Pivoting back to its proud growth-company history as the AI Revolution kicks into high gear, Salesforce delivered strong Q1 results powered by surging customer demand for its Agentforce platform, its new AI-enhanced Slack, and many of its core applications now enhanced by Agentforce.
While the Q1 topline figure of $11.1 billion — up 13% — captures the big-picture momentum, the larger story lies within some of the other numbers that reveal the extent that Salesforce’s entire business now hinges on its Agentic AI technologies and the innovation they’re delivering to customers.
In that context, I’ve pulled out 10 numbers from the Salesforce Q1 presentation and earnings call that show how Agentforce and a greatly reinvigorated and AI-supercharged Slack have rapidly become the new engines of companywide growth for Marc Benioff’s company.
1. Agentforce tops $1-billion run rate. Benioff cited “incredible demand” for the platform.
2. Current RPO up 14% to $33.6 billion. While the Q1 revenue figure of $11.1 billion reflects the recent past, this RPO number shows the strength of Salesforce’s pipeline for future business (RPO is contracted business not yet recognized as revenue).
3. Processed 28.6 billion tokens. This one’s a bit of a risk for Salesforce, but I think it’s a smart one on their part and will pay off handsomely as a baseline figure against which future real-world customer AI activity can be evaluated. The risk: Salesforce has to bet that its customers will be so delighted with Agentforce that they’ll keep consuming more and more tokens quarter after quarter. So far, so good — compared to Q4, that number’s up 152%.
4. Most-active AI customers boost spending on Salesforce. A fascinating insight from president and CFO Robin Washington: “On average, our top 10 customers by Q1 AWU [Average Work Unit] usage have increased their total Salesforce spend by 1.5x in the last year.” Leaders are gonna keep leading.
5. 98 deals with ACV of at least $1 million. That’s a record number for Salesforce and reflects rising demand for its AI portfolio.
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6. Agentforce generated $42 million in pipeline from cold cases. Benioff said that over the years, Salesforce has generated so many leads that its salespeople could not pursue them all, resulting in more than 1 million cold cases. But Agentforce has no such limitations, and Benioff said it cranked through 220,000 untouched leads autonomously and generated $42 million in pipeline.
7. Slack in almost 50% of major deals. Benioff said Slackbot and related agentic solutions helped drive almost half of Salesforce’s $1-million-plus deals in the quarter, and he also said that Anthropic calls Slack “our core operating system.”
8. AI boosts code output by 100%. Washington: “AI coding tools enabled us to double the amount of features and code shipped year over year while simultaneously reducing incidents and defects. Slackbot which is embedded directly into the flow of work, is now our fastest-adopted AI tool in Salesforce’s history, driving 3.8 million hours of annualized productivity gains for our employees.”
9. Raised FY2027 guidance. Salesforce hiked the midpoint for current fiscal-year guidance from $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion.
10. As part of Salesforce, Informatica bookings surge. President and CRO Miguel Milano: “Informatica was growing in single digits in both bookings and revenue. In just 2 quarters, we have significantly reaccelerated that bookings off the charts and beyond anybody’s expectation because data is king.”
Final Thought
This return to vibrant growth and innovation and customer value is great to see from Benioff and Salesforce because the company’s size and scope ensure that whatever it does reverberates across the industry. So, if Salesforce is going back to its roots on being a hard-charging growth company, then every other apps/agents/AI/data company will have to do the same.
And as always, the biggest winners in this new front in the Cloud Wars will be the customers.
