Salesforce beats on earnings and gives its AI story teeth

Salesforce walked into earnings priced like an AI bystander and walked out with the kind of record quarter that leaves very little to argue with. Revenue was a touch ahead of forecasts, profit was miles above them, backlog grew double digits, and the AI and data business closed in on a $1.4 billion run-rate as the stock jumped more than 5% after hours.

Heading into the print, the setup looked very different. The shares were down about 30% for the year and trading near the bottom of their 52-week range, with a multiple that had been squeezed down to “slightly better than the S&P” for a company that used to live in the premium SaaS stratosphere. The bar on revenue was modest — roughly 9% growth to about $10.27 billion — but the subtext was loud: prove that anything in the AI story is real, or get treated like a software utility that just happens to talk about AI agents a whole lot.

Salesforce’s headline numbers cleared that bar. Easily. Revenue landed at $10.3 billion, up 9% year over year. Current remaining performance obligation, Salesforce’s favorite proxy for near-term demand, rose 11% to about $29.4 billion; total RPO climbed 12% to roughly $59.5 billion. Non-GAAP operating margin came in around the mid-30s, GAAP margin a bit above 21%. Operating cash flow grew in the high teens, free cash flow in the low 20s, and Salesforce sent roughly $4 billion-plus back to shareholders between buybacks and dividends. For a stock that’s been trading like a problem child, the P&L looked conspicuously like a well-adjusted adult.

Guidance nudged the company in the same direction — the right one for markets. Salesforce nudged full-year fiscal 2026 revenue guidance up to about $41.5 billion at the midpoint, implying 9–10% growth, and raised its outlook for operating cash-flow growth into the low-to-mid-teens. The longer-range promise — more than $60 billion in organic revenue by fiscal 2030 and a combined growth-plus-margin “50” — stayed in place, now backed by one more quarter that doesn’t obviously undercut it. This isn’t a hypergrowth story anymore, but it’s not a stall-out story, either.

Enter: AI. Agentforce and Data 360 together are now running at nearly $1.4 billion in ARR, up more than 100% from a year ago. Agentforce on its own has crossed the half-billion mark and is growing several hundred percent year over year. Since launch, Salesforce has closed more than 18,000 Agentforce deals, with something north of 9,000 actually paid, and its LLM gateway has processed trillions of tokens. Data 360 is ingesting tens of trillions of records per quarter, with “zero copy” data — the bit that lets Salesforce sit on top of a customer’s data rather than yank it in — growing even faster. In the press release, Salesforce cast Agentforce and Data 360 as “momentum drivers” and tied them to the company’s long-term revenue and profit targets.

The scale problem hasn’t disappeared. A $1.4 billion AI-and-data run-rate inside a business guiding to more than $41 billion in annual revenue is meaningful, but it’s not transformational — yet. The core still looks like a grower with healthy margins and a buyback habit, now with a fast-compounding AI layer bolted on. The question the quarter doesn’t answer is how quickly that layer can move from “nice second engine” to something that actually changes the slope and scope of the whole company.

For one night at least, though, the labels and narratives had to stand down for the spreadsheet. Salesforce delivered the kind of quarter that makes it harder to write it off as dead money in the age of AI, without magically turning it into the next great growth stock. The numbers finally looked as good as the pitch, and the stock behaved like it noticed.