Salesforce Just Forced a 22% Repricing of the AI Software Scare
Salesforce just put a $200 billion software name into a single-day move most day traders never see.
Shares of Salesforce (CRM) closed up about 22.5% on Thursday after the company beat the quarter, raised the year, and showed Wall Street that AI is already paying rent inside the CRM stack. Revenue landed near $11.35 billion, up about 11% year over year. Adjusted earnings came in at $5.90 a share.
That EPS number needs a honest split. Roughly $2.6 billion of the beat came from a paper gain on Salesforce's stake in Anthropic. Strip the investment windfall and you still clear the Street on the core business. Investors bought both stories at once.
The part that is not a paper gain
Agentforce annual recurring revenue topped $1.5 billion, up more than 240% year over year. Combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR hit nearly $3.9 billion. Current remaining performance obligations climbed to $33.5 billion, with growth accelerating to about 14%. That is the fastest bookings pace Salesforce has shown in years.
Management also expanded the Anthropic partnership under a product push called Claudeforce. Claude becomes a default reasoning model across Agentforce and Slackbot. Sellers get Salesforce data skills inside Claude. The market has spent a year worrying AI would hollow out software. Thursday's tape said the opposite can be true when the software company owns the customer record and plugs the model in.
What Wall Street still has to prove
Full-year revenue guidance moved to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion. Third-quarter sales guide sits above consensus too. Bears will keep arguing that a one-day 20% jump prices in a lot of perfection, and that investment gains are not the same as durable software profit. Bulls will keep pointing at Agentforce growth and the fact that nine of the ten big AI companies already sit inside Salesforce and Slack.
As for me, I care less about the Anthropic mark-to-market and more about whether enterprise buyers keep expanding seats because the AI layer actually closes work. A double-digit day on a company this size only sticks if the product story outruns the multiple.
Bottom line: Salesforce just forced the market to reprice the idea that AI kills software, and the lasting trade depends on Agentforce staying a real revenue engine after the headline fade.
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