Salesforce Q2 2024 Earnings Report

Salesforce EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $2.12
• Consensus EPS: $1.90
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$0.22
• One Year Ago EPS: $0.52

Salesforce Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $8.60 billion
• Expected Revenue: $8.53 billion
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$73.63 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: +11.40%

Salesforce Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q2 2024
• Date: 8/30/2023
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Wednesday, August 30, 2023
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), Inc. is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) technology and related enterprise applications. Its platform helps organizations manage sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, data analytics and business operations through subscription-based software and cloud services.

The company’s product portfolio includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce also offers Slack for workplace collaboration, Tableau for data visualization and analytics, MuleSoft for application integration, and artificial intelligence capabilities, including its Agentforce platform for building and deploying AI agents.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and serves businesses and organizations across a broad range of industries and geographic markets worldwide. Marc Benioff, one of the company’s founders, serves as its chair and chief executive officer. The company’s shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CRM.

Salesforce Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Q2 Non-GAAP operating margin rose to 31.6%, up over 1,000 basis points year-over-year, and FY24 margin guidance was raised to 30%, three quarters ahead of plan.
• Revenue of $8.6 billion in Q2, up 11% year-over-year (constant currency), and FY24 revenue guidance was increased to $34.7–34.8 billion, representing ~11% growth.
• Operating cash flow surged 142% year-over-year to $808 million (free cash flow +379% to $628 million), supporting $8 billion in share repurchases over the past 12 months.
• Salesforce is advancing its position as the “number one AI CRM” by embedding generative AI across Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce Clouds, powered by Data Cloud and a trust/ethics framework.
• Professional services growth remained weak, creating a roughly one-point headwind to RPO/CRPO growth amid elongated sales cycles and a measured buying environment.

Presentation

[Operator]

Welcome to Salesforce Fiscal 2024 second quarter results conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad.

[Operator]

If you would like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. I would like to hand over the conference to your speaker, Mike Spencer, Executive Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

[Mike Spencer, EVP of Investor Relations at Salesforce]

Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us today on our fiscal 2024 second quarter results conference call. Our press release, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on our website. Joining me on the call today is Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO; Amy Weaver, President and Chief Financial Officer; and Brian Millham, President and Chief Operating Officer.

[Mike Spencer, EVP of Investor Relations at Salesforce]

As a reminder, our commentary today will include non-GAAP measures. Reconciliations between our GAAP and non-GAAP results and guidance can be found in our earnings materials and press release. Some of our comments today may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, which could change. Should any of these risks materialize or should our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual company results could differ materially from these forward-looking statements.

[Mike Spencer, EVP of Investor Relations at Salesforce]

A description of these risks, uncertainties, and assumptions and other factors that could affect our financial results is included in our SEC filings, including our most recent report on Form 10-K, 10-Q, and other SEC filings. Except as required by law, we do not undertake any responsibility to update these forward-looking statements. With that, let me hand the call over to Marc.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

All right. Hey, thanks so much, Mike, and really appreciate everyone being here today. We're obviously very excited about these results and getting out there with all of you, and thanks for being on this call. So, listen, as we've shared with you over the last couple of earnings calls, Salesforce has really accelerated our transformation to profitable growth.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I think that's super clear from the numbers, and I couldn't be more excited, especially on this huge top-line beat and what our margin is looking like today. You know, as you all know, over the last year, we've been executing against these four key areas of our transformation. First, our restructuring for the short and long term. We've been talking about that since the fourth quarter call, and we're going to update you on that today. Second, we're reigniting our performance culture by focusing on productivity, operational excellence, and profitability, and Brian is going to talk about that today.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Third, we're prioritizing the core innovations to drive customer success, and I can't wait to share with you at Dreamforce how we're taking our core platform to a whole new level, showing you some incredible new enhancements to our Data Cloud, as well as new versions of Einstein, and also fundamental extensions to our core platform, really showing how our core platform has been, you know, rebuilt so that we can take so many of these amazing acquisitions that we've made over the last decade and run them right inside the core.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Our fourth priority is building even stronger relationships with our investors. That's all you. You know how important that is to us. We've probably spent more time in the last six or nine months with our investors than we have maybe in the entire history of the company, and we've received just great feedback from all of you, and we're really making great progress there.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I want to especially thank Mike for everything that he's doing with all of you. We're adding a fifth priority. Last quarter, we told you we're now driving our AI transformation. We're pioneering AI for both our customers and ourselves, leading the industry through this incredible new innovation cycle.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I couldn't be happier with Srini and David and the entire product and technology team for the incredible velocity of AI products that were released to customers this quarter, and the huge impact that they're making in the market and showing how Salesforce is transforming from being not only the number one CRM, but to the number one AI CRM. And I just express my sincere gratitude to our entire T&P, T&P team. I couldn't be happier with the performance of our team delivered in the second quarter.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

The numbers basically speak for themselves. Our AI data, CRM, plus trust platform, well, it's propelled us to become the third largest enterprise software company by revenue in the world. And I think in Japan, we just became the second largest company. So congratulations to everyone at Salesforce, and especially to our Japanese team.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

With our industry-leading clouds and sales, service, marketing, commerce, our industry clouds powered by Data Cloud, Einstein, Flow, Tableau, Slack, MuleSoft, really, all of these are integrated into one trusted, metadata-driven platform. We're providing more capabilities to more customers than any other CRM vendor, and I can't wait to show all that, as I said, at Dreamforce.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

That's why Salesforce is the number one CRM by market share, based on the largest, latest IDC Software Tracker. Now we are working hard to be the number one, as I said, AI CRM. Our transformation drove our second quarter results, especially when it comes to our highest priority, as you can see, profitability. You know, look, we couldn't be happier to see these numbers. It's incredible to see the margin acceleration in such a short period of time. We've exceeded our own expectations.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I hope we've exceeded yours. In our second quarter, our non-GAAP operating margin rose to 31.6%. That's up over 1,000 basis points year-over-year. And this is the second quarter in a row our operating margin is up 1,000 or more points year-over-year. And as you're about to hear from Amy, we've maintained our disciplined approach to cost management while also investing in growth initiatives across our entire platform of offerings.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And we're positioning Salesforce for the future, and we'll continue to drive our margins and also while we're continuing to drive customer growth. Revenue in the second quarter was $8.6 billion. That's up 11% year-over-year, and the same in constant currency. And during the quarter, we had great wins with JP Morgan, Bayer, FedEx, Maersk, as well as-...

