Salesforce expects first-quarter revenue of between $11.03 billion and $11.08 billion, which would mark 10 percent to 11 percent growth year on year ignoring foreign exchange.
Growth in the artificial intelligence portfolio and parts of the traditional Salesforce product portfolio hasn’t stopped a larger debate over whether AI upstarts such as Anthropic pose an existential threat to the enterprise software vendor and competitors in the space.
San Francisco-based Salesforce and its partner ecosystem enter the 2027 fiscal year fighting back against concerns over the longevity of SaaS as a market as Claude maker Anthropic introduces product innovation in specific areas of vertical enterprise software.
Salesforce has also revealed new metrics for measuring the effectiveness of AI adoption that might interest solution providers exploring business models for the AI era while addressing growing competitive fronts in areas such as its Commerce Cloud business.
Salesforce started its new fiscal year Feb. 1 and revealed Wednesday how it performed in fiscal year 2026.
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Salesforce Fiscal Year 2027
Salesforce expects first-quarter revenue of between $11.03 billion and $11.08 billion, which would mark 10 percent to 11 percent growth year on year ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica should contribute about 4 points to that growth. The vendor expects current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) of about 13 percent ignoring foreign exchange.
Salesforce forecasts fiscal year 2027 revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion, up 10 percent to 11 percent year on year. Informatica should contribute 3 points.
The vendor expects organic revenue reacceleration in the second half of its 2027 fiscal year. It expects subscription and support revenue growth of about 11 percent ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica should contribute about 3 points.
Salesforce expects a Fiscal Year 2027 GAAP operating margin of 20.9 percent and 34.3 percent without using GAAP. The vendor expects Fiscal Year 2027 operating cash flow growth of about 9 percent year on year. Salesforce increased the revenue it expects to bring in during fiscal year 2030, going from a $60 billion forecast to now $63 billion, marking an 11 percent compound annual growth rate from fiscal 2026 to fiscal 2030.
Here are five takeaways from Salesforce’s latest quarterly performance and how fiscal year 2027 is taking shape for the enterprise software vendor.
CEO Benioff Keeps Faith In SaaS
Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff dismissed fears around artificial intelligence upstarts including Claude maker Anthropic and ChatGPT maker OpenAI potentially negatively impacting his company’s traditional SaaS business, touting SaaS’ survival through past market disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Benioff referred to Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI model makers as partners whose models are usable with Salesforce’s Data 360, which allows users to harmonize, integrate and federate data. Salesforce is also an investor in Anthropic. “This is not our first SaaSpocalypse,” Benioff said Wednesday.
For Salesforce, even if Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools become platforms of their own and try to challenge the vendor, Benioff said, his company still has 150,000 core customers, 1 million Slack customers and 15,000 sales representatives that work with customers on future-proofing and new technology adoption.
An Anthropic event Feb. 24 showcasing its Claude AI tool’s enterprise capabilities should mark a bottoming for the enterprise software stock selloff, Wedbush predicted in a report Friday.
New AI tools, as impressive as they are, won’t rip and replace existing software ecosystems and data environments. The tools are only as useful as the data they reach. Anthropic, OpenAI and the other AI upstarts don’t have the decades of distribution networks, executive relationships and embedded vertical workflows of Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft and their ilk, according to Wedbush.
“Our job as a software company is to help our customers create success and to take that and help them connect with their customers in a whole new way,” Benioff said on the call. “Our job is to take what’s available today and make it successful. And that isn’t where those platforms are today.”
Patrick Stokes, Salesforce president and CMO, added that Slack remains a powerful user interface even against Claude and other AI chatbots because users never have to leave the communications platform when leveraging agents with existing company data.
“We love and are partners of Anthropic, but it [Slack] knows all of the context of your business, not just the context of your systems of records,” he said.
Salesforce’s Agentforce should comprise about 25 percent of the vendor’s revenue by next year, Wedbush predicted in a report Friday.
Surveys of CIOs show that they are increasingly looking to application vendors as the primary partner for sourcing generative AI capabilities, Morgan Stanley said in a report Thursday. They cite Salesforce specifically as a top gainer on incremental IT wallet share with GenAI adoption.
Agentforce, Informatica Growth
The Agentforce AI agent creation platform is only in its second full year of general availability after going GA in September 2024. It has reached annual recurring revenue of $800 million, more than double year on year and up $260 million quarter on quarter, KeyBanc said in a Thursday report.
New bookings for the premium Agentforce 1 Edition and Agentforce for Apps nearly tripled quarter over quarter.
Agentforce should help organic subscription revenue growth accelerate back to double digits in the second half of this fiscal year as more customers ramp Agentforce and Data 360 monetization, according to Morgan Stanley’s Thursday report.
William Blair said in its Thursday report that Salesforce needs to at least double Agentforce annual recurring revenue to impress investors in fiscal 2027.
The number of paying Agentforce customers appeared to grow to 14,500, KeyBanc said in a report Thursday. Salesforce reported 9,500 the prior quarter. Data Cloud annual recurring revenue also appeared to triple year on year to $2.1 billion ignoring Agentforce. Partners have told the investment firm that Data Cloud is needed for the best Agentforce experience, a sign Data Cloud will continue to grow.
