Salesforce (CRM) shares jumped 22.6 percent on Aug. 27 following strong fiscal second quarter results for the period ended July 31, 2026. The software company reported revenue of $11.35 billion, an 11 percent increase year over year, hitting the high end of its guidance range. The result topped the $11.32 billion consensus.
Adjusted earnings per share more than doubled to $5.90, crushing the $3.27 consensus. The reported EPS included a $2.6 billion gain from strategic investments, primarily its stake in Anthropic. Excluding that one-time benefit, adjusted EPS was approximately $3.43—still above forecasts. Subscription and support revenue rose 12 percent to $10.82 billion.
Agentforce, Salesforce's flagship AI agent platform, drove the results. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) surged over 240 percent to $1.5 billion. Combined with Slack, the platform saw revenue increase 43 percent. Data 360, formerly Data Cloud, tripled ARR to $2.4 billion, with Informatica's contribution adding $1.1 billion in ARR, meaning organic growth exceeded 60 percent. The combined ARR from Agentforce and Data 360 climbed 210 percent year over year to $3.9 billion.
Slackbot, Slack's AI product, became its fastest-adopted offering, achieving 150 percent sequential growth to 1 million active users within five months of launch. Nine of the 10 largest AI companies use Salesforce and Slack, with their spending increasing 435 percent year over year. Salesforce also introduced Claudeforce, a plug-in leveraging Anthropic's Claude for reasoning and agentic tool use, designed to boost sales productivity within the Salesforce ecosystem.
The company raised full-year revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, up from $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion. It maintained its adjusted operating margin target at 34.3 percent. For fiscal Q3, Salesforce projects revenue to increase 11 percent to 12 percent, targeting $11.42 billion to $11.5 billion, and adjusted EPS of $3.42 to $3.44. Both projections exceed consensus expectations.
At approximately $252 following the earnings pop, CRM remains down year to date. The stock's trajectory supports a $265 price target. Current remaining performance obligations (cRPO) increased 14 percent on a constant currency basis, signaling strong revenue visibility. The results directly refute the "SaaSpocalypse" thesis—the fear that AI will displace the software layer—that has pressured SaaS multiples. Salesforce's AI-driven growth shows the company is not being disrupted but is becoming the infrastructure layer on which enterprise AI runs.
