‘In two years, there’ll be more agents using Slack than people,’ Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff says.
Early wins from recently acquired Informatica plus a growing business in the Slack collaboration application helped Salesforce outperform its expectations for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year.
Commerce Cloud and Tableau, meanwhile, were among the Salesforce businesses to see weaker results in the quarter.
During Wednesday’s quarterly earnings call with analysts, executives with the San Francisco-based enterprise applications vendor revealed that Slack’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) surpassed 1 million active users within six weeks of launch as an example of usage growth.
“In two years, there’ll be more agents using Slack than people,” Benioff said on the call. “Every one of those agents needs the context and the data and the insights directly from Slack. Every workflow needs the data. Every action needs the integration. And every customer needs to see what’s happening across the entire business.”
Benioff and team reported results for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year during the call. The quarter ended April 30.
[RELATED: Salesforce CEO Says $8B Informatica Buy Will Create ‘Most Complete’ AI Data Platform In The Industry]
Salesforce Q1 FY2027 Earnings: Revenue Hits $11.1 Billion, AI Metrics Surge
In another example of usage growth, Salesforce processed 28.6 trillion tokens, more than double quarter on quarter, and nearly 1 trillion application programming interface (API) calls across core products in the first quarter.
Benioff pointed out on the call that other AI vendors don’t get as granular as Salesforce in reporting AI product consumption. “I listen to some of the other earnings calls, and I don’t think that they’re at that level of detail,” he said, without naming any Salesforce competitors.
Shub Bhowmick, CEO of San Jose, Calif.-based Salesforce solution provider Tredence, told CRN in an interview that Salesforce’s investments in Agentforce have created new excitement for the vendor’s portfolio and Tredence’s practice.
“With the Agentforce work that they’re doing, it’s exciting, it’s interesting,” Bhowmick said. “Over time, as the technology grows, we’re going to lean in. … We see our role as deployment ninjas. We will do whatever it takes to deploy those agents across verticals, across horizontals.”
Agentforce, Slack Momentum: 3.8 Billion Agentic Work Units
Salesforce delivered 3.8 billion agentic work units for customers across Agentforce and Slack, more than double quarter on quarter. Salesforce defines AWUs as a discrete task accomplished by an AI agent, including updating a record, triggering a workflow and making a decision. Slack AWUs grew about fourfold quarter over quarter.
During the quarter, Salesforce’s Data 360 ingested 52 trillion records, more than double year on year, and processed 12 terabytes of unstructured data. Those records include 35 trillion ingested through Salesforce’s zero copy data federation technology, more than triple year on year.
High usage translates into higher spend. On average, the vendor’s top 10 customers by first quarter AWU usage increased their total Salesforce spend by 1.5 times in the last year, Robin Washington, Salesforce president and chief operating and financial officer, said on the call.
Salesforce’s Public Sector Industry Cloud’s AWUs grew almost fivefold quarter on quarter. In annual recurring revenue, ARR for this business surpassed $2 billion, up 23 percent year on year.
Since its April launch, Salesforce’s Headless 360 platform has processed 4.5 million MCP calls into the platform, according to the vendor.
Early Informatica Impact: $444 Million Revenue Contribution In Q1
Part of the fuel for Salesforce’s outperformance in the quarter was the on-premises and professional services businesses of recent acquisition Informatica, Washington said on the call.
First quarter subscription and support revenue grew 12 percent year on year ignoring foreign exchange, reaching $10.6 billion. Recently acquired Informatica contributed about $428 million during the quarter.
In total first quarter revenue, Salesforce reported $11.1 billion, up 12 percent ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica contributed $444 million.
Salesforce’s autonomous AI agent platform Agentforce has an annual recurring revenue of $1.2 billion, more than triple year on year. Agentforce and Data 360 ARR hit almost $3.4 billion, more than triple year on year. Informatica Cloud ARR reached $1.1 billion.
Salesforce President and Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milano said on the call that thanks to the vendor, Informatica has significantly reaccelerated bookings after growing single digits in bookings and revenue. “We are obviously subject to the timing of some of the on-prem renewals, but we are in double-digit growth” in the Informatica business, he said.
