Salesforce delivers Q3 numbers and bets the house on … what?
The News Yesterday, December 3, 2024, Salesforce reported its Q3 / 2025 numbers. The company reported a total GAAP revenue of $9.44B US, which is a year-over-year change of eight percent and also slightly above the guidance of up to $9.36B that it gave after Q2. In addition, Salesforce raised the lower end of its full year FY25 guidance by $100M to $37.8B. What is also visible is the continued focus on operative margin and operating cash flow, which are up by 280 basis points and 29 percent, respectively. These numbers exceeded ‘market expectations’, with the corresponding impact on the Salesforce share price. “We delivered another quarter of exceptional financial performance across revenue, margin, cash flow, and cRPO,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. “Agentforce, our complete AI system for enterprises built into the Salesforce Platform, is at the heart of a groundbreaking transformation. The rise of autonomous AI agents is revolutionizing global labor, reshaping how industries operate and scale. With Agentforce, we’re not just witnessing the future—we’re leading it, unleashing a new era of digital labor for every business and every industry.“ “We continue to drive disciplined profitable growth with third quarter GAAP operating margin of 20.0%, up 280 basis points year-over-year, and non-GAAP operating margin of 33.1%, up 190 basis points year-over-year,” said Amy Weaver, President and CFO of Salesforce. “To date, our total capital returns have surpassed $20 billion and we remain focused on driving shareholder value.” The Bigger Picture Salesforce has managed to become the biggest vendor of enterprise software in only 25 years. This is nothing short of amazing, especially, when considering that...Salesforce, Agentic AI, and You
Salesforce told us its agents were coming, and it was still a surprise when the agents arrived.If you’ve been conscious for the past year, you know how much news (or noise) there has been about artificial intelligence. Salesforce billed Dreamforce24 as “the largest AI event in the world.” It caught me a bit off guard when I heard Marc Benioff say it, but it probably shouldn’t have; Salesforce has invested heavily in AI for the past few years, ever since it introduced Salesforce Einstein (now Tableau CRM) in 2016. Its latest effort is Agentforce, and the company is really leaning into it.The topic of AI erputed in 2023 once ChatGPT was unleashed upon the general populace, and it’s only fair that a business would leverage the popularity of the topic. While 2024 seemed poised to be “the Year of the Copilot,” since a number of vendors introduced AI copilot apps—digital assistants that automate routine tasks—the fanfare was to be short-lived. Today, the talk is about agents, or agentic AI—AI that acts on its own to accomplish tasks and achieve goals, reaching into the knowledge stored in linked apps as necessary.Marc Benioff declared, “Agents are the third wave of AI.” It’s hard to argue against this. AI agents have great potential to increase productivity and customer satisfaction, and mark a leap forward in AI capabilities. Benioff stated that one of the goals of this year’s Dreamforce was to get 1,000 customers to deploy Agentforce, a goal which I believe they achieved. It’s too soon for there to be any tangible results that anybody can talk about, so we’ll have to...
Who’s in the driver’s seat – Human or Agent?
Oracle Cloud World is in the books, Dreamforce just wrapped up, Hubspot’s Inbound event is still on, and there is one key theme that overarches all three events. And no, it is not Larry Ellison getting all cozy with AWS (or Azure, for that matter). It is also not that his keynote was distinctly geeky, after some years of Oracle putting business solutions to the front. Or that Mark Benioff apparently tore up his keynote in the last moment. It is also not that Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan found that the sales process is broken and that customers know more about you as you about your customer. No, the theme is … drumroll … you will have guessed it … AI agents. Oracle’s Steve Miranda talked about them at length in a line of business context, while Larry focused on IT, security, and database-oriented agents. For Salesforce, agents are even more of a topic, dubbing Dreamforce the biggest AI event and Salesforce the most successful AI CRM – both technically right but probably somewhat short selling the full value of both. For Salesforce, the next big thing is Agentforce, it’s AI Agent platform. And Hubspot announced Breeze, its AI to power the customer platform, which, you guess it, includes agents. CEO Yamani Rangan talked about marketing, sales, and service agents. Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah then spent considerable time in his keynote, talking about agent.ai, Hubspots “professional network for AI agents”. What struck me watching all three keynotes – Ellison’s, Benioff’s and Shah’s – is the change from last year’s messaging to this year’s messaging. Last years it was...