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

the Department of Veterans Affairs, and so many more you're gonna hear about from Brian. Operating cash flow for Q2 was $808 million. Pretty incredible. That's up 142% year-over-year, really very strong. Our remaining performance obligation ended the second quarter at $46.6 billion. That's an increase of 12% year-over-year, really amazing.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Current remaining performance obligation, or what we call CRPO, ended at $24.1 billion. That's up 12% year-over-year, and 11% in constant currency. Now, through the second quarter, we have returned, and this is amazing, you know, $8 billion in share repurchases since we started the buyback program a year ago. We've bought $8 billion of stock over the last twelve months.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

That is really awesome, Amy's gonna talk more about that, and I think, I know you realize we have a lot more to do there. Based on our performance and what we saw in the back half of the year, we're raising our fiscal 2024 revenue guidance to $34.7 billion-$34.8 billion, or about 11% projected growth year-over-year.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Last quarter, we raised our fiscal year 2024 non-GAAP operating margin guidance to 28%, and we said that we expected to eclipse 30% in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Well, as you've all seen these numbers, and now I'm happy to officially share, we are accelerating that target again, raising our fiscal year 2024 non-GAAP operating margin, 30%. An improvement of 750 basis points year-over-year.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It's kind of amazing, but yes, we are saying that we're gonna deliver 30% margin for this year, and that's an incredible goal. So while we thought we were gonna do it next year, we're really gonna do it this year, and it's an amazing achievement of our whole team.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It certainly has been a lot of work. It's been difficult. In a lot of cases, it has been a struggle, but our teams are incredible, and what they have done has been nothing more miraculous and down to see, not only the delivery of the 31%+ growth for this quarter, but now the 30% for the year. It's just awesome. It's just incredible. And I'm really excited to welcome back to Salesforce so many boomerang employees.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Boomerang employees are employees who were employees, but for one reason or another, left the company, got recruited away, or went off to start their own companies or whatever. Well, a lot of these results have to do with not only our incredible employees that we've had in place, but a lot of folks have really felt the desire to come back and help us.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I just wanna say thank you to all of them. It's been incredible to welcome them back, and the line is long out the door of people who have left Salesforce and wanna come back to Salesforce, and we're welcoming all of them with open arms, especially across our sales, engineering, technology, organization, improvement winners, incredible leaders who got taken out of Salesforce because they were doing incredible things.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Get to watch them come back because they wanna help us and achieve this next level of growth and capability and, and, revenue and margin, and in technology and leadership. Well, I just wanna especially start to thank some of those, including Miguel Milano, who's our new Chief Revenue Officer, has just returned to us from Celonis, and of course, Ariel Kelman, our Chief Marketing Officer, who's most recently at Oracle, and Kendall Collins, our Chief Business Officer, and who's been my-- now my chief of staff, and was, of course, had so many many executive positions at Salesforce.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

But this is a long list, and I can't even continue it, of how many people are coming back, and what I love about this is that they're hitting the ground running, they make an immediate impact, they know the culture, they understand the products, they're able to execute, you know, incredible agility.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And so, I've got the siren song out there for all of them to come back and to join us. Now, earlier this month, we welcomed Sebastian Niles to Salesforce as our Chief Legal Officer. He's sitting here at the table right now, making funny faces at me, and I wouldn't be happier. And I, I wouldn't—I couldn't be happier to have Sebastian as part of my executive leadership team. You know, we met Sebastian this year.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We had did a lot of work with Wachtell, as a lot of you know, we won't go through the details. It's not necessary to go through that right now. The past is the past, but I'll tell you, one of the greatest things that happened during this amazing period of Salesforce was meeting Sebastian, and now to have him on the leadership team, I couldn't be more excited, and I'm thrilled to have him with us. So welcome, Sebastian.

[Sebastian Niles, President & CLO at Salesforce]

Thank you.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Okay, thank you. Those are his opening comments. AI, data, CRM, trust. Let me tell you, we are at the dawn of an AI revolution, and as I've said, it's a new innovation cycle that is sparking a massive tech buying cycle over the coming years. It's also a new tech investment cycle. We've been involved in the earliest rounds of many of the top AI startups.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Many of you seen that. We were in there very early, but I'll tell you, this company has pioneered AI, and not just in predictive. A lot of you have followed up the development and growth of Einstein, but also you've seen that, you know, we've published some of the first papers on prompt engineering and the beginnings of generative AI, and we took our deep learning roots, and we really demonstrated the potential for generative AI.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And now to see so many of these companies become so successful, I just saw OpenAI delivering a billion-dollar revenue run rate. It's just awesome to see this growth, and especially proud that they're right here in our hometown of San Francisco, which is becoming the number one AI city in the world.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Very excited for our city. Now, through our $500 million generative AI fund, we're seeing the development of ethical AI with amazing companies like Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face, and so many others. And I just heard one of them just subleased our entire Slack building, but I'm not allowed to say who it is, but I couldn't be more excited about that because we're really seeing downtown San Francisco become AI central.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

So every CEO I've met with this year, across every industry, believes that AI is essential to improving both their top and bottom line, but especially their productivity. You know, AI is just augmenting what we can do every single day. I just think about myself. I've spent so much time on Bard over the last week. It's incredible. I was just buying some flashlights, and I couldn't figure out what flashlight I wanted to buy, and I was on Amazon trying to figure out what's the flashlight.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And so I took a picture of the Amazon picture of what was happening on the app, and I gave it to Bard because Bard has this multimodal capability to ingest the photo. And it ingested the photo, and it told me not to buy the flashlight, that it was poor quality, and it recommended one that was better for me.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It was incredible to see that I was once again working with the next generation of artificial intelligence. That is inspiring me, and I think many of our customers, and ultimately, all of them believe they can grow their businesses by becoming more connected to their customers than ever before through AI, and at the same time, reduce costs, increase productivity, drive efficiency, and exceed customer expectations through AI.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I'll tell you, every single management team that we have here at Salesforce, every week, we're using our Einstein AI to do exactly the same thing. You know, we go back, we're trying to augment ourselves using Einstein. So we'll say is, and we've been doing this now, and super impressive, we'll say, "Okay, Brian, what do you think our number is?" And we'll say, "Okay, that's very nice, Brian, but Einstein, what do you really think the number is?" And then Einstein will say, "I think Brian is sandbagging."

