Salesforce, which provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) products for managing customer relationships, has been under investor pressure amid concerns that AI start-ups such as Anthropic threaten traditional software firms.

Benioff said: “If there is a ‘SaaS-pocalypse’, it may be eaten by the ‘SaaS-quatch’ because there are a lot of companies using a lot of SaaS because it just got better with agents.”

“Anthropic runs its whole operation on Salesforce and Slack. I think every AI company does,” he said.

Alongside this, Salesforce is also grappling with how to price its future AI services, having traditionally relied on a “per-seat” licensing model.

According to Benioff, charging by number of users gives customers predictable costs.

The comments come as Salesforce recently eliminated around 1,000 positions this month, having impacted staff in marketing, product management, data analytics and the firm’s Agentforce AI product unit.

This comes as Benioff also previously stated that the company had already eliminated about 4,000 customer support positions, claiming that expanding AI capabilities were lowering the need for a large support team.

​Benioff’s comments follow comments made by Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, who fears that AI will destroy software companies, alongside separate comments made by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who claimed that investors are misjudging how AI will affect software companies.

“I think the markets got it wrong,” Huang told CNBC, rejecting concerns that AI agents will undermine the enterprise software business.

Rather than replacing software vendors, Huang believes many companies will adopt agentic AI to build better products and improve productivity.

Branding the idea “counterintuitive,” he said AI agents are more likely to rely on existing software tools than eliminate them.

“That’s the reason why we also say agents are tool users,” he added. “All of these tools that we use today, whether it’s Cadence or Synopsys or ServiceNow or SAP, these tools exist for a fundamentally good reason. These agentic AI will be intelligent software that uses these tools on our behalf and help us be more productive.

“Nobody’s going to service better than ServiceNow, and they’re going to come up with agents that are really fine-tuned and optimised for the work that uses the tools that they have.”

“In the end, we need the tools to finish their work and put the information back in a way that we can understand,” he said.