Looking only at the quarterly figures of major SaaS players such as Salesforce, Workday, and Snowflake, one would assume that shareholders are largely satisfied. Although the past few days have been more favorable for most software companies, AI doubts have been putting downward pressure on stocks for months. How are the major SaaS makers doing?
Yesterday, Salesforce presented results that exceeded analysts’ expectations. Subscription & Support, which generates 95.5 percent of the company’s total revenue with $10.7 billion, saw 13 percent growth on an annual basis. Each segment within this division is now called Agentforce, a clear move to place AI even more centrally in external communications. However, expectations for the coming year ($45.8 to $46.2 billion) are on the low side compared to the $46.06 billion predicted by analysts.
Salesforce’s market value has increased by almost 7 percent over the past five days, and investors seem relatively satisfied today as well. However, this is only a slight recovery from the more than 13 percent decline in value that occurred last month; exactly one year ago, the company was worth more than 35 percent more.
Workday counters AI fears
A similar story is unfolding at Workday. Although it narrowly met the expected $2.52 billion in quarterly revenue with $2.53 billion, its share price fell 10 percent on Tuesday. Again, the trend over five days is slightly positive, with 2 percent growth. Exactly one year ago, Workday’s market value was almost 50 percent higher, with most of the decline occurring at the beginning of this calendar year.
This reflects investors’ doubts about SaaS solutions. Shareholders seem to be overwhelmingly uncertain about business SaaS platforms, assuming that AI may reduce their market. After all, why take out an expensive subscription to a CRM, ERP, or HRM solution when your employees can also request information from such systems via a chatbot?
Workday co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri offered an answer to this question. Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, the three AI model builders that investors believe threaten to replace SaaS software, are all Workday customers, according to Bhusri. Regardless of the amount of vibe coding you do, he is convinced that organizations cannot replace an HRM or ERP system.
AI is actually a plus for Snowflake
Snowflake also faced AI-driven doubts last month. Just over a month ago, Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, and since then, the shares of the above-mentioned parties and other SaaS players have fallen sharply. At Snowflake, the damage was relatively limited, at just over 14 percent since last month. That includes the slight recovery that seems to be taking place today in particular (up 7 percent at the time of writing).
Snowflake’s revenue for this quarter was $1.23 billion, 30 percent more than the same quarter a year ago. Analysts had expected $1.2 billion, so it slightly exceeded expectations. Because Snowflake builds the data platform that many organizations use to enrich AI with their own data, AI is actually a plus for this SaaS player.
Nevertheless, SaaS companies clearly need more than consistent results to overcome AI fears. Similar doubts struck hardware manufacturers early last year when China’s DeepSeek suddenly appeared to be able to run AI workloads much more cheaply with the same level of performance. That pessimism also blew over, so the question is whether the months of SaaS doubts will also operate in the same way.
Read also: Salesforce sees Agentforce as the answer to pressure on the SaaS market