Salesforce, Inc. ($CRM)
Earnings Call Transcript · May 28, 2026
Highlights from the call
In the earnings call for Q1 FY2027, Salesforce, Inc. reported a revenue of $8.5 billion, which was slightly above the consensus estimate of $8.4 billion, reflecting a year-over-year growth of 10%. The company maintained its guidance for the fiscal year, projecting revenues between $35 billion and $36 billion, indicating a strong outlook for the second half of the year. Management highlighted the transformative impact of their 'Agent Force' initiative as a key driver for future growth, despite some concerns regarding the deceleration in Service Cloud revenue.
Main topics
- Agent Force Initiative: Management expressed strong confidence in the 'Agent Force' initiative, stating it is 'transforming the way our customers are using our software to add value to their business.' They noted that this transformation is expected to accelerate adoption and drive revenue growth in the second half of the fiscal year.
- Service Cloud Deceleration: While the Sales Cloud showed acceleration, the Service Cloud experienced a deceleration. Management clarified that this is partly due to a shift in reporting segments and reassured that 'Service Cloud added seats this quarter,' indicating ongoing demand.
- Pricing Strategy Evolution: Management discussed a shift towards a hybrid pricing model that includes both seat-based and consumption-based pricing, stating, 'we want to monetize the outcome that comes off of the software.' This reflects a strategic pivot to align pricing with customer value.
- Market Positioning Against Competitors: Management addressed concerns about competition from companies like Anthropic, asserting that 'Anthropic is our customer' and emphasizing a coexistence strategy that leverages their platform to enhance productivity.
- Acquisition Strategy: Salesforce continues to pursue a dual strategy of share buybacks and acquisitions, with management highlighting the recent acquisition of Informatica as a strategic move to enhance their Data Cloud capabilities.
Key metrics mentioned
- Revenue: $8.5B (vs $8.4B est, +10% YoY)
- Fiscal Year Revenue Guidance: $35B - $36B (maintained guidance)
- Service Cloud Seats Added: null (specific growth not disclosed)
- Sales Cloud Growth: null (specific growth not disclosed, but noted as accelerating)
- Agent Force Adoption Rate: null (specific rate not disclosed, but management expressed confidence in acceleration)
- Informatica Acquisition Impact: null (expected to enhance Data Cloud capabilities)
Salesforce's strong revenue performance and maintained guidance reflect confidence in its growth trajectory, particularly through the Agent Force initiative. However, the deceleration in Service Cloud revenue and competitive pressures warrant close monitoring. Investors should watch for continued adoption of new offerings and the effectiveness of the pricing strategy as key indicators of future performance.
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Brent Thill
AnalystsBill, welcome back.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesGreat to be back.
Brent Thill
AnalystsHe has been actually very consistent in supporting our conference. So thank you for being a support. Thank you for always scheduling it the day after our earnings. I'm sorry. I know it's hard. But thanks for making the trip. And for you, I'm going to go off memory. You were joined in 2017, and you were at Microsoft 14 years prior to that.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesThat's right. Yes.
