Salesforce Eases AI Fears With Strong Outlook and Big Buybacks

Brody Ford

Fri, February 27, 2026 at 12:36 AM GMT+9 3 min read

In this article:

CRM

+2.45%

(Bloomberg) – Salesforce Inc. gave a strong outlook for long-term sales and announced a large share buyback, helping assuage some of Wall Street’s fears about AI disruption of the software industry.

“We’re well on our way” to $63 billion in annual revenue in fiscal year 2030, Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said Wednesday in a statement. Wall Street was expecting $60.3 billion. The company also announced a new $50 billion stock buyback program and increased its quarterly dividend to 44 cents per share.

Most Read from Bloomberg

LA’s Bankrupt ‘Graffiti Towers’ Finds Buyer for $470 Million

An Insurance Expert Appraises the Safety Record of Self-Driving Cars

Oslo Rebuilds Its Government Quarter with a New Focus: Openness

New Tax Proposal Takes Aim at Thailand’s Salty Food Obsession

Salesforce, the leading maker of customer management software, has become a poster child for Wall Street anxieties about the impact of AI on established vendors. The company’s shares have dropped sharply over the past 12 months as investors fear that AI will make it easier to build competing products and reduce Salesforce’s pricing leverage.

“People think SaaS is dead, which really isn’t the case,” Executive Vice President Mike Spencer said in an interview, referring to software as a service. “We don’t see that in customer commitments,” he said, adding that the company had record bookings.

Revenue will be about $46 billion in the fiscal year ending in January 2027, the company said. The forecast was in line with the analysts’ estimates. Salesforce said it expects “organic growth re-acceleration” in the second half of the year.

Salesforce shares climbed as much as 3.9% after trading got underway in New York on Thursday. The earnings results initially drew a poor reaction from investors. Salesforce “delivered a good, not great F4Q, and in line FY27 guide so seeing a ‘meh’ reaction in the pre-market seems about right,” wrote Kirk Materne, an analyst at Evercore ISI.

WATCH: Market turmoil unleashed by AI advances points up two seemingly contradictory fears about the tech: that it won’t fulfill its very expensive promise and that it will swallow up vulnerable industries.Bloomberg

Salesforce has been trumpeting its AI tool called Agentforce that can complete tasks such as sales development and customer service without human supervision. Annual recurring revenue for that product passed $800 million in the fiscal fourth quarter, up from $500 million in the preceding period, the company said in the statement.

Benioff said recent products the company has launched targeting IT service management and life sciences are attracting major customers from competitors including ServiceNow Inc. and Veeva Systems Inc.

Sales increased 12% to $11.2 billion in the three months ended Jan. 31. While that marked Salesforce’s most rapid revenue expansion in years, the growth rate was boosted with $399 million in sales from the recently completed acquisition of data software company Informatica.

Story Continues  

Revenue for the company’s two largest product lines — sales and service — increased 8% and 7%, respectively, when adjusting for currency fluctuations. Each was just short of Wall Street estimates. Earnings, excluding some items, were $3.81 a share, topping estimates.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

How Covid Quietly Rewires the Brain

Indian Desserts Are Ready for Their Matcha Moment

America’s Love of Ube Is Straining Supplies in the Philippines

Claude Code and the Great Productivity Panic of 2026

Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling Is Secretly a Gift to Trump

©2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Terms and Privacy Policy

Privacy Dashboard

More Info