Salesforce Surges: AI Optimism Returns, Q3 Outlook Beats, and Anthropic Partnership Expands

Deep News08-27

Shares of Salesforce jumped in after-hours trading as the company delivered a robust quarterly earnings report, paired with a major announcement about expanding its strategic partnership with Anthropic, a move that has reignited investor confidence in the company's position within the artificial intelligence landscape.

The company reported revenue of $11.35 billion for the second quarter of fiscal 2027, representing an 11% increase year-over-year, which met market expectations. GAAP net income reached $3.53 billion, up 87% from the prior year, while adjusted earnings per share of $5.90 significantly surpassed analyst forecasts.

Salesforce provided third-quarter revenue guidance in the range of $11.42 billion to $11.5 billion, slightly ahead of the consensus estimate of $11.41 billion. The company also raised its full-year revenue outlook by $200 million to a range of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion. Current remaining performance obligations (cRPO) came in at $33.5 billion, exceeding market expectations.

Chief Financial and Operating Officer Robin Washington highlighted in the earnings statement that net new annual contract value (NNAOV) growth was the strongest in four years, positioning the company for organic revenue acceleration in the second half of the year.

Adding to the positive sentiment, the company unveiled "Claudeforce," a deep integration of its product suite with Anthropic's Claude AI model. Following these dual announcements, Salesforce shares surged as much as 14% in after-hours trading, closing the regular session at $205.62. Despite a notable pullback earlier this year, the stock has climbed 26% over the past month through Wednesday's close, signaling a shift in investor sentiment.

Quarterly Highlights: Strong AI Product Demand and Better-Than-Expected Guidance

Salesforce's second-quarter revenue of $11.35 billion grew 11% year-over-year, which included a $456 million contribution from Informatica. Adjusted EPS of $5.90 dramatically exceeded the analyst consensus of $3.27 compiled by FactSet, while GAAP EPS of $4.29 more than doubled from $1.96 in the same period last year.

The key forward-looking metric, cRPO, reached $33.5 billion, up 14% year-over-year, surpassing the average analyst expectation of 13% growth. Third-quarter revenue guidance of $11.42 billion to $11.5 billion came in slightly above the Wall Street consensus of $11.41 billion, with cRPO growth expected to hold at approximately 14%.

CEO Marc Benioff called the quarter one of the company's best ever, citing AI as the core growth driver. "AI is creating value at every layer of our platform, and we are seeing strong demand for our AI and data products," he stated. Benioff noted that the company's AI products' annual recurring revenue (ARR) is approaching the $4 billion threshold.

Based on this strong momentum, Salesforce raised its full-year revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, up from the previous $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion range, representing approximately 11% to 12% growth year-over-year. The full-year adjusted EPS outlook was also raised significantly to $16.67 to $16.71, compared with the prior range of $14.06 to $14.12.

Of the $200 million increase in revenue guidance, roughly $100 million comes from organic growth, approximately $200 million from the pending acquisitions of Contentful and Fin, partially offset by about $100 million in foreign exchange headwinds. The company expects both acquisitions to close independently during the third quarter of the fiscal year. Salesforce maintained its full-year guidance for operating cash flow and free cash flow growth of approximately 4% to 5%, with its $2.5 billion accelerated share repurchase program expected to finalize by October 2026.

Claudeforce: Salesforce and Anthropic Expand Strategic Alliance

Salesforce also announced an expanded strategic partnership with Anthropic, launching "Claudeforce" to deeply integrate Claude's reasoning capabilities with Salesforce's enterprise-grade data, workflows, and governance systems. The first output of this collaboration is the "Salesforce in Claude" plugin, featuring 37 pre-built sales skills developed jointly by the two companies, covering scenarios such as meeting preparation, deal health reviews, and sales pipeline assessments. This enables sales professionals to access real-time customer information and take action directly within the Claude interface.

The plugin is currently available to select pilot customers, with a public beta expected in September of this year. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei commented, "Through this collaboration, enterprises can point Claude to decades of customer information and business context stored in Salesforce, and use it to truly operate and grow their business."

From a commercial standpoint, Salesforce finance executive Mike Spencer noted in an interview that when customers access Salesforce data from Claude, both companies generate consumption-based billing, which could drive customers to upgrade to higher-tier subscription plans. The two companies are also strategic customers of each other: Claude is now the default AI model in Slack, and Salesforce internally achieves approximately 8.1 million hours of productivity gains annually through Slackbot, a more than threefold increase quarter-over-quarter.

Accelerating Agentforce Growth and Expanding AI Scale

The combined ARR for Salesforce's core AI products, Agentforce and Data 360, reached nearly $3.9 billion in the second quarter, up more than 210% year-over-year. Agentforce ARR alone surpassed $1.5 billion, growing over 240% year-over-year, up from the $1.2 billion reported in the previous quarter.

In terms of usage, the Agentforce and Slack platforms have cumulatively processed 7 billion Agentic Work Units (AWUs) to date, with 3.2 billion completed in the second quarter alone, representing a 97% sequential increase. Slack recorded its fastest quarterly NNAOV growth since being acquired, with Slackbot user numbers growing more than 150% quarter-over-quarter. Additionally, Salesforce ingested 104 trillion data records through Data 360 during the quarter, a 355% increase year-over-year, with 82 trillion processed via Zero Copy methods, up 731% year-over-year.

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