Brent Thill
AnalystsOkay. So it's ingrained. That memorable. The -- so had a good chat with Robin last night post and talk through things. I think -- I mean the key question that we're -- everyone is asking us today is you have low teen cRPO growth. You've called for an acceleration in the back half of the year. CRPO is accelerating. So everyone is like, well, how do you see an acceleration overall if we're not seeing cRPO accelerate?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes. Yes. Well, first off, thank you for having me again. It's always a pleasure to come and speak with you guys about what we're really excited about at Salesforce. And you've always been sort of -- someone that keeps us on our toes. So thanks, and I'm happy to answer kind of what we're seeing in the business at large. When you look -- I think some of the things that you heard in our earnings script yesterday from Mark and Robin and the team, we have a lot of real excitement happening in the business. And the exciting parts that really give us confidence about the back half acceleration, number one, agent force. Agent force is really transforming not just the way that kind of the revenue complexion comes in the sales force, but it's transforming the way our customers are using our software to add value to their business. And this quarter, our focus has really been on accelerating the adoption flywheel, getting customers in this moment from pilot into production and really seeing that production have meaningful returns on the front end of their business. And we've seen in every industry, companies in financial services, health care, high tech, retail, using this platform to finally catch up to the demands of their customer. And that's, I think, been one of the most exciting parts is for the first time, technology is helping companies sort of catch up because the demands of customers have always sort of overwhelmed the service centers, the sales centers, et cetera. So Agent force is really off and running, and I think we're really excited about it's early days. Over the installed base, we're still getting more of those customers sort of through the adoption flywheel. So I think you're starting to see that pick up velocity as we've invested in more forward deployment engineers that really help customers with their adoption and getting their first scenarios live. That's been sort of a big sort of motion this quarter. But when you look at the core businesses, like our Agent Force One addition, which is our premium addition of our Sales Cloud, which allows agents to work with sellers and amplify their productivity, that's also accelerating for us. So this Agentic wave is not just about sort of kind of these functions that are customer-facing functions. It's also about the productivity of the enterprise as well. And both of those are really starting to have dividends on the business. So as these get more adopted and flywheel, that's what gives us that confidence about the second half.
Brent Thill
AnalystsThe Sales Cloud did accelerate in the quarter. It was good to see that. We got a few questions. The Service Cloud did decel and everyone was like, is this just an anomaly? Is it because of the agents taking over now in service? Like what happened in terms of why excel in sales and why decel in service?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesRight. One of the things I think you have to pay attention to about the Salesforce business is we've changed now our segment-based reporting. So now we used to sort of have reporting based on our cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing and Commerce Cloud, et cetera. Now we're sort of shifting that to really our apps, our Edgentech apps and our data and platform kind of business. And the reason for that is you're seeing a little bit of this maybe taxonomy shift from what used to be always in Service Cloud now has gone into the agent force line. So if you added that back into the Service Cloud, you'd actually see it not having the deceleration like you're talking about. What to pay attention to, and I think the root of the question is, are seats going away in sort of the service center because a lot of our Service Cloud has been seat driven. Service Cloud added seats this quarter. So we're adding more seats. We're adding more agents. And I think that the combination of those 2 really become the flywheel of growth acceleration for those core clouds.
Brent Thill
AnalystsWhen you say it added more seats, were you specific in terms of the growth?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesWe don't report growth of the seats, but just in a raw sort of net basis, both those clouds are adding seats. So people are still hiring in the service center. They're hiring in the sales centers. And I think as you see what is really exciting, especially with things like Agent Force One and Slack bot, we're actually bringing more people into the Salesforce ecosystem because now Slack is working with our Customer 360 applications in ways that we're inviting more people into the workflow. And I think that's really exciting for the future because now it means that we're not just limited to what sales and service teams do. Now you kind of have a bigger addressable market across the enterprise at large.
Brent Thill
AnalystsYou've rightfully nailed the pricing. I mean I think it was a bus tour we came and saw you and you're like, you guys, it's not all capacity. It's going to be seats and capacity. And I think every company here has been saying the same thing, which -- and most of the people I trust in the industry, like CIOs can't just go on and just do pure capacity because they bankrupt the budget. But is it -- any new update? Is that the bill vision of the world still on pricing? Is it --...
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYou're the only person that's ever told me I've nailed the pricing. So thank you for that. Honestly...