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And then the meeting continues. The reality is every company will undergo an AI transformation with the customer at the center because A, every AI transformation begins and ends with the customer, and that's why Salesforce is really well-positioned with the future and with this incredible technology, Einstein, that we've invested so much in, and grown and integrated into our core technology base. We're democratizing Generative AI, making it very easy for our customers to implement every job, every business, and every industry.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I will just say that in the last few months, we've injected a new layer of generative AI assistance across all of the Customer 360. And you can see it with our salespeople who are now using our Sales Cloud GPT, which has been incredible, what we've released, you know, this quarter to also all of our customers and here inside Salesforce. And then when we see that, you know, they all say to themselves, "You know what? In this new world, everyone can now be an Einstein."

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

But democratizing generative AI at scale for the biggest brands in the world requires more than just these large language models and deep learning algorithms. And we all know that because a lot of our customers kinda think, and they have tried, and they go, and they pull something off a Hugging Face. This is amazing, you know, amazing company.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We just invested in their new round and grab a model and put some data in it, and nothing happens. And then they don't understand, and they call us and say, "Hey, what, what's happening here? I thought that this AI was so amazing." And it's like, well, you know, it takes a lot to actually get this intelligence to occur. And that's what I think that's, you know, the value that Salesforce is bringing is that we're really able to help our customers achieve this kind of technological superiority right out of the box, just using our products in a low-code, no-code way. It's really this democratization of generative AI at scale.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And that is really what we're trying to achieve, that at the heart of every one of these AI transformations becomes our intelligent, integrated, and incredible Salesforce platform, and we're gonna show all of that at Dreamforce. Our platform starts and ends now with our Data Cloud, and I just would like to call out the incredible Data Cloud team for what they've delivered.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

A lot of you have seen the release of the Data Cloud, this incredible GenAI technology that we started really showing off last Dreamforce. But what you can see with Data Cloud is that customers must get their data together if they want to achieve success with AI.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

This is the critical first step for every single customer, and we're gonna see that this AI revolution is really a data revolution, and you're gonna see at Dreamforce that we're gonna get this Data Cloud turned on as fast as we can and as easy as we can for every single one of our customers. This Data Cloud is incredible, what it's doing for our customers. It not only has AI built in, but it's real-time, it's automated, it's integrated with the core Platform.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It's not some separate Data Cloud. It's an integrated part of our Platform in our metadata, in our core code, like our Sales Cloud, like our Service Cloud, and as you're about to soon see, our new Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, and of course, our core application development capabilities all inside our Data Cloud.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

No CRM platform on the planet is better positioned than Salesforce to use this amazing Salesforce and business data to fuel the AI-powered applications because of this architecture. It's very easy for our customers to set up and just go. And our Data Cloud is so deeply integrated as part of this core metadata architecture. It's allowing our customers to quickly action all of their data from any source without the costly integration project necessary with standalone data warehouses and data lakes.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

They've been forced to buy and create more islands of information and all of these, all of these independent systems and independent teams versus having one integrated data architecture. We're moving our customers from having islands of data to having a single source of truth for all of their data. This is our greatest dream. With Data Cloud and powerful technologies like Einstein Flow, Lightning, Tableau-...

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

MuleSoft, Slack, our customers, they can easily supercharge every application and customer experience with AI, automation, and analytics at scale. Data Cloud continues to be our fastest growing organic product. You're gonna see the new version at Dreamforce. It's fully integrated with our Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, and of course, already our Marketing Cloud and other key things in this kind of new second version of Data Cloud that's coming, will be fully released to the customers.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And all, as I said, our goal is for every customer just to be able to easily turn it on. Just in the second quarter, Data Cloud ingested, and this is amazing, over 6 trillion records. It ingested 6 trillion records and triggered more than 1 trillion activations to drive customer engagement.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We've always put trust at the center of everything that's going on in our platform, and that has never been important. More important, I would say, especially now, not only with Data Cloud, but in this AI revolution, because this AI revolution is a trust revolution. Everything Einstein does is also delivered with trust and especially ethics at the center.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I especially wanna call out the incredible work of our Office of Ethical and Humane Use, pioneering the use of ethics and technology. If you didn't read their incredible article in HBR this quarter, it was awesome. They are doing incredible work, really saying that it's not just about AI, it's not just about data, but it's also about trust and ethics. That's why we developed this Einstein Trust Layer. This is completely unique in the industry.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It enables our customers to maintain their data privacy, security, residency, and compliance goals. I can tell you, we're already at this early stage, seeing momentum with these amazing Einstein innovations. Companies like Heathrow Airport and PenFed Credit Union really adopted Einstein and took their Salesforce implementations to another level in the quarter.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Heathrow is a great example of transformative power of AI, data, CRM, and trust, and the power of a single source of truth. They have 70 million passengers who pass through their terminal annually. I'm sure many of you have been one of those passengers. I have as well. Heathrow is operating at a tremendous scale, managing the entire airport experience with the Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

But now, Heathrow, they've added Data Cloud, also, giving them a single source of truth for every customer interaction and setting them up to pioneer the AI revolution. And with Einstein, Heathrow service agents now have this AI-assisted generator replies to service inquiries, case deflection, writing case summaries, all the relevant data and business context coming from Data Cloud.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We're doing so much incredible and exciting, innovative work in service with Data Cloud and with our Service Cloud, and AI is gonna show us a whole new vision for the future of service and what our Service Cloud can do for customers, not only with delivering high-quality customer service, but delivering incredible new levels of productivity. This is saving their agents huge amounts of time and effort. This is the power of Salesforce.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I've never been more excited about the future of our industry, the power and future of our company, the potential to help all of our customers, and also, especially our team, the quality of our team, especially fueled by all these amazing new boomerangs, and you're gonna see it all at Dreamforce. Dreamforce is right around the corner, September twelfth through fourteenth, right here in San Francisco.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I'm looking forward to welcoming each and every one of you to Dreamforce. I'm right now at the top of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. We're gonna bring you up here. We'll bring you through Moscone. We'll show you our incredible downtown. And I'll tell you, this isn't just the largest enterprise tech conference this year, it's gonna be the world's largest AI conference and the largest gathering of AI experts.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We'll have many of the world's top AI thinkers, including Sam Altman and his amazing OpenAI company. Incredible what he's doing. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who's one of his alumni who left OpenAI to start Anthropic, amazing company. Stanford Fei-Fei Li, amazing, amazing researcher and visionary leader of AI, and presenting some of the 1,500 Dreamforce conference tech sessions.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It's really awesome what we're gonna see here with AI and Dreamforce, and we're gonna take everyone's skills to a whole another level. We'll also share our vision for the future of CRM, the next generation of Data Cloud and Einstein. We're also gonna have the Foo Fighters. They're gonna play our Dreamforce benefit concert. Dave Matthews is gonna play my dinner the night before.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Hopefully, we're gonna see him at the conference, in some incredible ways. We can't wait to get you all here and to show you what's happening in Salesforce, what's happening in AI, what's happening in San Francisco, and it's gonna be an amazing event, and we're just a few days away. And now let me turn it over to Brian.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Thanks, Marc, particularly for the sandbagging comment. I really appreciate it. Our focus on-

