While Salesforce’s Q2 revenue growth rate slipped to 11% from Q1’s 13%, the company announced a huge deal with the world’s hottest AI vendor in a move that boosts the potential for future acceleration.
The key Q2 numbers:
- Revenue up 11% to $11.3 billion (Q1: up 13% to $11.1 billion)
- Current RPO up 14% to $33.5 billion (Q1: up 14% to $33.6 billion)
- AI and data products annualized run rate of more than $3.8 billion, up 210%
- Agentforce annualized run rate of about $1.5 billion, up 240% (includes Slackbot)
- Q3 guidance: revenue expected to rise 11% to about $11.46 billion
- Full-year guidance: raised to about $46.25 billion, up 11% to 12%
Although CEO Marc Benioff called it “one of our best quarters ever, outperforming across every key metric,” Salesforce has not been able to match the growth rates of rivals SAP and Oracle. I take the heightened full-year guidance as a good sign, and I’m particularly encouraged by the new partnership with Anthropic.
In a press release about that alliance that came out on the same day as the earnings, Benioff said, “Probabilistic intelligence alone doesn’t run a company, and deterministic systems don’t reason. By fusing Claude’s extraordinary reasoning with the trusted data, workflows, and governance every enterprise runs on, we’re delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts. This is how every business will run.”
And since Benioff is unquestionably counting on this collaboration with Anthropic to drive more value to customers, it’s no surprise that the name of the new two-company solution is Claudeforce.
Final Thought
In the Q2 earnings release, Benioff eschewed any mention of the company’s cloud businesses — Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce — and did not use the term that for a quarter century was synonymous with Salesforce: applications.
Rather, he focused on platform and data, saying the new Salesforce enterprise AI harness called “AIforce” would unlock “the data, workflows, business logic, actions, and governance inside Salesforce” and make all that “available to every agent, model, and interface. This is how we are turning AI into customer success at unprecedented scale.”
That’s a big promise, and I’ll be watching to see if Salesforce’s growth can match up with Benioff’s bullishness.
Community Summit North America is the largest independent innovation, education, and training event for Microsoft business applications delivered by Expert Users, Microsoft Leaders, MVPs, and Partners. Register now to attend Community Summit in Nashville, TN from October 11-15.
