Salesforce Inc. delivered mixed financial results and mixed guidance for the coming quarter, but its stock moved higher in late trading thanks to some encouraging progress from its agentic artificial intelligence initiatives.

The company reported third-quarter earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of $3.25 per share, crushing the analyst consensus estimate of just $2.86, but it came up short in terms of revenue. Sales for the period came to $10.26 billion, up just 8.6% from a year earlier and just shy of the $10.27 billion forecast.

Profitability increased, though, with Salesforce reporting a net income of $2.09 billion in the quarter, up from $1.53 billion in the year-ago period. Its bottom line was boosted slightly by a $263 million gain from “strategic investments,” the company said.

Salesforce was once the epitome of Wall Street darlings, benefiting from an unprecedented duration of high sales growth that saw it consistently deliver impressive revenue from its founding in 1999 to the end of 2022. Not once during that stretch did its growth rate fall below 20%.

However, the company’s industry-leading customer relationship management platform has saturated the market to the extent that such growth is now no longer possible, and its growth consequently slowed from 2023 onward. In fiscal 2025, it generated growth of just 8.7%, and it has only been able to show similar gains so far this year.

The company has also been caught up in the maelstrom of AI, which threatens to break its stranglehold on the CRM market. To counter this, Salesforce has gone all in on AI itself, pushing fleets of AI agents that can automate complex tasks onto its own customer base. The promise of these agents is that they’ll be able to automate mundane, routine business tasks and increase productivity.

Agentic AI adoption grows

But the challenge for Salesforce is that it’s not at all easy to persuade enterprise customers to invest in such products, as many of them are extremely cautious about letting AI loose in their core computing systems, where they could potentially cause more harm than good.

Salesforce has been pretty open about the challenges it faces in persuading customers to embrace its AI offerings, particularly its Agentforce products, which provide tools for orchestrating fleets of prebuilt agents and also allow companies to develop their own, specialized AI assistants. The company said it has now booked $540 million in annual recurring revenue from Agentforce, up $100 million from the previous quarter. That’s encouraging, but at the same time, it represents less than 2% of the company’s forecast revenue for the next 12 months, illustrating that it still has a long way to go.

Analyst Rebecca Wettemann of Valoir told SiliconANGLE she thinks Salesforce has a better AI outlook than many of its peers, because it’s not asking them to do any of the “heavy lifting” with regard to building and managing AI agents. “Customers are gravitating to AI capabilities that are prebuilt, tested and tuned and delivered within and alongside business applications like CRM,” she explained.

Salesforce Chair and Chief Executive Marc Benioff (pictured) said Agentforce and its Data 360 platform have emerged as real growth drivers, achieving a combined $1.4 billion in ARR. “That’s an explosive 114% gain,” he said. “We now have over 9,500 paid Agentforce deals and 3.2 trillion tokens processed, underscoring our leadership in building the Agentic Enterprise and driving real outcomes.”

Wettemann said Salesforce’s agentic offerings are likely to get a boost from Slack and Slackbot. “This is where Salesforce’s AI story is heading, and we expect to hear more from the company about Slack as the original conversational interface and how employees can leverage Slackbot to help them work,” Wettemann said. “This augmentation story is a less scary message for customers than the replacement one.”

Salesforce might be in a good position with its agentic AI offerings, but that’s not going to do much for its immediate growth prospects, as its guidance for the current quarter indicates. The company said it’s looking for fourth-quarter earnings of between $3.02 and $3.04 per share, trailing the Street’s forecast of $3.04 per share, while it expects to hit between $11.13 billion and $11.23 billion in sales, above the $10.9 billion analyst consensus.

The guidance implies revenue growth of between 11% and 12%, which is an improvement on its recent performance. But about three of those percentage points are expected to come from Informatica, the data management company that it agreed to acquire for $8 billion in May. That acquisition finally closed last month.

Salesforce’s stock gained 2% in after-hours trading once investors digested the latest report, but it’s still down 26% in the year to date. The stock has badly underperformed compared to the broader technology industry this year, partly on concerns about its slowing growth and the prospect of disruption from AI.

Photo: Fortune Photo/Flickr