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It wasn't me, it was Einstein.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Sorry, yeah.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Just know, it is what it is, Brian.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Got it. Our focus on operational-

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

That's the AI revolution coming at you, baby, so get ready.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Okay. Our focus on operational excellence, high performance, and growth initiatives drove another strong quarter. We continued our disciplined approach to cost management and efficiencies, removing complexity from our business to drive top and bottom line improvements. Every customer I met with in the quarter made it clear they are laser-focused on driving greater productivity, quick time to value, and business growth. We see AI, CRM as the answer.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

They all see AI, CRM as the answer to those priorities, and we're making it easier and faster for our customers to unleash the power of trusted Generative AI safely and at scale. We're innovating faster than ever with AI plus data, plus CRM, plus the trust platform. We also have the most complete product portfolio, with Customer 360 delivering mission-critical outcomes for our customers.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

You've heard from Mark, Data Cloud is supercharging our product portfolio, surfacing real-time customer data in the flow of work around sales, service, marketing, and commerce. That's why more than 90% of the Fortune 100 rely on Salesforce on average more than five of our clouds. Amid the ongoing measured buying environment, compression of larger transformational deals continued in the quarter, affecting our professional services growth.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Despite that, we exceeded top and bottom line expectations in Q2. This is a reflection of our proven go-to-market strategy and focus on customer success. Our high-performance culture continues to drive results, and I'm proud of how well the team executed in the quarter. Our growth initiatives across core products, data, AI, services, industries, and international are driving that, driving our success.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

In the quarter, we saw consistent demand in our core business, and we continue to benefit from customers consolidating their technology platforms to reduce complexity, drive efficiency, and growth. Six of our top 10 wins in the quarter included 5 or more clouds. As you'll hear from Amy, we're deepening our relationships with multi-cloud customers who are running their businesses on Salesforce and realizing tremendous value from having one integrated AI-powered CRM platform.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Schneider Electric has been using Customer 360 for over a decade, enhancing customer engagement, service, and efficiency. With Einstein, Schneider has refined demand generation, reduced close times by 30%. Through Salesforce Flow, they've automated order fulfillment, and with Service Cloud, they're handling over 8 million support interactions annually, much of it done on our self-service offering. In Q2, Schneider selected Marketing Cloud to further personalize the customer experience.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

In the quarter, we saw add-on products like sales performance management, digital service, self-service, and marketing engagement grow 40%. To help our smaller business customers achieve faster time to value, we introduced a new product called Salesforce Starter in Q2, bringing sales, service, and marketing into one integrated offering for our small business customers.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

As Mark said, Data Cloud is one of our fastest-growing organic innovations ever, and it lets customers unlock the power of their data to supercharge every application and customer experience with AI, automation, and analytics. This is driving our strong momentum. Data Cloud was in five of our top 10 deals in the quarter, and we saw great wins at companies like SiriusXM and KPMG. In the quarter, FedEx made a significant investment in Salesforce by adding Data Cloud.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

FedEx has long relied on multiple clouds from Salesforce, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Einstein. Now, with Data Cloud turned on, every part of Salesforce is deeply integrated to drive growth and deliver more targeted customer engagement and personalized experiences. We're also seeing strong customer momentum on Einstein Generative AI. PenFed is a great example of how AI plus data, plus CRM, plus trust is driving growth for our customers.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

PenFed is one of the largest credit unions in the U.S., growing at a rate of the next nine credit unions combined. They're already using Financial Services Cloud, Experience Cloud, and MuleSoft, and our Einstein-powered chatbot, handling 40,000 customer service sessions per month. In fact, today, PenFed resolves 20% of their cases on first contact with Einstein-powered chatbots, resulting in a 223% increase in chatbot activity in the past year with incredible ROI.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

In Q2, PenFed expanded with Data Cloud to unify all the customer data from its nearly 3 million members and increase their use of Einstein to roll out generative AI assistant for every single one of their service agents. In the quarter, we also had great wins in Tableau, Slack, and MuleSoft, with Tableau continuing to be a tailwind to our revenue growth.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

In Q2, nearly half of our greater than $1 million-dollar deals included MuleSoft, and as customers bring together data from all sources to fuel efficiency, growth, and insights, MuleSoft has become mission-critical for them and was included in half of our top 10 deals. We've seen excellent usage growth in our automation products, including Slack, which now, which has now launched nearly 8 million workflows weekly, 71% increase year-over-year.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Our industry verticals continue to be a growth lever for us, and for the third consecutive quarter, eight of our industry clouds grew at ARR above 50%. We also saw strong growth internationally with wins like Hargreaves Lansdown in EMEA, Department of Education Victoria in APAC, Banco Carrefour, and LATAM. I'm excited to reiterate what Mark said earlier about Japan now being the second largest software business in the country. Just incredible growth.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

As we head into the second half of the year, we're leading the way as the number one AI CRM with the pace of innovation at an all-time high. Our focus on customer success drives our own success, accelerating revenue and profitability. The full power of Salesforce and our incredible community of trailblazers, experts, and partners will be on display at Dreamforce next month.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

I hope to see you all there. Amy, over to you.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

Thank you, Brian. Our Q2 results show that we continue to make great progress in our four, now five, key areas of transformation, delivering another quarter of top and bottom line expansion. As you can see in our results, we're delivering against our transformation, driving profitable growth and shareholder value, and we are well positioned for the future with the number one AI CRM. Our execution against our profitable growth framework drove our Q2 results.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

So let's start with the top-line commentary. For the second quarter, revenue was $8.6 billion, up 11% year-over-year, and the same in constant currency. The growth was primarily driven by continued MuleSoft momentum, solid sales and service performance, and a modest FX tailwind. This was partially offset by some continued weakness in professional services.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

The durability of our business model and our continued multi-cloud expansion strategy reflects the mission-critical nature of our unified platform. This is evidenced by the more than 460 customers who invest more than $10 million annually and average 7 clouds. In the last 5 years, the number of $10 million-plus customers has tripled, and their average number of clouds has nearly doubled.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

