‘It’s not just about the technology. It’s a whole different change management, value realization kind of approach that is honestly different than even what we did deploying basic Salesforce capabilities,’ said Megan Glasow, vice president of the Salesforce practice at Perficient.
Salesforce Agentforce adoption. Artificial intelligence’s threat to enterprise software vendors. And what Salesforce wants to buy next.
These are some of the subjects expected to come up Wednesday when the San Francisco-based customer relationship management software vendor reports its latest fiscal quarterly earnings, covering the three months and year ended Jan. 31.
Salesforce could report an organic subscription and support revenue increase of 8.9 percent year on year for the fourth fiscal quarter, up from 8 percent for the same period a year prior, according to a Monday report by KeyBanc. It expects annual organic subscription revenue growth to decelerate to 9.3 percent from 9.7 percent for the same period a year ago.
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Salesforce Q4 Earnings
Salesforce could see organic total revenue growth of 8.2 percent for the fourth quarter and 8.5 percent for the fiscal year, according to KeyBanc’s forecast. The vendor could see total revenue growth for the quarter of 11.5 percent and 9.4 percent for the fiscal year. The investment firm expects 9.5 percent growth by Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, each.
Megan Glasow, vice president of the Salesforce practice at St. Louis-based Perficient–No. 61on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that the solution provider has leveraged Salesforce agentic AI technology to improve its own sales, service, marketing and front office operations.
Building use cases internally has helped Perficient when talking to customers about how to adopt Salesforce AI products for themselves, she said. Customer AI conversations have also lent themselves to more holistic consulting engagements where Perficient learns about the customer’s processes and market to see where technology can make improvements.
“It’s not just about the technology,” Glasgow said. “It’s a whole different change management, value realization kind of approach that is honestly different than even what we did deploying basic Salesforce capabilities.”
Looking ahead, KeyBanc expects 8 percent organic revenue growth for the 2027 fiscal year.
Salesforce should beat the $11.19 billion in revenue Wall Street has forecasted, according to a Monday report by Wedbush.
Read on for more of what to expect on Wednesday’s earnings call.
Agentforce Monetization
Wednesday will give Benioff and Salesforce executives an opportunity to highlight growth milestones for the vendor’s autonomous agent development platform Agentforce and other parts of the AI product portfolio.
Salesforce channel partners are starting to see pilots and trials turn into paying contracts and contract add-ons, according to a KeyBanc report Monday. The vendor’s investment in forward-deployed engineers has taken some work from partners, but solution providers have still seen average annual recurring revenue (ARR) per customer grow consistent in line with what Salesforce has seen–more than doubled in six months from $25,000 to about $57,000.
Many customers are still on pilot pricing, which means opportunity for significant uplift in monetization in the Agentforce customer base, according to the investment firm. Agentforce’s subscription revenue contribution should start to have a material contribution to Salesforce, with partners telling KeyBanc that they’ve seen use cases expand from two to seven.
Partners continue to see work readying data for enterprise AI use cases and concerns by customers around privacy and AI, according to the investment firm. Partners still report a lot of simple use cases such as pulling sales contract clauses for reports and auto-populating documents.
Salesforce is also further along its pricing experimentation with AI products, according to KeyBanc. The firm noted that Salesforce appears to have retired a 10 cents per action choice payment plan some early adopters might still be leveraging for now. Salesforce also has a $2 per conversation option and a $500 per 100,000 flex credits system on a tiered rate card as add-on options. Customers can use those options with or instead of a Salesforce Foundations license, which includes free Agentforce usage up to a predetermined credit limit.
Salesforce last disclosed that Agentforce has 9,500 paying customers and $540 million in ARR. KeyBanc expects that Agentforce is on its way to tripling usage and paying customer counts, which will contribute $1 billion to total ARR.
Agentforce monetization has been slower than expected, Wedbush said in a report Monday. But with more than 150,000 customers, potential remains for Salesforce to make a lot of money off the AI platform. Salesforce customers also have decades of codified business logic and organized data in Salesforce tools for AI-driven results that could be more accurate than any tools by an AI upstart.
Overstated AI SaaS Fears?
Salesforce has been especially hit by the technology stocks selloff as AI upstarts like Claude maker Anthropic dip their toes into specific software markets, from productivity applications with Claude Cowork to LegalTech and cybersecurity.
Benioff and his team might want to reassure listeners on Wednesday’s call that Salesforce continues to be a vendor customers and partners want to bet on for the long run. Investors have been punishing Salesforce’s stock, with its price down about 19 percent over the past month and now trading at about $186 a share.