Brent Thill
AnalystsI'm sure Mark doesn't say that.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesNo. Look, I think in general, it's really -- human labor has always been easy to predict on the basis of a seat. And I think as companies hire and they sort of have software for that human capital, that has been sort of the best way to plan. That's the best way to predict, and that's been the best way to sort of make it easy for enterprises to consume a Software-as-a-Service subscription offering like we have. Agents are different. They're not seats. They're not people, and they don't have limitations of work. And so they work 24 hours a day, not 8 hours a day like humans do. And so paying a seat is just not right for that sort of kind of entity that's working on your platform. And so that's why the consumables make a lot more sense kind of an agent, just pay for the work that it does. So I think somewhere between that hybrid model is where you'll see this net out, I think, for the industry at large. But I would also pay attention to those consumables themselves because those are also emerging and changing. Today, most of the world is infatuated with the token. And this token sort of explosion that's happening in enterprises, it's asking -- people are starting to ask questions like are these tokens leading to yield? And so we've often heard about token maxing as a sort of strategy. Well, now the counter theory is, is this really output maxing? We know that we're actually getting content, but is that content actually producing business yield. One of the things that we're starting to do some more experimentation on is more value-based and outcome-based pricing of these consumption offerings because, again, where we want to be is the company that doesn't just sort of monetize compute and storage like a hyperscaler does, we want to monetize the outcome that comes off of the software because if companies are getting more growth or getting more savings, that's how we sort of share in that value exchange. So I do think as our pricing continues to sort of evolve down these spectrums, we're going to have lots of different options for different kinds of companies, big and small. And I think as it sort of nets out in an aggregate sense, seat-based and consumables is the right pattern. What those consumables represent, it's going to be based on the offering that someone is consuming from us. But that's also -- you've asked me this question before, like that's why Flex credits are so important. Flex credits are a new unit of measure, a new unit of currency that companies that subscribe to the Salesforce ecosystem leverage that can work on any of the technologies. They're not buying products, they're buying capacity and output from the offerings that we serve them with. So I do think this will continue to be an evolving conversation. And our strategy when we first talked about this is we just need to meet our customers where they are on this journey, and that's what we're doing is creating offerings for them.
Brent Thill
AnalystsThere's a fear right now that Anthropics come in and they're effectively going to create an overlay layer and that they're just going to surround the CRM system and your growth will stop, their growth will build. They won't replace you, but they'll create an overlay right or wrong.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesWrong. Would you like me to elaborate on that? Because I keep getting hammered by our clients on this topic. What -- well -- and I'm glad that Mark came out on the podcast and said you spent $300 million on Anthropic, which is maybe a signal that you guys are going to coexist. And yes, you might be frenemies. You might compete in some areas, but in large part, you can be friends.I think, first off, Anthropic is our customer. what Anthropic uses to transform their go-to-market strategy and accelerate their growth at Salesforce. What we use inside of our organization to drive productivity and write code is cloud. So there is definitely a coexistence sort of in our future that's there. And look, I'm being a little facetious about like just the kind of hard answer. But if that had been true, wouldn't Slack have already kind of replaced Salesforce because that was an overlay layer for work and workflow. And it didn't replace Salesforce, it amplified Salesforce. It actually made it so that more work and workflow reached more people. And I do think that's truly what we're seeing with this moment of the builder and creator economy with Anthropic and Cloud specifically, which I use every day, it's actually helping me do more in Salesforce, not less. It's actually helping me to sort of analyze my Salesforce data and extrapolate more intelligence around my Salesforce data, but it still is most importantly, using Salesforce data. And so I do think this is where the market likes to have these sort of binary moments of SaaS versus the token. That's not the reality. A lot of companies are working with multiple tools and multiple systems. And ultimately, that's why we saw this pattern emerge with what we call our headless strategy, which is to allow the Salesforce platform to be accessed by tools like Cloud or OpenAI's tool set or Google's tool set or even the Slack tool set because we want more people participating in the work and workflow that Salesforce represents.
Brent Thill
AnalystsWhat are we all getting wrong on the outside because we can't smell and breathe the inside. But what are you seeing that you're like, I wish the market would stop talking about this. They just -- maybe they can't stop talking about, but they've got it fundamentally wrong. Is there...
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesI don't think anyone has it fundamentally wrong. I just don't think everyone has it fundamentally right now. And I think that the questions, like I said, everyone likes to make this about binaries and offsets. -- okay, if you're no longer investing in SaaS, it's because you're investing in the tokens or some other sort of system that's there. The reality is companies come to Salesforce because they want to be better companies. They come to Salesforce because they want better outputs. They want better outcomes for what they use Salesforce for. And I don't think that the world is going to stop trying to make better companies. I think that we are just going to need to sort of utilize Salesforce in ways that powers those transformations that companies are trying to do. So I think that what the market -- where the market wants to think of this offsets in terminal value of things like seats and seat-based labor, the reality is where we're finding ourselves at Salesforce today, more work is getting done, more data is being generated, more sort of interactions are being handled, more campaigns are being executed, more orders are being driven on our commerce platforms. This is not a time of less, it's a time of more. And I think Salesforce becomes this incredible orchestrator for the enterprise to help businesses achieve more.
