Salesforce told analysts at Dreamforce it expects revenue of more than $63 billion in fiscal 2030, a figure that sits roughly $4 billion above the LSEG consensus of $59.2 billion. The forecast is not a GAAP commitment, it is a long-range target issued from the stage of a user conference, but it is the first time the company has put a number on the other side of the AI panic that knocked the stock down to $150 earlier this year.
The Anthropic trade paid for the buyback
The confidence has a specific source. Salesforce spent hundreds of millions on Anthropic equity; the stake is now worth tens of billions, according to Benioff. He said the company will probably sell it and use the proceeds to retire the debt from its accelerated share repurchase program. The buyback tally already stands at a cumulative $60 billion. Shares closed Wednesday above $250, up almost 23% since the last earnings report, the best single-day move since 2020, after a quarter that included a $2.6 billion gain on strategic investments.
The SaaSpocalypse narrative is officially retired
Miguel Milano, the operating chief, declared the term dead on stage. "I'm not going to use the word 'SaaSpocalypse' anymore," he said. "I hope you don't either, and the market will come to its senses, little by little." The phrase gained traction in 2025 as frontier models threatened to commoditize application software. Salesforce's response has been to embed those models rather than fight them: Claudeforce puts Salesforce data inside Anthropic's Claude, and a new reasoning model called Koa runs on Nvidia architecture. Up to 1,000 customers have signed up for the Claude beta, said Patrick Stokes, president of applications and marketing.
Slack becomes the agent layer
Alexa Vignone, president and chief revenue officer, said Slack has emerged in the past three months as a hub for communicating with AI agents. The chat app, acquired for $27.1 billion in 2021, is now being positioned as the interface layer for the very automation that was supposed to make SaaS obsolete. Benioff opened Dreamforce with Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Jensen Huang on stage, a lineup that reads less like a partner ecosystem and more like a cap table. He later noted that two executives returned from OpenAI, framing the boomerangs as validation.
Benioff thanks the sellers
Asked about the buyback, Benioff said he was questioned on whether he should thank the people who sold him stock at $150. "I don't know what that means exactly, but thank you to those people." The line captures the circular logic of the moment: the AI scare created the discount, the AI investments funded the repurchase, and the same AI narrative now supports a $63 billion revenue target that the market did not expect six months ago.