CRM Stock Heads For Best Day In 6 Years As CEO Declares ‘SaaSpocalypse’ Narrative ‘Nonsense’ After Impressive Q2 Beat

Salesforce’s AI usage surged sixfold as agents increasingly interact with its platform, CEO Mark Benioff said.

• Nine of the 10 biggest AI companies use Salesforce and Slack, Benioff said, after the company issued a strong quarterly report.
• AI firms’ spending with Salesforce and Slack jumped 435% year over year.
• Anthropic CEO Amodei said Anthropic wants to create new value, not “destroy” software companies.

Salesforce, Inc.’s stock surged 14% in overnight trading ahead of Thursday, after the enterprise software firm reported second-quarter results and issued a full-year guidance that topped expectations. If the gains hold in the regular session, it would be the stock's best day in six years.

In an interview after the earnings results, CEO Marc Benioff dismissed the so-called “SaaSpocalypse” narrative around artificial intelligence, arguing that the rise of AI agents is driving greater use of enterprise software rather than replacing it, after the company delivered a blowout quarter.

“This apocalypse narrative has been such nonsense… Skeptics said seats would decline, Jim, and Agentforce, Sales, Service, and Slack all grew seats year-over-year,” Benioff said in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer. 

His comments push back against a long-running Wall Street concern that AI could reduce the number of software products and undermine the seat-based SaaS model.

Benioff also argued that the relationship between AI models and enterprise software is being misunderstood, saying Salesforce’s data and applications are becoming more important as companies deploy AI.

CRM stock staged a strong rebound heading into the earnings report. Shares are up nearly 12% in August and on track to end in the green for a second straight month.

Benioff Says AI Operators Need Salesforce

“Frontier models depend on CRM, they don’t replace it… Those applications are not just applications anymore; they’re semantic foundations for these AI models,” Benioff said.

The Salesforce CEO pointed to rising usage of its platform as evidence that AI is creating incremental demand. “Agentic use of the platform has surged six times… because agents are using more Salesforce than ever via our model context protocol calls,” he said.

The trend is particularly visible among leading AI companies themselves, many of which are Salesforce customers. “9 out of the 10 top AI companies—most of them are within one block of us here—use Salesforce and Slack. Their spend, Jim: 435% year-over-year growth,” he said.

Salesforce-Anthropic Partnership

Salesforce and Anthropic expanded their partnership and unveiled ‘Claudeforce,’ a new way for salespeople to work within Anthropic’s chatbot. 

Claudeforce is launching as a plugin with pre-built sales skills that will allow Claude users to compose emails, update records and take other relevant actions, according to a release. The companies said they plan to introduce more integrations across Claude, Salesforce and its messaging platform Slack in the future.

Anthropic Sees AI Gains Spread Across Firms

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Benioff appeared in a joint interview on CNBC on Wednesday. Cramer just asked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei if he was going to "put Salesforce out of business." Amodei replied, "We're not interested in destroying anyone."

“We’re creating new value. It’s not about destroying anyone, it’s about how much of these gains go to various people and companies, and our philosophy has always been that we want to work with our customers,” Amodei said.

Amodei has repeatedly warned that increasingly capable AI could sharply reduce the amount of human work — and software use — needed in the future. In March 2025, he said AI could write 90% of software code within three to six months, with AI potentially handling virtually all coding within a year.   

That makes Anthropic’s expanded partnership with Salesforce particularly notable. The company that has warned that AI agents could increasingly perform the work people currently use software to accomplish is now working with Salesforce to bring Claude directly into the CRM giant’s ecosystem — suggesting that, at least for now, the future may involve AI working through enterprise software rather than simply replacing it.

Retail, Analyst View On CRM

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment for CRM climbed to ‘extremely bullish’ from ‘bullish,’ with message volume for the ticker rising over 1,100% in the past 24 hours. 

“$CRM this strength is tough to ignore,” a trader wrote. 

“This looks good at first glance. Both companies [are] doing what they do best,” Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, said in an X post, referring to the company’s expanded partnership with Anthropic.

“Salesforce is providing the tools in a way that their users want and adds the Anthropic technology goodness while protecting their customers' data… This is good for Anthropic as it maybe softens the ripping off the ‘alpha’ or IP and destroying all white-collar job mantra,” he said.

“Can we admit SaaSpocolypse was a bit overdone?” commented Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group.

Year to date, CRM stock is down 22%.

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