The number of Agentforce accounts in production increased nearly 50 percent quarter on quarter. The vendor has closed 29,000 Agentforce deals, up 50 percent quarter over quarter.
Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue exceeds $2.9 billion, tripling year on year.
That revenue includes $1.1 billion in annual recurring revenue from the cloud business of newly acquired Informatica. It also includes that $800 million in Agentforce annual recurring revenue.
Salesforce’s Data 360 foundational data layer for Agentforce saw $1 billion in annual recurring revenue during the fourth fiscal quarter, according to William Blair’s report Thursday. More than 60 percent of Agentforce and Data 360 fourth-quarter bookings came from existing customer expansion.
For the fiscal year, Data 360 ingested 112 trillion records, more than double year on year, and processed 18 TB of unstructured data. Those records include 53 trillion ingested through the zero copy direct, real-time access to data stored in external data warehouses without moving, duplicating or creating extract, transform and load pipelines. The number of zero copy ingested records more than quadrupled year on year.
Salesforce executives also indicated early wins for newly acquired Informatica, which contributed $399 million to fourth fiscal quarter total revenue, $388 million to the quarter’s subscription revenue and about $2.2 billion to remaining performance obligation, according to Morgan Stanley’s Thursday report.
New Metrics For An AI World
On Wednesday’s call, Salesforce executives discussed a new agentic work unit (AWU) to better measure how Agentforce affects customers’ operations.
Salesforce defines AWUs as a discrete task accomplished by an AI agent, including updating a record, triggering a workflow and making a decision.
Salesforce has consumed nearly 20 trillion tokens, converting them into more than 2.4 billion agentic work units to date across Agentforce and Slack, according to the vendor. That token count is up about fivefold year on year, and that AWU milestone is up 57 percent quarter on quarter, an acceleration from the second fiscal quarter’s 34 percent quarter-on-quarter growth, according to Morgan Stanley’s Thursday report.
AWUs allow the vendor to see what different models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others actually power an action by an AI agent, Stokes said on the call. Salesforce measures the ratio of tokens consumed and work coming out and tells customers whether their own ratios are good or bad—and makes sure its own model consumption ratios are favorable as well.
Salesforce leadership didn’t explicitly describe how AWUs translate into revenue for now, William Blair said in its report Thursday. The investment firm still took AWUs as a positive leading indicator for Salesforce AI making users more productive.
Salesforce could see an increasing mix of consumption-based revenue streams make its traditional current remaining performance obligation growth indicator less effective for forecasting subscription revenue growth, according to Morgan Stanley’s Thursday report. The investment firm will be watching for trends in this area throughout the new fiscal year.
Growth In ITSM, Life Sciences Cloud Markets
Only months into challenging ServiceNow’s IT service management (ITSM) business with a competing Salesforce offer, Benioff said that Salesforce has persuaded five customers to “leave” ServiceNow. Salesforce ITSM has more than 180 customers.
Salesforce’s life sciences cloud product has been taking customers from rival Veeva Systems, Benioff said on the call, naming AstraZeneca and Novartis among the customers Salesforce has won over.
“I’ve never been more excited about our business here at Salesforce,” Benioff said. “No one else is delivering this level of capability at this scale to this many customers. And we are taking the power of the agentic enterprise of these apps and Salesforce, and we’re giving them the security, reliability, availability, scalability that you need to make them successful in business.”
Challenges For Other Traditional Products
Robin Washington, Salesforce president and chief operating and financial officer, said on the call that Salesforce’s traditional business also accelerated, with seat counts growing year on year and quarter on quarter, Washington said.
“We’re just seeing incremental value to our software,” Washington said. “Some of it’s going to be consumption-based. But we’re going to have a hybrid model. Seats will continue to be a key component of our growth going forward.”
The vendor did see signs of weakness in its traditional product portfolio. The weakest products in its most recent results were Marketing and Commerce Cloud, MuleSoft and Tableau, according to a Thursday report by William Blair. Marketing and Commerce Cloud declined 1 percent due to competition from Shopify and other e-commerce businesses, according to the investment firm. MuleSoft and Tableau grew 3 percent.
Salesforce has now reported four consecutive quarters of sequential stepdowns in Marketing and Commerce Cloud, KeyBanc said in its Thursday report. While Marketing Cloud shows signs of turnaround, Commerce Cloud needs work, according to KeyBanc.
Organic current remaining performance obligation growth of 9 percent year on year met Salesforce guidance but missed a beat of at least 100 basis points Wall Street wanted, according to Morgan Stanley’s Thursday report. Salesforce’s forecast for about 8 percent organic subscription growth year on year for fiscal year 2027 would mark a deceleration from fiscal year 2026’s 9 percent.
Sales Cloud revenue grew 8 percent ignoring foreign exchange at $9 billion in scale, according to William Blair’s Thursday report. Users upgraded to more expensive products and bought more add-ons. That growth, however, marks a deceleration from more than quadrupling the prior quarter, according to William Blair’s Thursday report.