From a geographic perspective, the Americas revenue grew 10%, EMEA grew 13% or 11% in constant currency, and APAC grew 20% or 24% in constant currency. We saw strong new business growth internationally, highlighted by Canada, France, and India, while the United States continued to be constrained. From an industry perspective, manufacturing, automotive, and energy saw greater resilience, while high tech and retail and consumer goods were more measured.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

Q2 revenue attrition ended the quarter at approximately 8%. In Q2, our non-GAAP operating margin rose to 31.6%, up 1,000 basis points or more for the second quarter in a row. The margin improvement was driven by savings from our restructuring actions, strength in revenue, and investment timing. I am very proud of our progress.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

Our disciplined approach to cost management has allowed us to exceed our 30% non-GAAP margin target three quarters early. Q2 operating cash flow was $808 million, up 142% year-over-year. Q2 free cash flow was $628 million, up 379% year-over-year. The upside in cash flow was driven by stronger collections than expected and lower cash outflows tied to the Q2 margin benefits we just discussed. Now, turning to remaining performance obligation.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

RPO, which represents all future revenue under contract, ended Q2 at $46.6 billion, up 12% year-over-year. Current remaining performance obligation, or CRPO, ended at $24.1 billion, up 12% year-over-year and 11% in constant currency. This was ahead of expectations, notably due to the momentum in MuleSoft.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

As we called out last quarter, CRPO growth did include a 1-point headwind from professional services. Finally, we continued to deliver on our capital return commitment. In Q2, we returned $1.9 billion in the form of share repurchases, bringing the total returned to more than $8 billion, representing more than 48 million shares since the program was initiated just last August. Before turning to guidance, I wanted to briefly touch on the current macro environment.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

As you heard from Brian, the measured macro environment continues to impact customer decision-making, and we are still seeing elongated sales cycles, additional deal approval layers, and deal compression in our subscription and support and professional services businesses. These factors are incorporated in our guidance.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

Let's start with fiscal year 2024. On revenue, we are raising our guidance to $34.7 billion-$34.8 billion, representing 11% growth year over year in both nominal and constant currency. The increase is driven by strength in our subscription and support revenue, particularly in MuleSoft. We are accelerating our transformation to profitable growth. For fiscal year 2024, we are pleased to raise non-GAAP operating margin guidance to 30%, representing a 750 basis point improvement year over year.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

As Mark highlighted, we're in a new AI era, a new innovation cycle that we will continue to invest into as we have over the last decade. As a result, we expect nonlinear quarterly margins in the back half of this year, driven by investment timing, specifically in AI-focused R&D. We also remain focused on stock-based compensation and expect it to improve this year to slightly above 8% as a percent of revenue.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

As a result of these updates, we now expect fiscal year 2024 GAAP diluted EPS of $3.50-$3.52, including estimated charges for the restructuring of $1.11. Non-GAAP diluted EPS is now expected to be $8.04-$8.06. We are raising our fiscal year 2024 operating cash flow growth guidance to approximately 22%-23%.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

This continues to include a 14-16 point headwind from restructuring. As a reminder, we expect to see an increase in our cash taxes in fiscal year 2024 as we draw down our remaining net operating losses. We expect an even greater cash tax headwind next fiscal year as we draw down our remaining tax credit carryforward. CapEx for the fiscal year is expected to be slightly below 2.5% of revenue.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

This results in free cash flow growth of approximately 24%-25% for the fiscal year. Now to guidance for Q3. On revenue, we expect $8.7 billion-$8.72 billion, growth of approximately 11% or 10% in constant currency. CRPO growth for Q3 is expected to be slightly above 11% year-over-year in nominal and slightly above 10% in constant currency.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

We continue to expect professional services headwinds of approximately 1 point to CRPO growth. As a reminder, Q3 is the first full quarter we've lapped the measured buying environment that we first began to see in July last year. While we expect bookings growth to begin to normalize, CRPO will continue to be materially impacted by the cumulative effect of the previous 5 quarters of measured sales performance.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

For Q3, we expect GAAP EPS of $1.02-$1.03, and non-GAAP EPS of $2.05-$2.06. As we focus on shareholder return and disciplined capital allocations, we continue to expect to fully offset our stock-based compensation dilution through our share repurchases in fiscal year 2024. In closing, I want to thank our shareholders for their continued support.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

As we laid out to you two quarters ago, we have radically accelerated our transformation to profitable growth. We've maintained our disciplined approach to cost management while continuing to make strategic investments, notably in our new data and AI capabilities. Finally, I hope you're able to attend Dreamforce, whether in person or virtually, to hear the latest on the incredible AI innovation our team is delivering. As Mark said, it's going to be the AI event of the year. Now, Mike, let's open up the call for questions.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Thanks, Amy. Emma, we'll move to Q&A portion of our call now. Out of respect for others on the call, we ask everyone to ask only one question. Emma, please.

[Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce]

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, press star, followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from the line of Kash Rangan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

[Kash Rangan, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Hi, thank you very much. The team has done a spectacular job doing a soft landing, not to use an overused term, with respect to the economy, its cost controls, operating discipline, et cetera. So really, congratulations on that, and I hope that Dreamforce continues to stay in San Francisco, Mark. A question for you is, we got all this tremendous new product excitement.

[Kash Rangan, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

We got Generative AI capabilities. The spending environment seems to be sort of stabilizing. The economy does have a soft landing. Do you think Salesforce has maximized its customer wallet share, or do you think there's more share to gain and therefore, there are better days ahead? Because we've seen the margin story play out very, very impressively. Can Salesforce get back to the days of growth?

[Kash Rangan, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Not hypergrowth, but is there enough room in the market, enough customer wallet share, and seemingly there's enough product excitement with Generative AI. So if we net it all out, can we still do a nice job with margins while still having a shot at growing even faster when economic conditions are no longer a constraint? Thank you so much, and congratulations.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Oh, Kash, thanks so much, and we're looking forward to seeing you at Dreamforce. We're really excited, and I think you're going to be super excited when you see these new AI products. And when we talk about growth, I think it's going to start with great AI.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

You know, I think that AI is about to, to really ignite a buying revolution. I think we've already started to see that with our customers and even some of these new companies like OpenAI, and we certainly see that in our customer base as well. I think you also know we've definitely seen in the last several quarters, a measured buying environment.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

That's also been true, not just at Salesforce, but I think for the vast majority of our peers that you follow, and I think that you've also called that out a number of times, and I certainly expect that to abate, you know, as especially as customers begin to adopt these new AI technologies and understand they need to invest and grow to be able to achieve this kind of next level of productivity.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Now, all that said, we've also seen this amazing growth in a number of our core technologies and our products, and I would especially like to call out the incredible success of MuleSoft over the last several quarters, because that is a product that has far exceeded our expectations, especially, and including several of our geographies as well.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

So this is not something that is quite permeated everywhere, but there are some isolated areas. And I really think that Dreamforce is gonna become a catalyst for our customers to see this opportunity to grow with us, to see these new products, these new technologies. Data Cloud is just one example of many new areas that Salesforce investments can happen with customers.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And I'm sure that as they start to reignite their IT buying budgets in this kind of post-pandemic hangover that's kind of occurred, I think as we kind of get to this next level, we're gonna see it driven by artificial intelligence. Brian, what's your perspective?

