Salesforce shares rose 2.75% to $264 on Thursday following Snowflake's strong quarterly results. The cloud-data company reported 37% growth in product revenue, with artificial intelligence driving roughly half of the acceleration. Salesforce's second-quarter revenue increased 11% to $11.3 billion. Current remaining performance obligations climbed 14% to $33.5 billion. The company's Agentforce and Data 360 products generated nearly $3.9 billion in annual recurring revenue, including more than $1.5 billion from Agentforce. At $264, Salesforce trades 22% below its estimated fair value of $339. The combined AI and data run rate represents approximately 8.6% of annualised quarterly revenue. Snowflake's performance suggests enterprise AI spending is materialising, though Salesforce must demonstrate it can capture similar budgets.

Salesforce attributed its flat profit margin guidance to heavy spending on Anthropic's Claude AI model. Deputy CFO Mike Spencer told the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference that the company's operating margin is projected at 20.1% for the full year, down from 20.5% in Q2, due to Claude token costs. Spencer said Salesforce deployed Claude in its research and development cycle six months ago to accelerate product development. However, the company is now entering "refinement mode", selecting specific models for particular tasks rather than using the most advanced models for everything. The CRM giant is optimising costs across multiple AI providers, including OpenAI, Cursor, Claude, and testing X's Grok. CEO Marc Benioff previously disclosed expectations to spend $300 million with Anthropic in 2026.