Salesforce Q2 Growth Slips But New AI Products Plus Big Anthropic Deal Point to Future Acceleration

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze Salesforce’s latest results and why Dreamforce could be critical for proving its AI opportunity is here now. Highlights 00:03 — Salesforce yesterday released its Q2 results, and I'd say that while there's some very good things in there, it's a little bit of a mixed bag relative to what some other companies in its category are doing. But let's take a look at this because I think the big, the big news here, aside from the numbers, is Salesforce announced a huge new partnership with Anthropic. 00:41 — Customers will be able to tap into the power of Anthropic reasoning with their Salesforce applications and agents and data. So I think that offers a lot of potential for the future. But some of the key numbers here: we saw Salesforce revenue go up 11% for Q2, ended July 31. That's $11.3 billion relative to Q1. 01:30 — Its AI and data products—starting to break those out—said they now have an annualized revenue run rate of about $3.85 billion, almost $3.9 billion. It said that's up 210%, and then for Agentforce, annualized run rate of almost $1.5 billion, it said that's up 240%, and this, that. 02:43 — Combine that with the incredible presence of Salesforce applications and agents all over the world, all sorts of businesses. Bring those together. I'm sure for Anthropic, this is great too, as they aspire to become an enterprise powerhouse. The Salesforce partnership and connection here gives them entrée to some huge customers and huge opportunities. 04:21 — It's got to step up the urgency on that, and I think the deal with Anthropic is going to be just the medicine that's needed here for Salesforce. Got a detailed article that'll go into this on CloudWars.com, and we'll be following up more next week with the analysis of what Marc Benioff and others talked about on the earnings call. Visit Cloud Wars for more.