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

Yeah, Kash, thanks for the question. I think we've outlined in previous calls a growth strategy. It's a three-pronged, one around expanding our multi-cloud customers. And with new technology like AI and Data Cloud, there's a huge opportunity for us to go back to our customers and expand the number of clouds that they're using, a big growth opportunity to drive more value for our customers and certainly more success for us as well.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

International acceleration continues a big opportunity for us, and we think there's plenty of room to run in the international markets. We're gonna continue to focus our efforts there and make investments as we see appropriate. Obviously, we, we'd love to see the economy turn a bit.

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

And then finally, on industries, you heard me say 8 of our industry clouds grew at greater than 50% in the quarter. It's remarkable the impact we're having with our industry products. So deeper investments in industries as well will continue to propel the growth of this business.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I think I would be remiss if I didn't call on Ariel Kelman, who's sitting here at the table with us, to talk about Dreamforce, and to also talk about a number of the incredible new technologies that are appearing. So, Ariel, can you give us a little bit of an insight to what we're gonna see and some of these catalysts for maybe the next level of growth for Salesforce that are gonna occur?

[Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce]

Yeah, we're very excited about next week's Dreamforce conference. Hopefully, all of you can join us. As Mark said, it's gonna be the biggest AI event of the year. We have a tremendous lineup of speakers, both some of the most technical companies and the technical speakers of those companies, and people to help the broader business community understand what they can do with AI all across our Customer 360 range of products.

[Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce]

We're gonna have sessions for sales people, for marketing people, for customer service people, to really teach them and inspire them on how they can use AI to really advance their capabilities with the technology we've built directly in our product in the flow of work, so they can take advantage of it immediately.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Ariel, you've been back now for what has it been? A couple months now, one month? How long has it been?

[Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce]

It has been since the beginning of June, so about three months.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Three months. So tell us, what's been your biggest surprise being back at Salesforce? What-

[Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce]

My biggest surprise is that the energy of all the people here is, in some ways, you know, just as inspiring and energizing as it was when I was here 12 years ago, that this passion about the mission we're on and the high standards for the technology that we build is really, you know, has been very, very refreshing from having been at some other companies.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, we were sorry to lose you to Amazon and then to Oracle, but we're happy to have you back here, so welcome back.

[Ariel Kelman, President and CMO at Salesforce]

Thank you.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Okay, Michael. Thanks, Kash. Emma, we'll take the next question, please.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Keith Weiss with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

[Keith Weiss, Managing Director, Equity Research at Morgan Stanley]

Hey. Excellent. Thank you guys for taking the question, and I echo Kash's congratulations on a solid quarter, particularly on the margin side of the equation, where you guys really outperformed expectations. My question is around kind of margins on a go-forward basis. You achieved your targets well ahead of plan, three quarters ahead of plan, as you guys stated. But there's also a big opportunity ahead, and Mark, you've talked a lot about this transformational opportunity ahead with generative AI.

[Keith Weiss, Managing Director, Equity Research at Morgan Stanley]

So how should we be thinking about the balance between investing for that Generative AI opportunity versus further kind of margin gains on a go-forward basis, into the back half of this year and potentially into, into next year, as you guys balance these two opportunities and goals?

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, I really would like to just directly address that, which is, you know, what you're really speaking to is this incredible opportunity ahead, and Generative AI is really that opportunity, but also many other opportunities, including data. I really think that there are some unbelievable opportunities ahead.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It's gonna be incredible to see what we're gonna be able to do, and I think that the question is, exactly as you said, at how much are we gonna really unleash the fundamental growth of the company against commitments that we have made to our investors to continue to deliver profitable growth? I think that at the very fundamental level, starting with our Investor Day last Dreamforce, we told you that we were committed to profitable growth, and now you can see that we were serious. It wasn't a joke. We did a number of things.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We curtailed things. We made changes structurally to the company, short-term and long-term issues, and we're still doing things, by the way, to do that. At the same time, we see this incredible opportunity that's out in the industry, new companies that are emerging, as well as, of course, all kinds of unusual, public company, dislocations. So we're watching all of those things, but number one is gonna be our commitment to you.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Nothing is more important than the trust that we have with our investors. Number two is we, we are very thirsty to make sure that Salesforce is the number one AI CRM, and we have done a lot organically to do that in the last six months. Of course, there's things out there that we could do to help us with inorganic as well. We're looking at those things.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We're looking at everything, but nothing is gonna ever trump the trust that we have with all of you.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

Yeah. Keith, I would just add, you know, when we did the restructuring, it was never just for the bottom line. We also made changes so that we'd have the resources to invest into the areas that we believe are going to drive the highest growth for the company. You know, we've been very disciplined in our approach to spending this quarter, but, you know, we want to lean into these opportunities, especially around AI, around data, and around our core.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

And as a result, you will see that our increase in guidance to 30% does imply slightly nonlinear progression this year. And, you know, in terms of the future, as we look forward, you know, underscore everything Mark said about our commitments, and as I said last time, I really believe 30% annually is a floor, not a ceiling.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Thanks, Keith. Emma, we'll take the next question, please.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Kirk Materne with Evercore. Your line is open.

[Kirk Materne, Analyst at Evercore]

Yeah, thanks very much. I guess, Amy, I've had a lot of questions just on the impact of the pricing actions that you all announced earlier this or over the summer. You know, how that if that had any impact on the quarter, and then, you know, how are you thinking about that in terms of the guidance for the back half of this year? Thanks.

[Amy Weaver, President and CFO at Salesforce]

Great, thanks for the question. So on guidance for this year, I have taken into account the pricing uplift, as well as any changes from our new or opportunities around AI. I will say that neither has a significant influence on our guidance for this year. I think that those opportunities really take a while to roll through our customer base, particularly on pricing, as we look to renewal. Brian, anything else you would like to add?

