Salesforce announced a fiscal 2030 revenue target of over $63 billion during its Dreamforce event, exceeding analyst consensus expectations of $59.2 billion according to LSEG polling. The announcement marked a significant recovery for the enterprise software company, which had faced substantial headwinds earlier in the year stemming from concerns about artificial intelligence disrupting its business model.
The company’s fortunes shifted notably following strong earnings results released the previous month. Those results included a $2.6 billion gain on strategic investments from the company’s stake in Anthropic, and Salesforce announced Claudeforce, a tool enabling organizations to access Salesforce data through Anthropic’s Claude AI model. The stock responded dramatically, climbing nearly 23 percent—its best performance since 2020. Salesforce also revealed it had recruited two executives returning from OpenAI to bolster its artificial intelligence capabilities.
At the conference, CEO Marc Benioff assembled prominent figures from across the AI industry, including Sam Altman from OpenAI, Dario Amodei from Anthropic, and Jensen Huang from Nvidia. Salesforce unveiled Koa, a new AI reasoning model based on Nvidia technology, alongside custom dashboards incorporating Salesforce data accessible through Claude. Patrick Stokes, president of applications and marketing, reported that up to 1,000 clients had enrolled in the beta program. Additionally, Slack, the communication platform Salesforce acquired for $27.1 billion in 2021, has evolved into a central hub for AI agent communications, according to Alexa Vignone, the company’s president and chief revenue officer.
The company benefited from favorable share pricing in recent months. Salesforce accumulated $60 billion in cumulative share buybacks, taking advantage of depressed valuations. The stock closed the day of the announcement above $250. Benioff indicated the company intended to eventually monetize its substantial Anthropic holdings, which he suggested could be worth tens of billions of dollars, and use proceeds to retire accelerated share repurchase debt.
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