Photo Credit: City of Indianapolis | Mayor’s Office /Flickr.com
Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) recently announced its third quarter results that beat the market expectations and sent the stock climbing 12%. According to a recent report, agentic AI is expected to reach $31 billion in 2024, with a potential to grow at 32% CAGR. Salesforce’s Agentforce offering is already reaping benefits from this growth.
Salesforce’s Financials
Salesforce’s revenues for the third quarter grew 8% to $9.44 billion, ahead of analyst estimates of $9.34 billion. Net income grew 25% to $1.5 billion. Adjusted earnings of $2.44 per share were also better than the market’s forecast of $2.41 per share.By segment, Subscription and support revenues grew 9% to $8.9 billion. Its current remaining performance obligations grew an impressive 30% to $26.4 billion. Professional services fell 2% to $0.5 billion.For the fourth quarter, Salesforce forecast revenues of $9.9-$10.1 billion and an EPS of $2.57-$2.62. The market was looking for revenues of $10.06 billion and an EPS of $2.65. It expects to end the year with revenues of $37.8-$38 billion and an EPS of $9.98-$10.03. Analysts were expecting revenues of $37.86 billion and an EPS of $10.09.
Salesforce’s AI Focus
Salesforce is seeing a strong demand for its AI chatbot offering Agentforce. Agentforce is a suite of autonomous AI agents that Salesforce made generally available to its customers in October. But since its launch, Agentforce has already been included in 200 deals in the quarter and has a big pipeline. Agentforce’s AI chatbots help customers with more than just data analysis and instant customer care. They can help companies scale teams quickly, meet key performance indicators, and identify and solve problems before they become major issues.Today, Salesforce has become a platform where AI agents are working alongside humans. The chatbots work more as collaborators instead of mere tools. Agentforce is seamlessly resolving issues, processing transactions, anticipating customer needs, thus allowing the employees to focus on strategic initiatives and building meaningful relationships.Unlike legacy chatbots that have handled basic tasks like password resets, Agentforce will take digital intelligence and operational efficiency to a new scale. The bots are seeing “remarkably low” hallucinogenic performance because they have been trained on Salesforce data and metadata, including the repository of 740,000 documents in 17 languages along with each customer’s data.Salesforce spoke of some interesting use cases for Agentforce. For instance, smart home security provider Vivint is using Agentforce to create a digital support staff that autonomously provides support through their app and website and can troubleshoot a variety of issues across all their customer touchpoints. Vivint is also planning to utilize Agentforce to automate technician scheduling, payment requests, proactive issue resolution, and the use of device telemetry.Similarly, Adecco, a leading provider of talent solutions, is using Agentforce at scale to sort through millions of resumes, is working 24/7 to match candidates to opportunities proactively, and is also helping candidates refine their resumes to give them a better chance of securing their role.Another interesting use case is that of Agentforce at a nonprofit called College Possible, which matches eligible students with counselors to help them prepare for college. College Possible is leveraging Agentfoce to create a virtual counselor that had the data, the metadata, knew the students, and had the capabilities to deliver a highly personalized experience for students. Agentforce is leading the way to building a digital workforce.The market is very pleased with Salesforce’s AI engine. Its stock is trading at $361.38 with a market capitalization of $345.5 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $369 this week, and has recovered from the year low of $212.00 that it had fallen to in June.More By This Author:AI Unicorns: ClickUp Brings AI To Productivity Management
AI Unicorns: VAST Data Puts Unstructured Data In A Database
Cloud Stocks: Twilio Wants To Embed Ai Across All Its Offerings
