Salesforce was seeing "incredible demand" for its Agentforce platform. He also boasted that leading AI companies were already working with Salesforce.
"Anthropic runs its whole operation on Salesforce and Slack. I think every AI company does," he added.
The market reacted positively to Benioff's comments. Salesforce shares were up by about 2% early Thursday.
Benioff also reminded investors that this wasn't the first time Salesforce had faced down a threat to the SaaS industry.
"This is not our first SaaSpocalypse. We have been through many SaaSpocalypses," he said.
"I remember the horrible SaaSpocalypse of 2020 when not only the software industry was dying, but we were all dying, but we made it through that," he said.
Salesforce isn't the only SaaS company trying to reassure investors that AI isn't coming to eat their lunch. Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri said during the company's earnings call on Tuesday that companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI are running its software. He also said that HR and business software systems demanded complex security and needed to comply with statutory and regulatory requirements.
"No amount of vibe coding is going to produce an HR or an ERP system," he said, referring to enterprise resource planning software.