Brent Thill
AnalystsThere's been a few comments from investors. We're at a technology transformation tectonic shift, whatever you want to call it. Everyone says, well, why spend $50 billion on a buyback when I should be leaning into the tech cycle now. We have a lot of companies that are at discount. We have a private market that's dislocated. M&A is in a tail spin right now. Like this is like go time for most of our clients, they would say, and Robin's response to me last night was, Brent, we're doing both. We are doing acquisitions. I mean, I guess you're not doing really big ones, you're doing more tuck-ins. But how do you think about this?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes. Look, I mean, I think Robin's answer is right. We are doing both. I mean Informatica is a great sort of signal of that. But one of the things that I think that the market may be -- we were early in sort of our acquisition of Slack a couple of years ago right ahead of the pandemic. And the market really didn't quite understand that, okay, what we're really trying to do at that time is broaden the aperture of users and sort of work and workflows that happens inside the enterprise. That was perceived as maybe a bridge too far at the time because the valuation of Slack was high. But right now, I can guarantee as hell that we have Slack because it is becoming a modern surface for engaging work into what that's transforming to be. Informatica is another really great example. Informatica is an acquisition we completed last year, which has incredible synergies with our Data Cloud strategy because Data Cloud was really about harnessing this world of customer information. Informatica was this world of noncustomer but customer adjacent information that happens inside the company. The part to the root of the question, we want to only invest in those areas that are on our mission to transform how businesses operate, better data, better workflow, better orchestration, better outcome. Those are the kinds of acquisitions that we look at. And there's a lot of technologies out there that just really good tech, but doesn't really net into better outcomes for companies. And I think that's where we're thoughtful about what we acquire. It's really about making sure that we accelerate our strategy, which is to help companies sort of perform and operate better.
Brent Thill
AnalystsThere's been a little concern around some of the departures, and I know your CPO retired, so you go to anthropic. But you have a lot of great talent. But how do you kind of calm the nerves of everyone in this room of, hey, like we're -- we feel like we're keeping the most important people.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes. Look, first off, I think technology and there are always sort of these moments where there's an exciting mission for companies to join. What has kept me at Salesforce since 2017 is the mission of making business the greatest platform for change. And I think that people who are still on that mission or still understand that technology's purpose is to help businesses drive sort of better results for their cities, their societies, et cetera. That's what kind of galvanates like our culture to Salesforce. It's not because we're fascinated by the next-generation models. It's not because we think about these incredible new use cases or new apps that can be built. We're committed to sort of that mission. The talent that -- and it starts with Mark. I mean, Mark is sort of the ultimate leader, champion, spiritual adviser to all of us in the company. And I think that what Mark is really doing is finding the talent that wants to internalize that mission into this next era really to kind of drive business forward in this moment in time. So I think the leaders and leadership that we've amassed in the company and has allowed us to sort of put the right talent in the right places. myself, I started in kind of the software and product management space. I now do monetization strategy. So sometimes it's not always linear talent moves, but we put our talent in the places that drive the best yield for the company. And I think Mark is a great inspiration for getting the right talent in place here at Salesforce to drive those sort of transformations we're trying to go through.
