Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff laid out his strategy for navigating a period of sharp stock underperformance: focus on delivering a strong product for customers and keep buying back shares.
“We’re going to keep focusing on our customer success,” Benioff said on “Mad Money” on Wednesday. “We’re going to continue to drive our revenue, we’re going to continue to deliver tremendous cash flow.”
Shares of Salesforce have struggled this year amid growing concerns that generative AI platforms from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI could disrupt traditional software providers. The stock slipped another 1.5% in extended trading Wednesday despite better-than-expected earnings, as investors focused on softer-than-expected guidance.
Benioff dismissed concerns that Salesforce is falling behind in what he jokingly called the “Saaspocalypse,” pointing to better-than-expected revenue and profits.
“You can see we just had a record quarter,” he said. “We’ve never seen this many large transactions happen.”
Rather than retreat during the sell-off, Benioff said Salesforce has accelerated share repurchases. The company has now repurchased $27.1 billion worth of stock. On the earnings call, CFO Robin Washington said buybacks reduced Salesforce’s diluted share count by 10% year over year in the quarter and boosted first-quarter adjusted earnings per share by 23 cents.
“We can look around for great opportunities in the market, but Salesforce is probably the greatest,” he said. “We are very happy to buy back our stock.”
Benioff also argued AI will strengthen Salesforce rather than disrupt it, pointing to Slack’s integration with Anthropic-powered tools.
“That Slack bot is driven by Anthropic,” he said. “By building Anthropic now into Slack, we’re able to take an incredibly successful product…and give tremendous advice.”
