Salesforce will report second-quarter earnings on Wednesday afternoon amid the most uncertainty it has faced since its earliest days. Although the stock has rallied in the past month-rising 41% from its June low-it's still down 41% from its all-time high at the end of 2024.
Wall Street analysts are projecting $3.27 in adjusted earnings per share, rising from $2.91 a year ago. Sales are expected to be $11.3 billion, up 11% from last year.
The customer-relationship-management software giant is one of the central companies in the artificial-intelligence software apocalypse narrative. Beginning last year, investors began selling off enterprise software stocks on the idea that much of what they do will be replaced by AI agents that can write software code and execute complex series of tasks from simple conversational commands. The conventional wisdom became that cloud software's user-based subscription pricing-which comes with a very high gross margin-couldn't survive the disruption. The selloff accelerated in the first half of this year.
For the second quarter, analysts expect Salesforce' adjusted gross margin to remain over 80%.
Salesforce was once a disruptive force in enterprise software, but as it has matured its revenue growth has steadily declined. Despite the summer rally, the stock still trades at only 14 times forward earnings, well below the S&P 500 index's price/earnings ratio of 20, and it has been that way since July 2025. Before that, the stock had always traded at a valuation premium to the index.
Now Salesforce is trying to hold back the AI tide in the only way it can: by disrupting itself before someone else does. The company has upended its subscription pricing for more of a hybrid model that includes consumption-based pricing that typically comes with a lower gross margin. In a bold move, it has released a "headless" version of its software that is meant for agents-not people-to operate. This makes it easier for agents from other vendors like Anthropic to supplant human users.
The company is also selling its own agent software under the Agentforce banner. Annual recurring revenue for the product was still modest, at over $1 billion, when Salesforce reported its first-quarter results three months ago, but that's more than doubled over the previous nine months.
The company has also made 15 acquisitions in the past 15 months. The largest is Informatica at an $8 billion valuation, which brought data tools that Salesforce thinks will become crucial as companies implement AI with their own corporate data. The most recent was in June, the $3.6 billion acquisition of Fin, which brings AI customer-service agents under the Salesforce' umbrella.
No other company is disrupting itself more for AI than Salesforce. But that doesn't guarantee long-term success; it's the bare minimum for any sort of future success.
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