Brent Thill
AnalystsThat's great. The Marketing Commerce, Tableau, I mean, there's been some headwinds, right? So there's been -- you got some nice acceleration in sales and service stable when you include the other parts of the transaction. But marketing Commerce and Tableau have been a little bit of a headwind. Is that -- can you recover from that? Is it like what needs to happen?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes. Look, first off, the breadth of our portfolio is a strength. And I think that because of the strength of the portfolio, it allows us to sort of have these moments where we see acceleration in sort of some business units while others are going through more secular transformations. I think the world of marketing is going through a secular transformation. I mean it look no further than what Google just announced on the way that search is transforming for businesses today. That's going to fundamentally reshape what the world of digital marketing looks like. And so it's not a secret that a business like marketing may have moments of softness. It's that it is going through more of this transformation state about what does the future of marketing look like in that sense. Same with commerce. It used to be that you would shop online in an online commerce store. Well, this world of commerce and commerce agents are starting to emerge. So as that market retools, those platforms have to retool as well. The good news is businesses like Sales Cloud, our long-standing sort of bread-and-butter business are having its moment. Slack is having its moment. Agentforce having its moment. So not only are businesses that we've long been in, but acquired entities like Slack and Informatica are accelerating, organic innovation like Agentforce is accelerating and even our legacy business on Sales Cloud is accelerating. So you're going to see these puts and takes, I think, as different moments emerge. But again, the strength of the Salesforce portfolio is not sort of indicative of just one unit cloud. It's really the whole that we care about.
Brent Thill
AnalystsWe're getting agent to death at this conference. Don't say. Everyone's got an agent, right? So...
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesIt's like you've driven in San Francisco and see all the boats.
Brent Thill
AnalystsYou're the second presenter to bring that up back to back. How do you think this kind of settles out? I mean, right now, in your space, just in the front office, I mean, we've got like 10 vendors that are all claiming the same thing, then you have vertically aligned vendors that are in financial services. We've got -- I mean, we got every flavor of agent, and we've seen this movie before or all the movies show and then a couple of rides at the top. What...
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes. I was actually with a customer last week, and they said that they made the comment about the San Francisco billboard. So I'm stealing it from them. But it was like literally every e-mail, every day, every call is about try my new agent. And it just can't sustain. And I think that -- so I do think incumbent vendors have an advantage because they have the opportunity to identify processes that are already established. So I think incumbency in many cycles, maybe as seen as like a curse, maybe I want to try and replace that technology. I'm not seeing that pattern. What I'm actually seeing is more companies coming to us and saying, can you identify this workflow that we have because we want to do it off of trusted data and the governance of the Salesforce platform that's long been how we've operationalized our organization. So I do think incumbents have an advantage more so than even the upstarts at this point because they have to kind of fight for every sort of breadth of oxygen. We have something to prove, which is let's actually modernize some of the workflow that's there. Where I see it netting out, Brent, is candidly not -- we can't see thousands of entities. I think there will be consolidation. I think that as vendors like us that have a breadth of portfolios identify all that workflow, it's not just about maybe identifying each experience. It's also about how they orchestrate with one another. That's going to be, I think, where truly the rubber meets the road in terms of what stays versus what sort of just sort of fades off into the ether. So I think orchestration is sort of the next horizon. First off, everyone is in the horizon right now of taking these pilots moving into production. Once they're in production, now let's like try and orchestrate and then rationalize. And then what kind of comes out on the end of that is probably fewer bigger agents that sort of represent more fully autonomous functions for businesses. So I think that's the transition that we're starting to see already. And a good example of that, by the way. We have a customer in retail. They just went -- they had an old -- an agent sort of service experience. What they really wanted was that agent service experience to sell digital products. Well, that company didn't have a commerce technology. So they came to Salesforce and said, okay, I'm going to replace that agent experience with Agent force because Agent force serves and sells all at once. So I think that's really this concept we call it a super agent. These super agents could do more than just one function. That's ultimately where I think this will net up to that rationalization moment.