While Cowork users can leverage the tool for reducing timelines in Salesforce-owned collaboration app Slack as an example, new AI tools are only as useful as the data they reach and are not likely to rip and replace existing software ecosystems and data environments, according to a Wedbush report Tuesday.
Salesforce–along with ServiceNow, Microsoft and others–are deeply embedded workflow systems of record, according to the investment firm. Replacing them would mean ripping out mission-critical infrastructure, whereas Cowork users are layering in the new AI tools. Companies like Salesforce already own the orchestration layer needed to execute actions across systems. Salesforce, Microsoft and ServiceNow also have decades of enterprise distribution networks, CIO relationships and embedded vertical workflows that AI upstarts lack, at least for now.
Platform providers like Salesforce and Microsoft usually capture value from new infrastructure and are seeing accelerated deal cycles, including customers looking to modernize existing investments to take advantage of AI rather than ditching existing infrastructure altogether.
Vendors including Salesforce have not seen the kind of customer churn acceleration, budget freezes or competitive displacement to warrant market fears, according to Wedbush.
KeyBanc’s Monday report said the investment firm is still positive on Salesforce’s organic growth reacceleration and the potential of Agentforce, although the narrative that AI will challenge Salesforce’s traditional software-as-a-service model will likely continue in the near term, according to KeyBanc. Partners who spoke with KeyBanc called AI’s Salesforce displacement an overblown fear today, but the rapid pace of innovation in AI could change things down the road.
Growing Business In Industries, SMB
Salesforce executives Wednesday might have good news to share around partner-influenced markets where the vendor has been growing.
One such market is life sciences, where partners participate and Salesforce has sought to take share against Veeva Systems, according to KeyBanc’s Monday report. Salesforce could hold as much as half of the committed seats in the life sciences CRM market.
Last quarter, Salesforce executives said that the global life sciences and health cloud business outpaces overall Salesforce growth at $4.7B of ARR, according to KeyBanc. The growth should continue, with Salesforce unlocking an incremental total addressable market (TAM) opportunity of at least $5 billion.
Salesforce’s Revenue Cloud and Data Cloud products have outperformed with partners, as has sales to smaller and midmarket customers depending on the industry, according to KeyBanc.
Salesforce’s M&A Strategy
Analysts on Wednesday’s call might seek more details from Salesforce leadership around the vendor’s mergers and acquisition strategy ahead and the upsell and cross-sell possibilities from recent acquisitions–which should also interest Salesforce solution providers.
Salesforce revealed two acquisitions this month after the fiscal quarter closed. The vendor intends to buy conversational insights and revenue orchestration platform Momentum within the first quarter of fiscal 2027 and add to Agentforce 360 and Slackbot’s ability to ingest and analyze unstructured data from third-party voice and video channels and apply those insights to agentic workflows, which opens new opportunities for solution providers following integration.
The vendor also intends to close during that quarter its purchase of AI-powered product discovery and agentic commerce Cimulate, adding improved shopping experiences to Agentforce Commerce, according to Salesforce.
A third acquisition expected to close in that quarter–but announced in December–is agentic AI marketing products provider Qualified, which will allow users to deploy marketing agents that autonomously generate pipeline, according to Salesforce.
During the fourth fiscal quarter, Salesforce closed on its purchase of agentic enterprise search company Doti, which can help enhance Slack as a conversational interface for users. Salesforce also closed on its purchase of Spindle AI, bringing in capabilities around neuro-symbolic AI agents and AI-native data systems to generate and optimize scenario models in seconds. Salesforce also closed on its purchase of Apromore during the quarter, bringing users more process intelligence capabilities and agentic process automation.
Informatica Updates
Salesforce might have new updates to share around the integration of Informatica, which Salesforce bought in November for $8 billion in equity value.
The acquisition should contribute about 300 basis points of growth to Salesforce, according to KeyBanc’s Monday report. The firm expects Informatrica to contribute 3 percent total revenue growth for the quarter and .8 percent for the fiscal year.
The new acquisition should also add to Salesforce’s moat of huge volumes of business data collected over decades that is hard for AI upstarts like Anthropic and OpenAI to replace, Wedbush said in a report Monday. Salesforce’s Agentforce with Informatica is well-possitioned to provide AI agents with rich, trusted context to work properly.
Even with the acquisition close, Informatica continued innovating on its platform, with recent updates including a deeper integration between Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the new ability for users building AI agents in Microsoft Foundry to connect directly to trusted data from Informatica IDMC data through Model Context Protocol (MCP).
