Every business-model transition produces one company whose results you read not to understand the company, but to locate the entire category.

For the shift from licensed software to the cloud, that company was Salesforce.

For the shift now underway — from Software-as-a-Service, where firms charge for access to tools that humans operate, to Agentic-as-a-Service (AGaaS), where they charge for outcomes that agents execute — the instrument is Salesforce again.

The first quarter of fiscal 2027, reported May 27, 2026, is the cleanest public reading we have of where that transition really sits. And the pattern beneath the headline is consistent and important: