💃 Salesforce 2026Q1 (FY2027Q1) Earnings Call 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! If earnings calls were a cooking competition, Salesforce just plated a Wagyu steak with truffle butter 🥩... and the judges responded with "nice, but what's for dessert?" 😬

The stock was down 32% YTD going into the call 📉. Marc and team delivered a double beat, record cash flow, and a $25 billion buyback. The stock dropped another 1.4% afterhours 📉.

All of your Salesforce 2026Q1 (FY2027Q1) Earnings Call highlights wrapped into a 4 minute burrito 🌯.

THE NUMBERS

Salesforce FY2025Q1 Earnings

Revenue | $11.13 billion actual vs $11.05 billion expected, a 13% YoY increase (12% constant currency). ✅

Earnings | $3.88 per share vs $3.13 expected, a jaw-dropping 50% YoY increase 💪.

That's a double beat 🥊, double-digits on both lines, for the second quarter in a row 💥!

📈 Agentforce ARR surpassed $1.2 billion, up 205% YoY.

📈 Operating margin hit 34.8%, up 250 basis points.

📈 CRPO clocked in at $33.6 billion, up 13% constant currency.

📈 They raised FY27 revenue guidance to $45.9-46.2 billion.

But... full-year guidance came in slightly below Wall Street's whisper number. And that is why the stock dipped after hours despite the best earnings print in company history 🫠.

They cooked the perfect steak and the judges docked them for the garnish 🤷🏻.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Investors No Likey 📉

So the earnings are objectively good, right? Then why is the market dumping them?

🤖 Agentforce 

Agentforce ARR crossed $1.2 billion, with 28.6 trillion tokens processed. This is a critical line-item because Salesforce is a bit of a bellwether for Enterprise AI out in the wild.

And whether it cannibalized seat revenue is secondary to it being an effective AI solution. Because if it’s effective, it will earn back the license revenue and way beyond. Salesforce is actually quite brave to be on the vanguard of this.

But, even if AI sales did improve by 205%, there is still no compelling success story that it is significantly moving the needle for Salesforce customers. PenFed’s CEO joined the podcast earnings call to tout that Agentforce saved them $1.6M in after-call effort (AI call summaries…🙄).

As well, the Salesforce professional community is not impressed as referenced here, here, and here.

Long story short, investors want to see AI move the needle in a meaningful way, and it just hasn’t.

💰 Share Buyback

This was an interesting play and basically a Salesforce waving a flag to investors that “Hey, we are so confident in our growth that we are investing $25 billion in ourselves, expecting that investment to grow along with investment you make in us!”

It’s a solid strategy to build trust with investors, and put some money in their pockets. By buying the dip, and being in the driver’s seat, Salesforce can make a nice return by betting on numero uno, while enriching their investors. Win win!

Unfortunately, to date, investors have treated it more as a red flag than a money flag. And this perspective aligns exactly with what we said last quarter about stuffing shareholder pockets versus investing in, for example, tighter Slack integrations, data normalization tools for AI, and one-click-webhooks 🙏.

🚀 Slack

Slack drove nearly half of all million-dollar-plus wins, up 80% YoY. Marc proudly declared Slack is on a path to becoming a $10 billion cloud.

It is looking more and more like a good acquisition, it just took more time to cook than investors liked.

Also, it is one (of many…more on this, below) options to be the dedicated Salesforce UX/UI of the future.

OFF WITH ITS HEAD!

Headless Salesforce

The biggest buzzword of the call wasn't "Agentforce" (though Marc tried @ 47 times). It was "Headless 360."

For the uninitiated, Headless 360 is Salesforce exposing its entire platform via MCP servers, meaning any AI coding agent, Slackbot, or 3rd party app can tap into Salesforce without ever logging into the UI 😲.

Think of it this way - Salesforce spent 25 years building the best restaurant ever. Headless 360 rips the walls off and lets every delivery service, food truck, and catering company cook with your ingredients.

Patrick Stokes made the case that this expands the addressable market. Miguel Milano dropped a spicy example - Anthropic, one of Salesforce's biggest Sales Cloud customers, saw usage explode 5x once they started accessing CRM from outside the app.

Random fun fact they dropped on the call - Salesforce has the most used set of APIs on the planet, according to Postman.

Back to the kitchen 🍳 - the investor question is whether ripping the walls off makes the restaurant more valuable, or if everyone just starts cooking at home.

Marc's bet? More cooks, more orders, more revenue.

Wall Street's verdict is still out 💁.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes