Salesforce beats on earnings and gives its AI story teeth

Salesforce reported profits rated at an AI spectator’s level and came away with the kind of record quarter that leaves very little to argue with. While revenue was slightly below forecasts, profits were well above forecasts, sales backlog grew by double digits, and the AI ​​and data business came in close to a $1.4 billion run rate. After hours trading, the stock jumped more than 5%.

Before printing, the setup was very different. The stock was down about 30% for the year and trading near the bottom of its 52-week range, with a multiple that had been cut to “slightly better than the S&P” for a company that once inhabited the high-end SaaS stratosphere. The revenue bar was modest – growth of about 9% to around $10.27 billion – but the subtext was strong: prove the AI ​​story is real, or be treated like an old utility man desperate to get caught up in the hype of agentic AI.

Salesforce’s headline numbers have passed this milestone. Easily. Revenue reached $10.3 billion, up 9% year-over-year. The current remaining performance obligation, Salesforce’s preferred metric for near-term demand, increased 11% to approximately $29.4 billion; Total RPO climbed 12% to around $59.5 billion. The non-GAAP operating margin was in the mid-30s, with the GAAP margin being just over 21%. Operating cash flow grew in the 1990s, free cash flow in the 20s, and Salesforce returned about $4 billion to shareholders between buybacks and dividends. For a stock that trades like a problem child, the P&L visibly resembles that of a well-adjusted adult.

The boards pushed the company in the same direction: the right direction for the markets. Salesforce pushed back its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to around $41.5 billion at the midpoint, implying 9% to 10% growth, and raised its outlook for operating cash flow growth to between 15% and 20%. The longer-term promise – more than $60 billion in organic revenue by fiscal 2030 and combined “50” plus margin growth – remained in place, now supported by an additional quarter that obviously doesn’t undermine it. This is not a story of hypergrowth, but it is not a story of stagnation either.

Enter: AI. Agentforce and Data 360 together are now worth nearly $1.4 billion in ARR, an increase of more than 100% from a year ago. Agentforce alone has crossed the half-billion mark and is growing several hundred percent year over year. Salesforce claims to have completed more than 18,000 Agentforce transactions since its launch, of which more than 9,000 have actually been paid, and its LLM gateway has processed billions of tokens. Data 360 ingests tens of billions of records per quarter, with “zero copy” data (the bit that allows Salesforce to sit on a customer’s data rather than extract it) growing even faster. In the press release, Salesforce introduced Agentforce and Data 360 as “momentum drivers” and linked them to the company’s long-term revenue and profit goals.

However, the problem of scale has not disappeared. A $1.4 billion run rate of AI and data within an enterprise, leading to over $41 billion in annual revenue, is significant, but it’s not yet transformational. The core business still looks like a producer with healthy margins and a buyback habit, now with a rapid-dial AI layer. The question the quarter doesn’t answer is how quickly this layer can move from a “nice second engine” to something that actually changes the slope and scope of the entire business.

For one night at least, the stories had to leave the spreadsheet behind. Salesforce delivered a quarter that makes it harder to dismiss as dead money in the AI ​​age – without magically making it the next big growth stock. The numbers ultimately seem as good as the talk, and investors are acquiescing.