Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM, XETRA:FOO), the enterprise software group, delivered a comprehensive first-quarter earnings beat on Wednesday evening, with revenue and profits comfortably ahead of expectations
Yet the results did little to settle the deeper debate about whether the company can survive the AI revolution it is simultaneously trying to lead.
The stock was little changed in extended trading, a muted reaction that speaks to the weight of the narrative that has dragged Salesforce shares down roughly 33% in 2026, making it the worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year.
Total revenue came in at $11.13 billion, up 13% year on year, beating both the company's own guidance and the Street's $11.05 billion estimate. Pro forma earnings per share of $3.88 crushed the $3.13 consensus by 24%, helped by a lower share count following a $25 billion accelerated buyback programme.
The standout metric was Agentforce, Salesforce's agentic AI platform, which reached $1.2 billion in annualised recurring revenue, up 205% year on year and 50% quarter on quarter.
The company closed 98 deals worth more than $1 million in net new annual contract value, with half of all Agentforce and Data 360 bookings coming from existing customers.
Wedbush, which rates the stock 'outperform' with a $325 price target, described the quarter as an important step towards reaccelerating organic growth in the second half of the financial year.
The broker noted that data remains the core of Salesforce's business moat, with the platform processing 28.6 trillion tokens to date, up 152% quarter on quarter, while its Data 360 product ingested 52 trillion records.
The fear that has stalked Salesforce all year is this: investors worry that AI will hollow out the software-as-a-service business model Salesforce helped define.
When Anthropic launched plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent earlier this year, automating tasks such as contract review and compliance workflows, it triggered a sharp sell-off across enterprise software.
The concern was that if AI agents could perform tasks currently handled within Salesforce, the platform risked becoming a back-end data store rather than the system customers interact with directly.
Bank of America reinstated an 'underperform' rating and $160 target on the stock less than a fortnight before the results, calling the shift an AI-driven structural reset.
Yet the results suggest the doomsday scenario has not materialised, at least not yet. The argument from Salesforce's defenders is that enterprise customers want a unified platform integrating agents, actions, data and workflows, a structural advantage that pure-play AI model providers currently lack.
The irony is that one of the companies most frequently cited as an existential threat to Salesforce, Anthropic, is itself one of the platform's largest customers, with Wedbush noting that its usage increased fivefold in the quarter through Salesforce's headless 360 product.
The company raised the midpoint of its full-year revenue guidance to between $45.90 billion and $46.20 billion, broadly in line with consensus, while guiding for full-year earnings per share of $14.06 to $14.12, well above the $13.23 the market had expected.
For bulls, the numbers are persuasive: a 34.8% operating margin, rapid Agentforce adoption, and a valuation of just 12.6 times forward earnings that prices in far too much disruption risk.
For bears, the question remains whether Agentforce's consumption-based model can offset the structural pressure on traditional per-seat licensing quickly enough to matter.
It is early days, and the answer is genuinely uncertain. But Wednesday's results suggest reports of Salesforce's death have been considerably exaggerated.