Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has now shared an important message for investors. As Salesforce stock continues to face pressure, Benioff has now sought to reassure investors by emphasizing customer success, strong cash flow and aggressive share buybacks. Speaking on CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Carmer, Benioff said the company remains focused on delivering value despite concerns that generative AI platforms could disrupt traditional software vendors. Benioff’s message is clear: Even as the stock struggles, Salesforce is betting on its product strength, customer loyalty, and AI-powered innovation to sustain long-term growth.
Salesforce posts record quarter despite market concerns
Salesforce has reported better-than-expected earnings, and Benioff highlighted a record quarter marked by big transactions. “We’ve never seen so many big transactions,” he said, dismissing fears of what he jokingly called a “Saaspocalypse.” Despite the strong results, the stock fell another 1.5% in extended trading as investors focused on softer guidance.
Buybacks as a sign of trust
Benioff underscored Salesforce’s commitment to buybacks, noting that the company has repurchased $27.1 billion worth of stock. Chief Financial Officer Robin Washington added that the buybacks reduced the diluted share count by 10% year over year, boosting adjusted earnings per share by 23 cents in the first quarter. “We can look for big opportunities in the market, but Salesforce is probably the biggest. We are very happy to buy back our shares,” Benioff said.
AI as an engine of growth, not a threat
While investor anxiety is focused on AI-driven disruption from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, Benioff argued that AI will strengthen Salesforce’s offerings. He pointed to Slack’s integration with Anthropic-powered tools, saying, “That Slack bot is powered by Anthropic. By integrating Anthropic now into Slack, we can take an incredibly successful product and provide great advice.”
Salesforce CEO has a message for engineers
Recently, Marc Benioff revealed that he doesn’t think AI will replace Salesforce engineers. He believes this will make them managers. Speaking on The Future Live with Matthew Berman, the Salesforce CEO described a shift already underway within the company: one in which its 15,000 engineers work alongside AI coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI Codex and Cursor, and increasingly supervise those agents rather than doing the work themselves. “They can even become somewhat supervisors of these agents,” Benioff said. “But those engineers are still needed.” His argument boils down to a single line: “The model cannot yet function autonomously. We have not reached that level yet.”As proof, he pointed to the job boards of the world’s largest artificial intelligence companies; all of them, he noted, are still hiring engineers on a large scale.
