Dive Brief:
- Salesforce’s new agentic artificial intelligence product known as “Agentforce” has so far generated over 8,000 deals, the company said Wednesday.
- Agentforce is also now producing $100 million in annual order value, CEO Marc Benioff said during an earnings call.
- “It's much faster than any product in our history, and we are not even fully deployed on all geographies, currencies or languages,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Salesforce is among tech giants whose heavy AI spending is being closely watched by investors.
Microsoft expects to spend roughly $80 billion during the current fiscal year on AI-enabled data centers to train large language models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications, Microsoft President Brad Smith said in January. The tech giant remains on track to achieve this spending goal despite a recent pullback in AI data center projects, a spokesperson told CFO Dive in April.
In September, Salesforce’s venture capital division, Salesforce Ventures, announced a $500 million AI fund, which at the time marked a total commitment of $1 billion in the space over a period of 18 months.
That announcement came just days after Salesforce unveiled Agentforce, a suite of AI agents designed to perform workplace tasks. At the time, Benioff said the company was seeking to deploy one billion agents by the end of 2025.
In addition to generating over 8,000 deals, Agentforce has also handled over 750,000 requests on help.salesforce.com, cutting case volume by 7% year over year, the company said Wednesday.
“As a result, we have reduced some of our hiring needs, enabling us to rebalance and redeploy 500 customer support employees to higher impact data plus AI roles by year-end, driving $50 million in savings,” Salesforce Chief Operating and Financial Officer Robin Washington said during the Wednesday earnings call.
The enterprise software giant highlighted the Agentforce news as it also posted $9.8 billion in total revenues for its fiscal 2026 first quarter ended April 30, an increase of 8% compared with the year-earlier period.
Despite the revenue growth, the company’s stock fell more than 9% on Thursday.
Analysts at RBC Capital Markets on Thursday downgraded their rating for Salesforce, questioning the wisdom of the software giant’s Tuesday announcement that it agreed to buy cloud data management firm Informatica for about $8 billion.
“While we understand wanting to control the full stack at the data layer, we don’t know that it was mission-critical to own Informatica outright, especially with Informatica having integrations with Salesforce (including Agentforce),” the analysts said. “Furthermore, given many of Salesforce’s prior acquisitions have not been integrated, we believe this creates deal risk, not to mention the risk that Informatica becomes a distraction from Salesforce’s core business.”
The analysts also said they’ve heard from industry participants who are “mixed on Agentforce and whether the technology truly lives up to the marketing yet.”
