Salesforce reports earnings as companies layer AI workflows over SaaS systems of record

Cloudy with a chance of sales calls…. Salesforce is set to report after market close today, and amid SaaSpocalypse jitters, investors will be looking for insights into the health of LinkedIn’s favorite acronym: B2B SaaS. Snowflake, Asana, Okta, and other software mainstays also report this week. Salesforce stock is down ~30% this year, and it’s not alone: in Q1, software sector stocks had their biggest quarterly drop since 2008 over worries that AI will replace many enterprise SaaS uses. Ramp Rate data tells a different story:

The seat is sticky: Salesforce holds 76% adoption in the CRM category, up 3 percentage points year-over-year. Compare that to AI-native CRM upstart Attio’s 4% adoption, up 2 percentage points YoY. Salesforce is also the most switched-to vendor, with 60% first-time adopter share.
Systems of record at records: Salesforce reported record Q4 results and a handy earnings beat in February, even as businesses' monthly AI spend quadrupled from February 2025 to February 2026.
For traditional SaaS vendors, the share of seat-based revenue has increased, rising from 65% in April 2025 to 76% in February of this year, Ramp Rate data shows. Consumption-based revenue is roughly flat.

On the seat-level, incumbents including Salesforce, Snowflake, Adobe, Figma, and GitHub are winning in their respective categories: Salesforce’s adoption share is rising even faster than that of an AI-native CRM competitor. While incumbents are holding the system of record, several AI-natives are seeing breakout growth in adjacent workflow layers and entirely new categories.

In the sales execution & orchestration category, a layer that sits on top of the CRM, AI sales meeting-notes app Granola went from virtually zero to 24% category adoption in roughly two years. And in sales data providers, Apollo.io and Clay are growing fast, starting to close the adoption gap with leader LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
It isn’t just sales software: Ramp data shows that 5 of the 6 fastest-growing software vendors over the past three months are AI-native tools.

The bottom line:

Software’s future is more layered than apocalyptic. While incumbents are holding and growing seats, AI-natives are spiking in workflows layered above systems of record. The SaaS layer cake will only get thicker as AI changes how work gets done and new categories emerge (think: AI notetaking, AI coding, answer engine optimization). Of course, the best position is to capture both the system and the workflow layer. That could be why Salesforce has announced about a dozen acquisitions in the past year — most recently, of AI-native Momentum.

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Rebecca Moretti•Editorial Lead

As the Editorial Lead at Ramp, Rebecca focuses on melding original data with financial news to craft engaging stories that highlight leading indicators. Previously, Rebecca was the Senior Editor of Robinhood’s Snacks newsletter, which she helmed for five years, and was Senior Editor of SoFi’s On the Money newsletter.

Ramp is dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes make informed decisions. We adhere to strict editorial guidelines to ensure that our content meets and maintains our high standards.

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