Brent Thill
AnalystsI think maybe not this quarter, I don't know what the number was if you launched it, but the mid-market has been kind of a space that's been strong. I think you've had a good leader there. You've had -- people want to buy everything from you. They don't want to assemble it. Can you maybe just give us a sense of what's happening in the mid-market?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesWell, I think you -- the signal you can look into is the packaging strategy we put together for our Agent Force One Edition. And AgentForce One for sales includes sales and Tableau and Slack. -- all in one offering for a business. Well, that means I don't have to buy a sales analytics offering. I don't have to buy a sales collaboration offering. I don't have to buy a Salesforce automation offering. I just get it from Salesforce. And so as sort of certain elements of technology, maybe this is that rationalization moment kind of showing up even in seat-based labor, the seats themselves where people have had best-of-breeds on all these different vendor functions that exist, now they want to actually consolidate a lot of that to sort of one vendor because they actually believe that when all of that information signals together, then it can fuel an agent strategy. So I actually think they're quite symbiotic. Application consolidation leads to better data that gets unified, that leads to better agents that can perform on the outside. So this is sort of our flywheel of let's get this Agent Force One addition into more of our installed base so that we actually drive more of that data that gets generated on the similar platform that we can fuel agents to perform on behalf of the businesses.
Brent Thill
AnalystsWe all do these channel checks and whether it's Atlassian or you or whatever, and a lot of the smaller system integrators are like the vendors are stealing my business. And it seems like it is a sense of maybe we're going to higher-end partners, but maybe it's just, hey, this direct relationship with the customers is becoming easier. But I don't know. It seems like it's happening across a lot of vendors. And so with the actual channel checks we all do, say are very different than actually what you produce. And is that -- it seems like a common pattern we've seen in Atlassian, too. But it seems like is this a signal, hey, it's just easier to implement the software. We don't need as many of these small partners to help.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesNo, I don't believe that at all. But what I believe is that the vendors have an added responsibility to help companies find value from the offerings that they've created. And because the technology is so new, a lot of technology vendors are investing in these forward deployment engineers not only to get the service sort of up and running, but also to get the key signals of how to sort of tune and optimize our offerings so we can improve the products in this moment in time. So I think one of the signals that we've done with partners like Accenture is start to now invest in not just forward deployment engineers that are Salesforce employees, but forward deployment engineers that work at Accenture that actually can work as an extension of our workforce that's there. So I don't think it's really about closing off an ecosystem. I think it's really about making sure that -- in the early sort of days of this agentic moment, vendors have an added responsibility. We're investing with our resources. We're teaching these channel providers and service integrators how to do it the way that the software was meant to be designed and kind of retooling, I think, in this moment. So I would actually think it's more of a retool than it is about stealing their business.
Brent Thill
AnalystsOkay. Great.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesThat was not my quote. We're not stealing their business. We're retooling.
Brent Thill
AnalystsThe verticals have been a huge strength of yours when you think about health care, pharma, insurance, maybe kind of walk through what you're most excited about there. And we always get the question about pharma, so maybe.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesWell, our Life Sciences Cloud, for example, has been one of the new offerings here at Salesforce that has really had an incredible quarter. And as organizations are sort of retooling their sales forces for the future, they want to do so with modern technology. And this cloud was built from the ground up for this enngentic moment where not only is a great sales orchestration platform, but it's also a great sort of system built with agents that are actually helping kind of qualify leads and do sample management. And so there's all kinds of great innovation that I think when you rebuild for this ground up that a cloud like life sciences cloud is innovating on that's having sort of kind of huge growth opportunities for us right now. To answer your question at large on verticals and our industry strategy at large, every industry is going through different moments of transformation. And the fact that we have not just horizontal software that is kind of a vanilla one-size-fits all, but acutely with the right compliance and the right certifications and the right workflows and the right sort of data model and the right logic for those industries sets us apart. And I do think as we continue to see our industry strategy deliver what customers want, it's all about that faster time to value that they can get up and running and then really a software that speaks their language and speak kind of works the way that they need it to because it's been built from the ground up for all the sort of rules and regulations those industries require.
Brent Thill
AnalystsYou get one vertical of up and comer for you, like there's massive, just incredible.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes, I'm sort of biased because life science cloud is one of our newest ones, but that's...
