Salesforce surges! Is the “software doomsday” over? Q3 guidance exceeds expectations, expands cooperation with Anthropic | Financial Report Insights

Salesforce delivered an impressive quarterly report and announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with Anthropic, restoring investor confidence in its competitiveness in the era of artificial intelligence.

Salesforce released its results for fiscal quarter two of 2027, with revenue at $11.35 billion, up 11% year-over-year, in line with market expectations; GAAP net profit at $3.53 billion, up 87% year-over-year; adjusted EPS at $5.90, far above expectations.

Guidance for the third quarter is revenue between $11.42 billion and $11.5 billion, slightly higher than the market average expectation of $11.41 billion. Full-year revenue forecast was raised by $200 million to the range of $46.1–46.4 billion. Current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) reached $33.5 billion, beating market expectations.

Chief Financial and Operating Officer Robin Washington stated in the earnings release that the growth rate of net new annual order value (NNAOV) was the strongest in the past four years, and the company is expected to accelerate its organic revenue growth in the second half of the year.

At the same time, the company announced the launch of "Claudeforce" in collaboration with Anthropic, deeply integrating Salesforce’s product suite with Claude.

Boosted by strong performance and partnership news, Salesforce’s stock price surged as much as 14% after hours, previously closing at $205.62. The share underwent a notable pullback earlier this year, but as of Wednesday’s close, the monthly cumulative increase had reached 26%, showing a clear recovery in investor sentiment.

Salesforce reported revenue of $11.35 billion for the second quarter, an 11% year-over-year increase, including a $456 million contribution from Informatica.

Adjusted EPS was $5.90, well above the FactSet analyst consensus of $3.27; GAAP EPS was $4.29, more than double the $1.96 from the same period last year.

The key indicator reflecting future revenue trend—current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) reached $33.5 billion, up 14% year-over-year and outpacing analyst consensus growth of 13%.

Third quarter revenue guidance is in the range of $11.42 billion to $11.5 billion, slightly above Wall Street’s average estimate of $11.41 billion, with cRPO growth expected to remain around 14%.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff described this quarter as one of the company’s best ever, highlighting AI as the core driver.

"AI is creating value at every level of our platform, and we are seeing strong demand for our AI and data products."

He stated that the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) from AI products is about to cross the $4 billion threshold.

Based on strong business momentum, Salesforce raised its full-year revenue guidance to $46.1 to $46.4 billion from the previous range of $45.9 to $46.2 billion, representing a year-on-year increase of about 11% to 12%. Full-year adjusted EPS guidance was also raised significantly to the range of $16.67 to $16.71, up sharply from the previous $14.06 to $14.12.

The $200 million increase in revenue guidance includes about $100 million from organic growth, around $200 million combined from the pending Contentful and Fin acquisitions, and a roughly $100 million offset from unfavorable exchange rates. Salesforce expects both acquisitions to close independently in the third quarter of this fiscal year.

The company also maintained its guidance for year-on-year growth in operating cash flow and free cash flow of about 4% to 5%, and expects the $2.5 billion accelerated share repurchase plan to achieve final settlement by October 2026.

Salesforce also announced an expanded strategic partnership with Anthropic, launching "Claudeforce" to deeply integrate Claude’s reasoning capabilities with Salesforce’s enterprise-grade data, workflow, and governance systems.

The first deliverable of the partnership is the "Salesforce in Claude" plugin, which comes with 37 pre-set sales skills co-developed by both companies. It covers scenarios such as meeting preparation, transaction health review, and pipeline assessment, allowing salespeople to retrieve real-time customer information and perform actions directly in the Claude interface.

The plugin is currently available to select pilot customers and is expected to enter public testing in September this year.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said:

"Through this partnership, companies can point Claude to decades of customer information and business context accumulated in Salesforce, and truly run and grow their businesses on it."

From a business logic perspective, Mike Spencer, the Salesforce executive responsible for finance, said in an interview that when customers access Salesforce data via Claude, both parties will generate consumption bills. This integration is expected to drive Salesforce customers to upgrade to higher-tier subscription plans.

In terms of mutual adoption, both sides are strategic customers of each other—Claude is now the default AI model for Slack, and Salesforce has achieved about 8.1 million hours of productivity gains per year via Slackbot, more than doubling quarter over quarter.

Salesforce’s core AI products, Agentforce and Data 360, had a combined ARR close to $3.9 billion in the second quarter, up more than 210% year-over-year.

Among them, Agentforce’s ARR surpassed $1.5 billion, up more than 240% year-over-year, higher than the $1.2 billion reported in the previous quarter.

In terms of usage, cumulative Agentic Work Units (AWU) processed by Agentforce and the Slack platform have reached 7 billion to date, with 3.2 billion completed in the second quarter alone, representing a 97% increase quarter-over-quarter.

Slack also realized its fastest quarterly NNAOV growth since acquisition, with Slackbot users up more than 150% quarter-over-quarter.

Additionally, Salesforce ingested 104 trillion data items this quarter through Data 360, a 355% increase year-over-year, of which 82 trillion were processed via Zero Copy, up 731% year-over-year.