[Brian Millham, President and COO at Salesforce]

No, exactly that. We're gonna see the impact of our price increase really hit the customer base over the next 1 to 2 to 3 years. So no big material change in this fiscal year. Appreciate the question, Kirk.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Thanks, Kirk. Emma, next question, please.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Karl Keirstead with UBS. Your line is open.

[Karl Keirstead, Analyst at UBS]

Thanks. Maybe to Marc and/or Amy, with headcount down 11% now, and as you talked about, Marc, welcoming back former employees, do you feel like you've right-sized the headcount now at this 70,000 level? Has it sort of bottomed? And if you feel like there's an opportunity for it to stabilize or start growing again, is that a signal, Marc, that you feel like your growth rate here at 11% this year is at or near a bottom? Thanks so much.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, I think it's such a great question, and something the management team is talking about every single day, because we are continuing to grow and invest in our headcount, especially in AI. Also, I think I mentioned we are doing so much incredible innovation work in our core, and we've commanded our engineering teams to accelerate their work in moving all of our acquisitions into our core, especially our marketing products and commerce products and Data Cloud, all of which we plan to show you at Dreamforce and to accelerate that work, and that's extremely important to us.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And also, Brian has a number of products and geographies that are growing, and we've also commanded him to invest in his growth. So we are continuing to grow our headcount, but we are also facing normalized attrition. Of course, with headcount, that's also part of it.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

So as those both of those things get rebalanced, you'll continue to see our headcount adjust and move forward. I don't know if we can call this as a bottom exactly yet, or if it's a, you know, we're not planning any other major restructuring efforts in the company today, like what we saw earlier this year. We hope that that is one and done and behind us.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Thanks, Karl. Emma, we'll take the next question.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Brad Sills with Bank of America Securities. Your line is open.

[Brad Sills, Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst at Bank of America Securities]

Oh, wonderful. Thank you so much. I wanted to ask another question here on AI. The opportunities here are just so exciting across the stack, you know, with Sales GPT, you've highlighted, you know, content, automation, call summaries, sales assistance, Service GPT, auto replies, you know, summaries on, and scheduling. Just when you look across the Salesforce stack, where do you see the most opportunity here, you know, across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and the core, based on the activity that you're seeing, today from customers with the early release of the product?

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, thank you so much for that. You know, let me just say, we're at the beginning of, you know, quite a ball game here and, you know, you know, we're really looking at the evolution of artificial intelligence in a broad way, and you're really gonna see it take place over 4 major zones. The first major zone is what's played out in the last decade, which has been predictive.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

That's been amazing. That's why Salesforce will deliver about 1 trillion transactions on Einstein this week. It's incredible. These are mostly predictive transactions, but we're moving rapidly into the second zone that we all know as Generative AI, and these GPT products, which we've now released to our customers.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We're very excited about the speed of our engineering organization and technology organization, our product organization, and their ability to deliver customer value. With generative AI, we have tremendous AI expertise, led by an incredible AI research team. And this idea that we're kind of now in a generative zone means that that's zone number two. But, as you're gonna see at Dreamforce, zone number three is opening up with autonomous and with agent-based systems as well.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

This will be another level of growth and another level of innovation that we haven't really seen unfold yet from a lot of companies, and that's an area that we are excited to do a lot of innovation and growth and help our customers in all those areas. And then we're eventually gonna move into AGI, and that will be the fourth area.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And I think as we move through these four zones, CRM will become more important to our customers than ever before because you're gonna be able to get more automation, more intelligence, more productivity, more capabilities, more augmentation of your employees, as I mentioned. And you're right, you know, we're gonna see a wide variety of case capabilities, exactly like you said, whether it's the call summaries and account overviews, and deal insights, and insight summaries, and in-product assistance or mobile work briefings.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

I mean, when I look at things like service, you know, when we see the amount of case deflection we can do and productivity enhancements with our service teams, not just in replies and answers, but also in summaries and summarizations.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We've seen how that works with generative and how important that is, and knowledge generation and convert, you know, auto-responding conversations. And then we're gonna have, you know, the ability for our customers to... With our product, we have an open system. We're not, you know, we're not dictating that they have to use any one of these AI systems. We have an ecosystem.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Of course, we have our own models and our own technology that we have given to our customers, but we're also investing in all of these companies, and we plan to be able to offer them as opportunities for those customers as well, and they'll be able to deliver all kinds of things. And you'll see that, whether it's gonna end up being contract digitization and clause generation, or survey generators, or all kinds of campaign assistance.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Most recently, in our world tour in London, we showed how our Data Cloud did automatic marketing segmentation. That was incredible. You're gonna see a lot more that's gonna happen in all of these things. A lot of it you can see happening in Slack. Slack has become incredible for these AI companies. Every AI company that we've met with is a Slack company.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

All of them make their agents available for Slack first. We saw that, for example, with Anthropic, where Claude really appeared first and Claude 2 first in Slack. Then Anthropic, as a company, uses Slack internally, and they have a—they take their technology and develop news digests every day and newsletters, and they do incredible things with Slack, because Slack is just a treasure trove of information for artificial intelligence.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

You'll see us deliver all kinds of new capabilities in Slack along these lines. We're, you know, working, as I've mentioned, get Slack to wake up and become more aware, and also for Slack to be able to do all, all of the things that I just mentioned. One of the most exciting things I think you're gonna see at Dreamforce is Slack very much as a vision for the front end of all of our core products.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

We're gonna show you an incredible new capability that we call Slack Sales Elevate, which is promoting, you know, our sales core, Sales Cloud system running right inside Slack. That's gonna be amazing, and we're gonna also see how we're gonna release and deliver all of our core services in Salesforce through Slack.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

This is very important for our company to deliver Slack very much as a tremendous, tremendous, easy-to-use interface on the core Salesforce, but also all these AI systems. So all of that is that next generation of artificial intelligence capability, and I'm really excited to show all of that to you at Dreamforce, as well as Data Cloud as well.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Thanks, Brad. Emma, we'll take the next question now, please.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Brad Zelnick—I mean, of Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.

[Brad Zelnick, Managing Director, Senior US Software Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Great. Thanks very much, and congrats in particular to Amy and the whole team on overachieving on profitability. My question, Mark, is for you. I wanted to drill down at the Data Cloud, 'cause the things we keep hearing from partners suggest that the interest level just keeps building and building. Can you talk about the pipeline and scope of these projects, and how this generative AI moment is impacting the opportunity? And why Salesforce is well-positioned as the partner of choice, especially in the context of trust?

