Salesforce CEO Benioff dismisses 'SaaSpocalypse' as AI spending jumps 435%

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Salesforce posted $11.35 billion in Q2 revenue and unveiled a Claude-powered plugin for sales teams as stock climbed 12% after hours

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Salesforce $CRM reported second-quarter revenue of $11.35 billion on Wednesday, up 11% from a year earlier, and raised its full-year revenue guidance by $200 million, as the company also unveiled a new plugin integrating Anthropic's Claude chatbot with its customer data platform.

The company now expects fiscal 2027 revenue of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, raised from prior guidance of $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion issued in May, the company said. For the fiscal third quarter, Salesforce expects revenue of $11.42 billion to $11.50 billion. Analysts had anticipated $11.41 billion for the third quarter, according to CNBC.

Salesforce stock climbed more than 12% in after-hours trading Wednesday. The stock had been down 22% for the year through Wednesday's close.

Combined annual recurring revenue from Agentforce and Data Cloud AI products reached nearly $3.9 billion, reflecting growth of more than 210% from the prior year. Agentforce on its own surpassed $1.5 billion in ARR, a 240% year-over-year increase, the company said. Quarterly net income came in at $3.53 billion, against $1.89 billion in the same period last year, with the company attributing much of the gain to a $2.6 billion investment gain tied in part to its position in Anthropic.

Alongside the earnings release, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, a plugin that embeds Salesforce customer data, workflows, and business logic into Claude for sales teams. The plugin launches with 37 prebuilt sales skills covering tasks such as meeting preparation, deal health review, and pipeline management, the companies said. A select group of pilot customers have access now, with an open beta expected in September 2026.

The partnership extends beyond the plugin. Claude is now the default model for Slack $WORK, powering Slackbot and a new feature called Claude Tag for team decision-making. Claude is also available inside Agentforce through Amazon $AMZN Bedrock, keeping customer data within Salesforce's security boundary, the company said. Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei said in a statement that the integration allows companies to "point Claude at the customer information and business context that they've been building in Salesforce for decades."

Salesforce Chair and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff used the results to push back on fears that AI would undermine traditional software subscriptions. "This SaaSpocalypse narrative has been such nonsense," Benioff said on CNBC's Mad Money on Wednesday. He said nine of the top 10 AI companies are Salesforce and Slack customers, and that those companies have increased their spending on the platforms by 435% over the past year. "Frontier models depend on CRM. They don't replace it," Benioff added.

Benioff had previously signaled the depth of the Anthropic relationship. Salesforce was on track to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026, with software coding as the primary use case, according to an earlier report on remarks Benioff made on the All-In podcast. Salesforce also holds an equity stake in Anthropic, and the two companies said they are strategic customers of each other: Salesforce uses Claude across its engineering organization, while Anthropic uses Salesforce as its preferred CRM and Slack as its preferred internal collaboration platform.

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