Marc Benioff wants Wall Street to drop the idea that AI is about to eat enterprise software. “This SaaSpocalypse narrative has been such nonsense,” the Salesforce CEO told Jim Cramer on CNBC’s “Mad Money” after Wednesday’s earnings. “Frontier models depend on CRM. They don’t replace it.”
The quarter gave him room to talk. According to Salesforce’s results, second-quarter revenue rose 11% to $11.35 billion, current remaining performance obligations grew 14% in constant currency, and the company raised its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion. Benioff also cited the strongest growth in net new annual order value in four years, with attrition near record lows, Benzinga reported. Shares jumped more than 12% after hours, after falling 22% this year through Wednesday’s close.
The AI numbers
Agentforce annual recurring revenue topped $1.5 billion, up more than 240% from a year earlier, a figure that now includes Slackbot and Headless 360. Combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR reached nearly $3.9 billion, up more than 210%. Customers ran 3.2 billion “agentic work units” in the quarter, up 97% from the prior quarter.
Benioff’s sharpest point was about who’s buying. He said nine of the 10 leading AI companies use Salesforce and Slack, and that their spending on the platforms is up 435% from a year ago. In other words, the companies supposedly making SaaS obsolete are paying more for it.
Claudeforce
Salesforce and Anthropic also unveiled Claudeforce on Wednesday, a plugin that lets salespeople use Claude to pull customer data from Salesforce and handle tasks such as drafting emails and updating records. Benioff called it the “number one AI” paired with the “number one CRM,” and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNBC the integration is “bigger than the sum of its parts.”
That’s the argument in miniature. Models like Claude still need the customer records, business context and workflows that live in systems like Salesforce. “Salesforce is first and foremost in the data business,” Benioff said. “These AI models need this level of intelligence, security and controls for users.”
Earlier this year, investors feared that capable AI models would let companies do the same work with fewer software subscriptions, or build their own tools, undercutting per-seat pricing across the industry. One strong quarter doesn’t settle that debate. Still, Salesforce’s results suggest that, at least for now, agents are adding to demand for the data platforms underneath them.
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