February 26, 2026
AI Fears Cast a Shadow Over Salesforce’s Earnings Results
Despite strong financial results, expanding AI products and confident leadership messaging, investor anxiety around artificial intelligence continues to weigh on Salesforce. The company’s latest Q4 2026 earnings show momentum across revenue, product innovation and enterprise adoption. The market responded by dipping nearly four percent in pre-market trading, however, suggesting that enthusiasm for AI-driven growth remains stifled by uncertainty about its long-term impact.
Strong Numbers, Sceptical Markets
For fiscal year 2026, Salesforce reported revenue of $41.5 billion, up 10 per cent year over year. Fourth quarter revenue reached $11.2 billion, a 12 per cent annual increase. The company also issued guidance above analyst expectations and forecast fiscal 2027 revenue of between $45.8 billion and $46.2 billion, which represents a 10 to 11 percent increase from last year. Despite this relatively strong performance and forecast, share prices fell, with the stock already hovering around a three-year low.
Benioff’s Case for AI
Marc Benioff, Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce, sought to reassure investors, attributing AI to much of its sales revenue: “Our market is bigger than ever because not only selling apps, we’re selling apps and agents.” He went further, predicting a future in which every application will have its own AI agent, such as Slackbot, which he spoke about in glowing terms. This view aligns with a number of other industry leaders like Cisco’s President, Jeetu Patel,who wants AI agents to be treated like “digital co-workers”.
To this end, he also highlighted some of the positive figures surrounding its largest strategic bet, Agentforce, which has seen “incredible demand” and closed 29,000 deals in its first 15 months, while customers in production are up nearly 50 percent quarter-over-quarter. The platform for autonomous AI agents has directly benefitted from six acquisitions the company has made since November.
To measure real-world AI output, the CRM giant has introduced a new performance indicator. Patrick Stokes, Salesforce President and CEO, developed the ‘Agentic Work Unit’ metric to track completed AI tasks such as triggered workflows, decisions made and system calls executed.
AI agents on the platform have already delivered 2.4 billion Agentic Work Units, including 771 million in the fourth quarter alone. Benioff acknowledges it is still determining what these figures mean commercially, but sees them as evidence nevertheless that humans and AI are operating together at scale.
Enterprise adoption in Salesforce’s agent-driven transformation has accrued some big-name customers, including Amazon, Ford Motor Company, AT&T, Moderna, General Motors and Pfizer. Large deal activity also reinforces this momentum as contracts above $1 million rose 26 per cent year-over-year, while deals exceeding $10 million were up 33 percent.
Demonstrating his conviction in the company’s future, Benioff announced its $50 billion share repurchase programme, which he called “a great marketing opportunity and a great buying opportunity”.
‘SaaSpocalypse’ vs the ‘Saasquatch’
The Salesforce CEO also moved to dismiss fears of a software slowdown, joking: “If there is a SaaSpocalypse, I think it might be being eaten by the SaaSquatch”. He also reminded investors that “this is not our first SaaSpocalypse”. There was a “horrible” SaaSpocalypse in 2020, but “we made it through that”.
Benioff has been an adamant supporter of AI for some time, having claimed last year that that “AI is doing 30 to 50 percent of the work at Salesforce now”. More recently, he was open about AI productivity gains enabling the company’s latest round of layoffs.
Salesforce is not alone in facing AI-driven market tension. Similar investor caution has been visible around Adobe recently, alongside a paradox which has affected Five9 and many other technology companies of negative market reactions to seemingly positive results. Other businesses seem to be experiencing the equal and opposite market greed associate with AI, such as the market’s inexplicably jubilant reaction to RingCentral’s results last week.
AI Concerns Remain
Salesforce’s results and forward-looking guidance revealed a lot to be optimistic about. Despite Benioff’s best efforts to impart his vision of the company’s future with AI, the market revealed a more cautious sentiment.
AI promises productivity gains, but its scale and timing remain unclear. There are also broader questions of privacy, sovereignty, security, and employment disruptions that are still unresolved. Investors are no doubt aware of the host of issues that could arise under the strain of large-scale automation.
Salesforce is betting that AI will expand markets, transform work and drive long-term growth. Investors are evidently not entirely convinced, however. For everyone from customers and employees to executives and the wider technology sector, all we can say for sure is that the road ahead is unlikely to be smooth.
