Salesforce made a profit the price is the same as that of an AI witness and walked away with such a record quarter that there is nothing left to argue with. While revenue was slightly below forecasts, profits were well above forecasts, the sales gap grew by double digits, and the AI and data business approached $1.4 billion in revenue. Shares jumped more than 5% in after-hours trading.
Before printing, the setup looked completely different. The stock is down about 30% for the year and was trading near the bottom of its 52-week range, with the multiple lowered to “slightly above the S&P” for a company that used to live in the premium SaaS stratosphere. The revenue target was modest—up about 9% to about $10.27 billion—but the implication was loud: Prove that the AI story is real, or you'll be treated like an old utility desperately trying to outshine the hype around agent AI.
Salesforce news headlines have surpassed that threshold. Easily. Revenue was $10.3 billion, up 9% from last year. Current remaining performance obligations, Salesforce's favorite indicator for determining near-term demand, rose 11% to about $29.4 billion; Total RPO increased 12% to approximately $59.5 billion. Non-GAAP operating margin was in the mid-30s, with GAAP margin slightly above 21%. Operating cash flow was growing in the mid-twenties, free cash flow was growing in the mid-twenties, and Salesforce returned about $4 billion-plus to shareholders between buybacks and dividends. For a stock that traded like a problem child, the P&L looked distinctly like that of a well-adjusted adult.
Management pushed the company in the same direction—the right direction for the markets. Salesforce raised its fiscal 2026 revenue forecast to about $41.5 billion at midyear, implying growth of 9% to 10%, and also raised its operating cash flow growth forecast to low to midrange. The long-term promise of more than $60 billion in organic revenue by fiscal 2030 and a '50' compound growth plus earnings rate remains intact, now bolstered by another quarter that clearly 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 combined now have ARR of nearly $1.4 billion, up more than 100% from a year ago. Agentforce itself has surpassed the half-billion mark and is growing several hundred percent year over year. Salesforce says it has closed more than 18,000 Agentforce trades since launch, of which about 9,000 have actually been paid, and its LLM gateway has processed trillions of tokens. Data 360 processes tens of trillions of records per quarter, with “zero-copy” data—the bit that allows Salesforce to sit on top of a customer's data rather than extract it—growing even faster. In a press release, Salesforce called Agentforce and Data 360 “driving drivers” and tied them to the company's long-term revenue and profit goals.
However, the problem of scale has not gone away. The $1.4 billion use of artificial intelligence and data in business, generating more than $41 billion in annual revenue, is significant but not yet revolutionary. The core business still looks like a growth company with healthy margins and a repurchase habit, now with an added layer of artificial intelligence to allow for fast compounding. The question that the quarter doesn't answer is how quickly this layer can move from being a “good second mover” to something that actually changes the tilt and scope of the entire company.
For at least one night, the narrative had to be replaced by a spreadsheet. Salesforce unveiled quarterly stocks that are harder to dismiss as dead money in the age of artificial intelligence, but they didn't magically turn into the next hot stock. The numbers are finally as good as the offer, and investors are nodding in agreement.
