Salesforce Q4 2025 Earnings: CEO Benioff Dismisses Threat To SaaS From Agentic AI

“Beware the false agents,” Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said.

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff called concerns that agentic artificial intelligence could mark the end of software-as-a-service applications a “Microsoft narrative” and put down the tech giant’s Copilot AI offerings as “repackaged” ChatGPT.

“There is kind of a holy trinity here of AI CRM, which is the apps, the data and the agents,” Benioff (pictured) said during Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call for the San Francisco-based cloud application vendor. “These three things have to kind of work together. … It's a very interesting point that, yes, the agentic layer is very important. But it doesn't operate by itself. It operates with data, with a data cloud that has to be federated through your company to all your data sources.”

Benioff also suggested that Salesforce is doing a better job leveraging its AI products than Microsoft is leveraging its own AI products. He pointed to an online version of Salesforce’s Agentforce on the company’s help portal handling 380,000 conversations with an 84 percent resolution rate and just 2 percent of the requests needing human escalation.

“Beware the false agents,” Benioff said on the call. “Go out there and take a look. Who's really talking about it and who's really delivering. … We are the No. 1 AI CRM. We are the leader of the digital labor revolution.”

Salesforce Q4

CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment. Earlier this year, Microsoft Chief Communications Officer Frank Shaw took to the Microsoft-owned LinkedIn social media network to call Benioff’s Microsoft attacks part of the CEO’s familiar marketing playbook.

“If anyone cared to plot a chart of our Copilot and agent news with Benioff’s posts on X, you’d find a relationship,” Shaw said. “It's all about marketing, less about truth or substance. It can be, as Marc notes, great marketing in the short term to highlight competitors. Of course, the challenge is that long-term success requires actual competition. We're still waiting.”

The Wednesday earnings call covered Salesforce’s fiscal 2025 fourth-quarter, ended Jan. 31, and full-year results. Salesforce has about 12,000 partners worldwide.

Benioff also seemed to take a swipe at Microsoft and other AI vendors for spending billions of dollars on data centers to meet AI demand.

“We’re not doing some of these engineering efforts that may or may not have some kind of huge payoff but is going to take down all of our cash and all of our margin for the next several years,” Benioff said. “We're augmenting our existing product line with artificial intelligence, taking advantage of these incredible investments that are being made in infrastructure by others. And we're going to deliver the digital labor revolution.”

Pricing Model Changes, Partner Investment

Asked on the call about pricing AI by seat or by consumption, Benioff said Salesforce has historically used both models.

“It's always been a mix of products that we have for humans and then products that we have for computers,” Benioff said. “Now we have these products that are for agents also. And agents are also a consumption model. … It's going to be a mix between what's going on with our customers, with how many humans do they have, and then how many agents are they deploying?”

Salesforce President and Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham, who is retiring May 1, added on the call that Salesforce will move in “the near future” to a universal credit pricing model from a per conversation basis.

“The nice thing that we've seen with our customers is they really understand the ROI associated with digital labor,” Millham said. “What we're able to provide with agents is really driving the velocity of transactions that we've seen.”

As for the benefits of Agentforce on Salesforce’s internal operations, Millham said that the AI product has accelerated Salesforce’s quoting cycles by more than 75 percent. In outbound prospecting, Agentforce has engaged more than 50 leads per day.

Millham said on the call that Salesforce is “leaning into our ecosystem,” with partners involved in half of the vendor’s Agentforce “wins” and 70 percent of Agentforce activations in the quarter.

“Over 127,000 system integrator employees have completed Agentforce training and more than 1,000 ISVs and technology partners are building and selling agents,” Millham said.

Benioff’s DOGE Thoughts

Salesforce’s call was its first since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president and since the formation of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Asked to weigh in on Musk’s cost-cutting efforts, Benioff said that he is “coming at this with a beginner's mind.”

“We want to see what they are able to deliver with the new administration,” Benioff said. “We are huge fans of the United States of America. We want us to be as successful a country as we possibly can be.”

Benioff said that he believes a balanced budget is important for the U.S., that he is “thrilled” with Salesforce’s relationship with the federal government and that he’s seen reports of DOGE leveraging Salesforce-owned Slack for communications.

“We'll work closely with the government,” he said. “We'll do anything we can to help them succeed. And we wish them only the best. And we're here to help at every step of the way.”

Asked about the potential for Salesforce AI as the federal government looks at lowering costs, Benioff said that AI will have benefits for organizations worldwide.

Salesforce itself has about 76,000 employees and will leverage AI to move 9,000 support employees more into sales and marketing, he said. Salesforce doesn’t plan to hire new engineers this year and has seen a 30 percent productivity increase in engineering thanks to AI.

“We're the last generation of CEOs to only manage humans,” Benioff said. “Every CEO going forward is going to manage humans and agents together. I know that's what I'm doing. … You can see it also in the global economy. I think productivity is going to rise without additions to more human labor, which is good because human labor is not increasing in the global workforce.”

Salesforce Q4 In Detail

Salesforce reported $900 million in Data Cloud and AI recurring revenue during the fiscal fourth quarter, more than double year over year.

Since October, Salesforce has closed 5,000 Agentforce deals, more than 3,000 of those paid.

Data Cloud surpassed 50 trillion records, double year over year. And half of the Fortune 100 are AI and Data Cloud customers.

For the quarter ended Jan. 31, Salesforce brought in $10 billion in revenue, up 9 percent year over year, ignoring foreign exchange. That marked the third straight quarter of single-digit revenue growth. Subscription and support revenue was $9.5 billion, up 9 percent year over year.

Salesforce’s current remaining performance obligation (CRPO) was $30.2 billion, up 11 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange. Total RPO was $63.4 billion, up 11 percent year over year.

Revenue for all of fiscal year 2025 (ended Jan. 31, 2025) was $37.9 billion, up 9 percent year over year. Salesforce reported $35.7 billion in subscription and support revenue, up 10 percent year over year.

Slack was in one-third of Salesforce deals worth more than $1 million during the quarter. Its contribution to overall deal size increased double digits year over year, Millham said. Nearly 5 billion messages are sent weekly on Slack.

Tableau and MuleSoft were each in nearly half of Salesforce’s $1 million-plus deals. Salesforce’s industry business, including the public sector, finished the fiscal year with $5.7 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up 20 percent year over year.

For fiscal 2026, Salesforce forecasts revenue between $40.5 billion and $40.9 billion, marking a 7 percent to 8 percent increase over the just concluded fiscal 2025. The company is forecasting subscription and support revenue growth of about 9 percent year over year.

The price of Salesforce stock, which closed at $307.33 Wednesday, tumbled more than 5 percent in after-hours trading. Just before 8:00 p.m. EST Salesforce stock was priced at $290.50, down 5.48 percent from the close.

The company’s reported revenue was below the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $10.02 billion (from Zacks Equity Research, as reported on NASDAQ.com). The guidance for fiscal 2026 revenue was also below analysts’ expectations, which was $41.32 billion, according to Visible Alpha.