Salesforce (CRM) Bets Its Next Chapter On An Unlikely AI Marriage

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM ) spent its fiscal 2027 second quarter proving a point it has been arguing for months: that artificial intelligence is expanding its business rather than replacing it. The company used its August 26 earnings call to unveil Claudeforce, a joint product with Anthropic that layers Claude's reasoning on top of Salesforce's customer data, while posting numbers that gave management fresh ammunition against the idea that AI agents make traditional software obsolete.

A Platform Leaning Into Agents Instead Of Losing To Them

The headline metric was Agentforce annual recurring revenue crossing $1.5 billion, up more than 240% year over year, with AI and data ARR nearing $3.9 billion after growing over 210%. That growth showed up in usage too. Customers generated 3.2 billion Agentic Work Units in the quarter, a 97% jump from the prior quarter, and agentic activity through Model Context Protocol and Claude calls surged sixfold as customers moved past standard software interfaces.

Slackbot became the company's fastest adopted AI product ever, reaching 1 million active users just five months after launch and growing 150% quarter over quarter. Current remaining performance obligation climbed 14% in constant currency to $33.5 billion, a point ahead of guidance, while net new annual order value growth hit its strongest level in four years. Bookings from the premium Agentforce 1 Edition and Agentforce for Apps bundles more than doubled from the prior quarter, and contract terms lengthened across every segment.

On the data side, the Data 360 platform ingested 104 trillion records, up 355% year over year, with Zero Copy architecture usage climbing 731%. Nine of the top 10 AI companies now run on Salesforce and Slack, and their combined spending rose 435% year over year, a detail management used to argue that frontier AI firms depend on CRM infrastructure rather than displacing it. Free cash flow reached $1.1 billion, up 81% year over year, and the U.S. Army expanded its contract to potentially drive up to 55 million monthly Agentforce conversations.

Not every line told a clean growth story. Non-GAAP operating margin actually slipped slightly to 34.1% from 34.3% a year earlier, even as revenue and earnings per share climbed. Overall revenue growth remained a comparatively modest 11%, and management pointed to continued volatility in licensed revenue within its integration and analytics segments, even as Slack and Agentforce carried the results. The raised full-year guidance also comes with an asterisk. Of the $300 million constant currency increase to fiscal 2027 revenue guidance, only $100 million reflects organic momentum, while $200 million depends on the anticipated closings of the Contentful and Fin acquisitions in the coming weeks, deals that have not yet closed.