According to CRN, Salesforce reported third-quarter revenue of $10.3 billion, an 8% year-over-year increase, with subscription and support revenue hitting $9.7 billion. CEO Marc Benioff directly addressed and dismissed what he called a “false narrative” that large language models jeopardize the company’s core SaaS business. Instead, the company highlighted explosive growth in its AI products, with Agentforce’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) alone quadrupling to over $500 million and total ARR for Agentforce and Data 360 reaching nearly $1.4 billion. The company now has over 9,500 paid Agentforce deals and processed a staggering 3.2 trillion tokens. Salesforce also raised its full-year revenue guidance to between $41.45 billion and $41.55 billion, and its stock rose about 2% in after-hours trading following the earnings call.
Benioff’s Big AI Pivot
Here’s the thing: Benioff isn’t just defending his turf; he’s aggressively redefining it. The entire earnings call was a masterclass in shifting the narrative from defense to offense. It’s not about AI *replacing* Salesforce; it’s about AI *multiplying* the value and monetization of Salesforce. And the numbers they’re throwing around are hard to ignore. When a CRO like Miguel Milano says average order values are increasing up to fivefold and monetization opportunities are multiplying fourfold, they’re telling a very specific story to Wall Street: our old business is the foundation for a much, much bigger one.
They’re framing this as the dawn of the “agentic enterprise,” and they want to be the operating system for it. It’s a smart play. Instead of letting startups chip away at their CRM dominance with point AI solutions, Salesforce is bundling AI deeply into its entire platform and selling it as a transformative journey. The bet is that their decades of accumulated customer data and workflows—what they call the “data foundation”—is their unassailable moat. Basically, any generic AI can write an email, but only Salesforce’s AI, with your company’s entire historical context, can supposedly run your sales or service department.
The Monetization Playbook
But how do you sell this? The most fascinating part might be their flexible pricing strategy. They’re offering fixed-cost “Agentic Enterprise Licensing Agreements” (AELAs), seat-based plans, pay-per-conversation models, and flex credits. This isn’t an accident. They’re trying to catch every possible customer mindset—from the CFO who wants predictable costs to the innovator who wants to experiment. Selling 16 of those multimillion-dollar AELAs in a quarter, with 100 in the pipeline, shows serious enterprise appetite for a all-in, budgetable AI transformation.
And let’s talk about those new markets: IT Service Management (ITSM) and Life Sciences. Going after ServiceNow and Veeva is a declaration of war. Benioff’s comment about customers buying from competitors and “never deploying them” is a classic Salesforce dig—they’re selling not just software, but the promise of actual adoption and value. If they can leverage their existing sales muscle and platform to disrupt these adjacent, lucrative markets, their total addressable market just got a lot bigger. It’s a land-and-expand strategy on steroids.
The Partner Ecosystem Angle
Now, none of this happens in a vacuum. A key point, somewhat buried, is their reliance on a massive partner network—over 16,000 strong—including giants like Accenture and Deloitte. This is crucial. You can’t sell a “agentic enterprise” transformation with just a software license; it requires huge consulting, integration, and change management work. Salesforce is smartly positioning itself as the platform, while the system integrators do the heavy lifting of implementation. This co-sell motion is what turns a pipe dream into a pipeline, and Milano said they’ve “never seen a pipe gen quarter like we did in Q3.” That’s the ecosystem firing on all cylinders.
So, Is The Narrative Really False?
Benioff is probably right, for now. The idea that AI would simply evaporate the need for structured SaaS platforms like Salesforce was always a bit naive. Real businesses run on reliable processes and governed data, not just chat prompts. Salesforce is arguing, convincingly with these results, that AI is the ultimate feature add-on, not a replacement. It makes their platform stickier and more valuable.
But the long-term question remains: as AI gets smarter and more autonomous, does the center of gravity stay with the data platform (Salesforce) or shift to the AI model itself? Salesforce is betting everything on the former. This quarter suggests their customers are buying it, literally. The narrative isn’t false for Salesforce today. But the race to own the “agentic enterprise” is just getting started, and everyone from Microsoft to startups is lining up. The pressure is on to keep delivering those mind-boggling token stats and revenue multipliers.
