Salesforce raises AI growth outlook, Marc Benioff regains dignity

For most of the year, sales force CEO Marc Benioff has heard that his company could be wiped out by AI. He always gets ridiculed when someone asks about it.

“This is not our first SaaSpocalypse,” Benioff said during an earnings call in February. “We’ve been through a lot of surpocalypses.”

These comments come after the company’s stock price fell 21% last year, a trend that continued through much of 2026 as Salesforce and the rest of its software division underperformed the broader market. and human and OpenAI The rapid deployment of a large number of artificial intelligence models and services for enterprises has increased concerns about the sustainability of traditional software.

But if this week is any indication, Wall Street may finally be coming back to Benioff’s side.

Salesforce stock rose about 23% on Thursday, its best day since 2020 and the second biggest gain since the company went public in 2004. The gains erased most of the stock’s losses this year, but it’s still down about 5%.

Investors were reacting to Beat and Raise Quarterly’s new partnership with Anthropic, called Claudeforce. This earnings release coincidentally came at a time when reports were surfacing that high-level OpenAI employees were joining the company.

Benioff said in a post on X last week that Kaylin Vos is returning to Salesforce just five months after serving as vice president of the Americas at OpenAI. Peter Doolan, who was with the company for about the same amount of time as global head of AI transformation, will also return.

OpenAI is in talks to bring back 22 former Salesforce employees, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

“Boomerang talent is celebrated as part of our culture,” a Salesforce spokesperson said in an emailed statement, but did not comment on the talent from OpenAI. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Salesforce announced in its earnings report Wednesday that sales for the quarter rose 11% from a year earlier, beating expectations. The current outlook is for growth of nearly 12% at the midpoint of the range, which is also slightly above expectations.

This is by no means runaway growth, and is pretty much in line with what Salesforce has been doing over the past four years. But the numbers were enough to allay some investors’ fears, especially as annual revenue from Salesforce’s Agentforce AI product soared 240% year over year to more than $1.5 billion.

“This SaaSpocalypse story is so much nonsense,” Benioff told CNBC’s Jim Cramer after the company reported its results. “The Frontier model relies on CRM. It is not a replacement for CRM.”

Salesforce’s revenue directly benefits from AI, and the company recorded a $2.6 billion return on its three-year investment in Anthropic. That number could rise even further as Anthropic moves toward a long-awaited initial public offering.

Benioff’s overarching message to investors centered on the scale and power of the company’s software, which Salesforce says is used by more than 150,000 enterprise customers, and that it’s unthinkable that customers would decide to scrap it and use AI to build their own services for customer relationship management and other critical functions.

During this week’s earnings call, Benioff revealed that he invited David Friedberg, CEO of biotech startup O’Haro, to spend the weekend doing some vibe coding on the CRM tool.

“You can see right away how much time it takes to do maintenance, account creation and security,” said Friedberg, best known as co-host of the podcast “All-In.” “We already use Slack. We’re not going to vibecode Slack. We’re not going to vibecode CRM.”

Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce for about $28 billion, is already integrated with Claude and will now work even more closely with it as part of its Anthropic partnership this week. According to Salesforce, Claudeforce gives users a plugin with 37 pre-built sales skills to help Claude compose emails, update records, and perform other related actions.

“I think this is the way all enterprise systems will operate in the future,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told CNBC as part of a joint interview with Benioff.

This is also the first time Salesforce has added the “force” suffix to the end of a third-party product name.

Arjun Bhatia, an analyst at William Blair who recommends buying Salesforce stock, said investors who turned negative or eliminated exposure to cloud software companies due to concerns about AI are starting to return.

“I think there were a lot of AI geeks of some sort,” Bhatia said, adding that the sentiment shows “there are only two companies in the world that will be around in the next five years: OpenAI and Anthropic.”

Mr. Bhatia was moved by Mr. Amodei’s remarks.

“Anthropic is basically saying, ‘Look, we still need Salesforce,'” he said.

Bhatia said investors now see Salesforce’s revenue growth opportunities increasing from low double digits and margins expanding.

“Can we get to 15%?” he said. “I think that’s very likely.”

His peers are less bullish on the short term. Analysts on average expect growth to be 11% this fiscal year, falling to 10% over the next two years, according to LSEG.

Michael Monaghan, partner and portfolio manager at Founders ETF, remains a believer in Benioff, who turns 62 in September.

“As long as he wants to continue to show up every day, I’m confident he’s going to do well,” Monaghan said.

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