Salesforce Eyes Faster Growth as AI, Slack and Agentforce Gain Momentum

Key Points

• Salesforce reported stronger momentum, with second-quarter bookings exceeding expectations and supporting its goal of returning to faster organic growth in the second half of the fiscal year.
• The company is expanding its AI strategy through the Anthropic partnership “Claudeforce,” while integrating data assets including Informatica, Data Cloud, MuleSoft and Tableau to support enterprise AI deployments.
• Slack and Agentforce are gaining traction: Slack delivered strong double-digit growth, while Agentforce customers are increasingly moving from pilots to production and replenishing usage credits, driving higher contract values.

Salesforce NYSE: CRM Deputy CFO and Head of Finance Mike Spencer said the company’s second-quarter performance and updated outlook reflected several quarters of execution against its strategy, including its goal of returning to faster organic growth in the second half of the fiscal year.

Speaking at Deutsche Bank’s technology conference, Spencer said current remaining performance obligations and net-new annual contract value, or AOV, bookings were key indicators of momentum. He said second-quarter bookings exceeded the company’s expectations and supported the outlook for second-half reacceleration and longer-term fiscal 2028 goals.

AI Partnerships and Data Foundations

Spencer highlighted Salesforce’s expanded commercial partnership with Anthropic, branded “Claudeforce,” which is intended to provide Salesforce users with integrations and prebuilt skills connecting Claude with Salesforce products including Slack and the company’s core CRM tools.

He said Salesforce’s investment relationship with Anthropic is separate from its commercial partnership. The companies have worked together through Slackbot, which is powered by Anthropic, and Salesforce has also used Claude internally in research and development during the past six months.

According to Spencer, customer feedback through advisory boards helped shape the Claudeforce offering. He said customers increasingly want flexibility in how they work with AI, with some preferring interfaces such as Claude and others continuing to use traditional applications.

Spencer also described Salesforce’s AI strategy as dependent on a broad data and infrastructure layer. He said the company’s “data foundations” include Informatica, Data Cloud, Data 360, MuleSoft and Tableau, alongside external AI model providers. Informatica, acquired about a year earlier, has helped customers advance their AI strategies, he said.

Leadership Changes and Customer Adoption

Spencer said recent leadership and organizational changes were intentional and aligned with business priorities. He highlighted Alexa Vignone’s appointment as chief revenue officer, reporting to Miguel, and said Vignone is a highly regarded sales leader.

Miguel has also taken on responsibility for professional services, customer support and Salesforce’s builder motion, which Spencer compared with forward-deployed engineering, or FDE, teams. The company plans to place greater emphasis during the next 12 to 18 months on customer adoption and consumption of its products.

On the product side, Spencer said Steve Fisher retired and Salesforce hired Rohan Kumar from Microsoft to lead its platform business. Patrick Stokes moved into a role focused on the application side of the company’s product organization.

Spencer said customers need support as they navigate a rapidly evolving AI market. Salesforce currently has several types of customer-facing technical resources, including solution engineers, formal FDEs, professional services personnel and developers in customer success. The company is working to consolidate those capabilities into a more unified customer-adoption motion, he said.

Slack and Agentforce Momentum

Slack has become an increasingly important element of Salesforce’s AI and product strategy, Spencer said. He described Slackbot as an AI sidecar within Slack that can retrieve conversations, summarize information and prepare users for customer meetings using information available across Slack and Salesforce systems.

Spencer said Slack contributed significantly to record net-new AOV during the second quarter and has posted strong double-digit growth for several consecutive quarters. He added that more enterprise customers are willing to experiment with Slack even when they already use Microsoft Teams.

For Agentforce, Spencer said Salesforce has taken a “crawl, walk, run” approach to adoption. The company changed sales compensation plans about two years ago to place more emphasis on adoption rather than simply selling annual contract value, he said. Salesforce expects a more material shift in account-executive and account-manager behavior in fiscal 2028.

Customers are increasingly moving from pilots to production deployments, according to Spencer. He said roughly 50% of recent Agentforce bookings came from customers “refilling the tank” of agentic work units, and that the AOV of those customers has been rising rapidly.

Margins, Pricing and Long-Term Growth

Spencer said AI spending had been broadly neutral to Salesforce’s business over the past 12 to 15 months, as customers reprioritized budgets to experiment with large language models. Over time, however, he expects AI to become a tailwind as enterprises mature their strategies and deploy more AI products in production.

Salesforce is continuing to invest aggressively in AI, including R&D, talent, technology and acquisitions, he said. The company expects AI delivery costs to remain relatively neutral to gross margins through premium monetization, new product offerings, workflow optimization and selecting lower-cost models for tasks that do not require the latest models.

Sales and marketing efficiency represents another potential margin lever, Spencer said, particularly as self-service and consumption-based offerings expand. Salesforce has outlined a fiscal 2030 framework targeting a “Rule of 50,” combining revenue growth and margin performance.

The company is also experimenting with several contract and pricing structures: traditional annual commitments, all-you-can-eat agreements known as AELAs, and “Salesforce Commit” arrangements in which customers commit to spend over a multiyear period while choosing among seats, Flex Credits and consumption products.

While consumption pricing is expected to grow, Spencer said more than 95% of Salesforce revenue remains ratable today. He does not expect consumption to become a material share of the company’s overall revenue mix for another three to five years.

Looking toward Dreamforce, Spencer said Salesforce plans to showcase AI capabilities across Slackbot, Claudeforce and recently acquired products, while also featuring external technology leaders including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang.

About Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)

Salesforce, founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, is a global provider of cloud-based software focused on customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise applications. The company popularized the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for CRM and has built a broad portfolio of products designed to help organizations manage sales, service, marketing, commerce and analytics through a unified, cloud-first platform.

Core offerings include Sales Cloud for sales automation, Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing and engagement, and Commerce Cloud for e-commerce.

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