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, especially as we've said on the call as well, which is that we've said this is about AI, this is about data, this is about CRM, and this is about trust. Those four things have to come together as one thing, and that's what we call Salesforce. That's a modern version of Salesforce, is AI plus data plus CRM plus trust. And I think that is really a moment that we have to, like, really get clear and show that to customers. We've tried to really book the last, you know, six months.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Obviously, we're going through a huge transformation with all of you, but you can see we've also gone through an incredible technology transformation around artificial intelligence, to the point where we got these products out, was awesome, and let our customers really get into it and see what they can and cannot do, and what they're excited about, and how they wanna move these products forward, and what we think is gonna be the future of AI.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

It's these four things together that are gonna fundamentally help us. I think Data Cloud, you're 100% right, is gonna be the heart of it. Well, certainly, it's a huge revenue opportunity for us because, as you heard from Brian, customers who have Sales Cloud, and they've got Service Cloud, and they've got Marketing Cloud, and they're using our platform.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Maybe they have Commerce Cloud, you know, as well, and now they're adding Data Cloud. And as these clouds get stacked with these customers, attrition falls, customers become more successful, they develop a single source of truth. And our job is to get all of these things running on our core and getting all these things ignited with artificial intelligence. So I was very excited to recruit back, you know, as my Chief of Staff and as my Chief Business Officer, Kendall Collins.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

So Kendall, can you just give us a little insight into the vision of Dreamforce and what we're gonna see for Data Cloud and some of these amazing clouds, and why everyone should get excited about what's about to happen over the next couple of weeks when everyone gets here into San Francisco on September 12th?

[Kendall Collins, Chief Business Officer & Chief of Staff to Marc Benioff at Salesforce]

Yeah, Mark, it's great to be back. It's been about four months, and just amazing to see the energy of Salesforce. You know, a company with the right values, and I think the right people, and really the right time with generative. You know, what you said about AI is so compelling because it's not just about one cloud, it's about making every cloud better. Seeing that with Sales GPT, Marketing GPT, Commerce GPT went live last week, and Dreamforce is gonna be exciting.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, I'm really excited as well, and I'll tell you, you're sitting next to Sabastian Niles, our new Chief Legal Officer, just joined us from Wachtell. Sebastian, we're happy to have you here live for the first earnings call, and welcome to Salesforce. I know this is gonna be your first Dreamforce and, you know, give us a vision of what you're excited about for the future.

[Sebastian Niles, President & CLO at Salesforce]

I'd say whether it's Dreamforce or sort of looking ahead, what I've been most excited about is how our values, trust, customer success, innovation, equality, sustainability, are truly infused within our culture. And that these values, they're powering our customer journeys, they're powering our commitment to our investors, they're powering our commitment to all stakeholders.

[Sebastian Niles, President & CLO at Salesforce]

And I think certainly as we look ahead, whether it's in the next, you know, several months, the next several years, the next ten years, you know, and beyond, you know, it's these values that are going to underlie how AI evolves and how, you know, at least for sophisticated enterprises, and I think for all enterprises and even individual human beings, they will choose to partner with the companies and organizations who are putting trust first, and are deploying and incorporating trust throughout the technology lifecycle.

[Sebastian Niles, President & CLO at Salesforce]

Whether that's design of technology, deployment of technology, development, service, and monitoring, and I could not be more excited by what I see ahead.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, I couldn't be more excited to have you on our new management team and kind of the evolution of our team here at Salesforce. You know, thank you for all the help that you've given us also in the last six months, especially with all of our investors. Michael?

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Okay. Thanks, Brad. Emma, we'll take our last question now, please.

[Operator]

Your question comes from Brent Thill with Jefferies. Your line is open.

[Brent Thill, Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Jefferies]

Mark, 12% CRPO growth the last 2 quarters, with AI billing into the model, do you believe long term you can re-accelerate this to a 15%-20% growth business?

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Well, I'll tell you, that's certainly on my mind every single day. And you know, you're right, you know, I'm a growth CEO, so that's what I like to do. I like to grow. I mean, that's been about growing margins for the last six months, so that's a reframe for me. But, you know, we've grown this business to these incredible revenue numbers this year, the third largest software company in the world.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

And, you know, as we kind of head into these incredible next levels of capability, I'm very excited about the future. And, you know, there's lots and lots of ways to move the top line forward. But I'll tell you, now I am quite addicted to the bottom line as well.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Also, as I said earlier, there's nothing more important than the trust that I have with all of our stakeholders, including our investors. So I want to make sure that we fulfill all our commitments and promises to all of you, just as we have in the last three earnings calls. We've delivered exactly as we've told you we are gonna do, and we're gonna continue to do that.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

At the same time, you know that I am thinking about how are we gonna move this ball forward and down the field with these incredible opportunities in front of us. So it's very much has to be a balanced equation to make this right, to make it right for, for us, and to make it right for you. And I'd love to have that conversation in more depth in the next couple of weeks.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

As we all come to Dreamforce, I hope you'll seek me out and find me, and let's have that conversation, one-on-one, just as we have been having the last six months. I want to do what I've been doing for the last couple of quarters, which is to express my sincere gratitude to all of you, and our investors have been a critical part. You've had key insights, many of which we did not have ourselves, on things that we could do to make us an even stronger company. And we've done that. I'm sure you can see that in the numbers. There's never been a software company quite like this at this level.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Even now, as we start to cross into these incredible numbers in the mid-$30 billion numbers, you know, the strength of the company has never been higher, and now we have this incredible opportunity with AI, AI ahead.

[Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO at Salesforce]

Thanks, Brent, and thanks everyone for joining us today. We look forward to seeing everyone, hopefully, at Dreamforce in a few weeks.

[Operator]

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.

Participants

Executives

• Amy Weaver, President and CFO
• Ariel Kelman, President and CMO
• Brian Millham, President and COO
• Kendall Collins, Chief Business Officer & Chief of Staff to Marc Benioff
• Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO
• Mike Spencer, EVP of Investor Relations
• Sebastian Niles, President & CLO

Analysts

• Brad Sills, Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst at Bank of America Securities
• Brad Zelnick, Managing Director, Senior US Software Analyst at Deutsche Bank
• Brent Thill, Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Jefferies
• Karl Keirstead, Analyst at UBS
• Kash Rangan, Senior Equity Research Analyst at Goldman Sachs
• Keith Weiss, Managing Director, Equity Research at Morgan Stanley
• Kirk Materne, Analyst at Evercore