Dive Brief:
- Salesforce executives touted customer and revenue wins during a Wednesday earnings call. The company saw revenue increase 8% year over year, to $9.8 billion, according to the announcement.
- Data cloud and AI annual recurring revenue surpassed the $1 billion mark during the quarter, up 120% year over year. The company reported 4,000 paid Agentforce users, up from 3,000 during the prior quarter.
- “We are now very well positioned to take advantage of this multitrillion-dollar opportunity in AI, enterprise software and digital labor,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, pointing to the company’s increased revenue guidance for the 2026 fiscal year to $41.3 billion, up more than $400 million from the previous forecast.
Dive Insight:
Salesforce is betting on agentic AI adoption to further extend its enterprise presence. The Agentforce platform, introduced last year, lets customers access a library of pre-built agents and create their own customized offerings.
“We’re learning a lot about how to make agents successful, productive, how to scale, how to tune our own organization, and really get our customers all ready for this AI transformation in the enterprise led by agents,” Benioff said Wednesday.
Earlier this week, Salesforce announced it will acquire cloud data management company Informatica for $8 billion, with plans to bolster its cloud-based data and AI capabilities. The deal will let Salesforce integrate Informatica’s governance and data management services across several products, including Data Cloud.
“This is a moment where Informatica is more important to our customers than ever before,” Benioff said, in reference to enterprises’ need to enhance their own data capabilities in order to deploy AI.
Data governance woes represent a top challenge for enterprise agentic AI ambitions. Data privacy and security features were among the key changes IT executives leaders wanted to see from available agentic AI offerings, according to an April report published by Cloudera.