During the quarter, Salesforce completed the purchase of Qualified and integrated its Piper sales development agent. The agent has more than 700 Salesforce customers using it and the agent is engaging 50 percent of Salesforce’s traffic and qualifying thousands of leads, delivering 45 percent more pipeline than traditional web agents, Benioff said on the call.
During her revenue forecast on the call, Washington said the vendor assumes continued momentum in Agentforce, Data 360 and Slack throughout the fiscal year. The vendor predicts “ongoing weakness” in its Marketing and Commerce clouds plus “increased softness” in Tableau bookings and renewals. Revenue from Informatica’s on-premises business could also create “greater license revenue volatility,” she said.
Salesforce’s investment in internal artificial intelligence tools has helped the enterprise applications vendor double the amount of features in code shipped year over year and reduce incidents and defects, Washington said.
Slackbot is the fastest adopted AI tool in Salesforce’s history, driving 3.8 million hours of annualized productivity gains for its 80,000-plus employees. Slackbot has increased Salesforce’s productivity by around 3 percent, Milano said.
At the online help.salesforce.com portal, the vendor has delivered more than 4 million autonomous service transactions, Benioff said.
Thanks to AI tools, Salesforce has maintained a flat engineer employee count of about 15,000 for about two years, Benioff said on the call. “We have been using AI to create more efficiency for our engineers,” the CEO said. “Especially this year now with these new coding agents, we’ve seen even more dramatic capabilities. So that that’s a key part of our margin story is that we’re not hiring more engineers. We’re not hiring more GA.”
The company does continue to add more salespeople. AI agents can qualify leads provide service, but humans still play an important role in scaling sales and working different parts of the market for Salesforce, Benioff said.
Salesforce continues to scale its Agentforce agents platform, replacing the search bar in Salesforce with it so that users can search, aggregate and get insights into information throughout every single Salesforce application, Benioff said. Users can also create agents for first-party tools including Slack and third-party tools such as Slack competitor Microsoft Teams.
“That is the biggest, exciting technology because that is going to be technology that you’re not going to have to implement, you’re not going to have to rebuild things,” Benioff said.
Q1 FY2027 In Depth: cRPO, Margins, Cash Flow, Big Deals
For the quarter, Salesforce reported current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) of $33.6 billion, an increase year on year of 13 percent ignoring foreign exchange. Salesforce saw RPO of $67.9 billion, up 11 percent year on year. Salesforce saw momentum not just in Slack, but also Agentforce and Data 360.
Salesforce’s operating margin was 21.1 percent using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Non-GAAP operating margin was 34.8 percent.
Operating cash flow for the quarter came out to $6.7 billion, up 3 percent year on year. Free cash flow grew 4 percent year on year to $6.6 billion.
Bookings from the Agentforce One Edition and Agentforce for Apps premium products grew nearly 60 percent year on year. More than half of Agentforce and Data 360 bookings came from existing customers in the first quarter.
The vendor reported landing a record 98 deals valued at more than $1 million in new annual contract value (ACV) during the quarter.
Salesforce Outlook: Q2 Revenue Guidance And FY2027 Forecast
Salesforce executives said to expect $11.27 billion to $11.35 billion in revenue for the second fiscal quarter. That would mark a 10 percent increase year on year ignoring foreign exchange. Informatica should contribute about 4 points of growth.
The vendor also increased the midpoint of the revenue it expects for the 2027 fiscal year, forecasting $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion. That would mark 10 percent to 11 percent growth year on year ignoring foreign exchange and include about 3 points of growth from Informatica.
Salesforce still expects subscription and support revenue growth for the year of about 11 percent ignoring foreign exchange, with about 3 points from Informatica.
The vendor expects full-year GAAP operating margin of 20.6 percent and non-GAAP operating margin of 34.3 percent. It expects full-year operating cash flow growth and free cash flow growth of about 4 percent to 5 percent year on year.
Salesforce’s stock traded at about $176 a share after market close Wednesday, about the same as the closing price.
