Bret Taylor was elevated to the co-CEO role at Salesforce a year ago. The departure continues a period of leadership upheaval at Salesforce in recent years. In 2018, Keith Block was promoted to co-CEO alongside Mr. Benioff after five years as president and chief operating officer. He left 18 months later, saying he was moving on to the “next chapter.” Mr. Taylor was billed as the architect of Salesforce’s $27.7 billion purchase of workplace-collaboration company Slack Technologies, the company’s biggest acquisition. He joined Salesforce in 2016 through its acquisition of software company Quip Inc., which Mr. Taylor ran at the time. Mr. Taylor also served as chairman of Twitter Inc. until the $44 billion takeover by Elon Musk closed late last month. “After a lot of reflection, I’ve decided to return to my entrepreneurial roots,” Mr. Taylor said. He and three colleagues left Google in the early 2000s to form FriendFeed, a startup that aggregated updates, posts and other snippets from other social-media platforms to create personalized feeds. Facebook acquired the business in 2009. At Facebook, he became chief technology officer. Salesforce announced the leadership change along with its quarterly earnings. The company posted higher revenue in the latest quarter, citing customer demand against a challenging economic backdrop. Mr. Taylor’s impending departure marks another recent executive change for the San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based software. Gavin Patterson will also step down from his position as chief strategy officer, effective Jan. 31, according to a Nov. 23 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. After years of pandemic-fueled demand, some cloud companies have warned of slowing sales, citing pressure on customers to pull back spending amid inflation and other economic concerns. Salesforce executives said Wednesday that customers are relying on its software to run their business and reduce costs. Revenue increased to $7.84 billion during the period, up 19% on a constant-currency basis, slightly higher than the $7.83 billion analysts had expected, according to FactSet. Salesforce missed analysts’ expectations for billings, a measure of business actually transacted during the period, by roughly 8%. Last quarter, billings came in 5% below expectations, which was considered at the time to be the worst miss for that metric in at least five years, according to FactSet. Shares fell more than 6% in after-hours trading Wednesday, following a 5.7% gain to $160.25 in the regular session. Write to Kathryn Hardison at kathryn.hardison@wsj.com More