Benioff Gets Biblical on Death of SaaS, Separate Wheat/Chaff

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I dive into the growing debate
between SaaS and agentic AI, sparked by Satya Nadella’s December
2024 remarks suggesting that AI agents could spell the end of
SaaS.Highlights


00:32 — We've all been hearing a lot about SaaS
dying — the demise of SaaS — triggered by AI, an opinion
expressed in December of 2024 by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who
said that the rise of AI and agents is going to lead to the
collapse of SaaS, the hollowing out of it, to become little more
than a third-tier support product.


01:18 — Well, Marc Benioff said basically that
this view, it’s just so much nonsense. And Benioff even went
biblical. He said, we've got to be able to separate the wheat
from the chaff, and we need to be able to determine what's going
on here with SaaS, what's going on with AI, and what's going on
with agentic AI. How are they going to play together, along with
Data Cloud and so on?


02:26 — And he said, that's very much not the
right question. He used some pretty tough language in explaining
this. He said we've got thousands of customers who are very
happily using Salesforce applications along with our Agentforce
platform, to drive better business results. It's very beneficial
to believe both in the future of SaaS and the future of agentic
AI.


04:02 — And on the earnings call, he went into
detail about how many customers now are investing heavily in
Agentforce. And the number of new business deals coming in — or
repeat business — on agentic AI and Agentforce coming from
existing customers. The Data Cloud that underpins this and
Agentforce, he said, are now on a $1.2 billion run rate.


04:32 — I wish that there would be a point at
which Satya Nadella could say, with the experience of nine months
now of feedback in the market and from people he's talked to:
“Hey, I'm going to double down on what I said in December 2024.”
Or he could say, “You know what, maybe I was a little too
aggressive on that.” I'd love to hear that.


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