Salesforce Reaccelerates Growth as AI Momentum Gains

Salesforce's deputy CFO and head of finance Mike Spencer discussed the company's second-quarter performance at Deutsche Bank's technology conference. He highlighted several key indicators, including current remaining performance obligations and net-new annual contract value bookings, which exceeded expectations and supported the outlook for reacceleration in the second half of the fiscal year.

Spencer also talked about Salesforce's expanded commercial partnership with Anthropic, branded 'Claudeforce', which provides integrations and prebuilt skills connecting Claude with Salesforce products. He mentioned that customer feedback through advisory boards helped shape the Claudeforce offering, as customers increasingly want flexibility in how they work with AI.

Spencer emphasized that Salesforce's AI strategy is dependent on a broad data and infrastructure layer, which includes Informatica, Data Cloud, Data 360, MuleSoft, and Tableau. He also mentioned that the company plans to showcase AI capabilities across Slackbot, Claudeforce, and recently acquired products at Dreamforce.

Regarding Agentforce, Spencer said Salesforce has taken a 'crawl, walk, run' approach to adoption, with customers increasingly moving from pilots to production deployments. He noted that roughly 50% of recent Agentforce bookings came from customers 'refilling the tank' of agentic work units, and that the AOV of those customers has been rising rapidly.