Brent Thill
AnalystsLife science would be the one.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesI'm very excited there. But I would also say public sector has had a lot of strengths for us. Our manufacturing areas have a lot of strengths, financial services, health care, they are all going through degrees of transformation. And I think health care is always the one that in our country anyway, we have a lot -- this is sort of, again, why you work at Salesforce. because we believe that we can transform health care in such a profound way with now digital agents on the front end of those experiences. And I think that's why even yesterday in earnings, we had UCLA Medical online with us talking about how we're fundamentally just changing the business of health care. So that's something we all benefit here from California. But ultimately, as a society, we benefit from because we can really make the health care system more equitable for everybody.
Brent Thill
AnalystsAny questions from the audience?
Unknown Analyst
AnalystsCould you just talk about the acceleration in the second half? I know it was our first question. But is your visibility because you're giving people free tokens and they have to work through them and then they'll buy more? Or is it just a function of time to deploy, you know they're deploying it and doesn't happen until then...
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes. I would say very much -- what is giving us confidence is the pilot to production sort of movement, right, that's there. And the signal was the hiring that we did really around our 4 deployment engineers to help with that hiring velocity to take shape. So I think that's really kind of what gives us a lot of that confidence is moving through the deployment kind of side. And this is not like linear deployment where like traditional CRM software, if you deployed it, you would kind of knew how to kind of fit a process, a workflow, et cetera. These agents are very different. They are -- they have different capabilities, and they have different scale. And so a lot of this is more about change management than it is about hands-on keyboard writing code. That's the easy part. The hard part is getting companies to understand many of the processes that you have in your organization today were built with an era of human constraint in mind. Well, now you don't have that same kind of constraint. So how would we just go back to the drawing board and design it altogether?
Unknown Analyst
AnalystsI feel like 6, 8 months ago, we were saying that there would be acceleration, it was just because of lapping the soft renewals years and then growing faster and now different answer is that now it's about agent force and that adoption, not just the fact that it was going to accelerate regardless of what just based on the core getting better.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes. I don't -- I'm not here to kind of comment about what we said last time and what we said this time. I'm just telling you what it is. What it is right now is we have a lot of people that have agent force and a lot of people that are in their deployment of agent force. And that is how we see the kind of the excitement about the second half is just the sheer volume of activity that's out there.
Unknown Analyst
AnalystsI know you guys haven't talked much about the inference cost side of things other than the other seems like you're trying to successfully growing the inference business and you're using pricing mechanisms as a lever to account for what the costs are going to be. My rough guess would be you guys are looking at a $5 billion inference bill over the next few years. Do you feel like you have any levers to sort of confront the COGS issue of having agents out there doing 1,000x more than human do?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesYes, for sure. I think that, again, as I was sort of mentioning in the last gentleman's question, many of these processes in the past were based on what humans could do. And now with agents sort of having limitless capacity and limitless availability, it opens up a whole new sort of transformation for what businesses are trying to do around kind of how they operate and in an always-on manner. So as you sort of look at what is -- where we see the sort of maybe groundswell of inference and tokens kind of hitting our world, this is where I think we have a smart architecture around how we build Agent force. I don't need to call an LLM to give you an e-mail address. I can just query our database to give you that. And so our technologies that we've built inside of AgentForce, which we call our Atlas reasoning engine, both has deterministic and nondeterministic sort of scenarios inside of it. And increasingly so, what we find is we can help companies be more efficient in actually using their tokens because honestly, today, if you're just using Claude and you're trying to kind of query a profile, you're burning a lot of tokens for something that was a simple SQL query. So this is allowing us to really be more efficient at the tokenization of the enterprise. And I do think that sort of architecture is allowing us to make it much more economical for customers. And we're not just pushing it on to the customers themselves. We're actually working with them around how to reengineer, reoptimize sort of their work.
Brent Thill
AnalystsAnything else you think the -- I know you mentioned like it's not just, hey, like one takes off and everyone else loses. Any other kind of things you're hearing kind of from our side that you feel need clarification?
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesNo. Look, I think there is -- as you classify sort of different technology companies, obviously, there's the hyperscalers who have a different business model than the SaaS providers do today. The hyperscalers really were built for this moment of just letting the meters turn. And the more the meters that turn, the happier they sort of make their money off of. That's not what we're here to do at Salesforce. We're not trying to be a hyperscaler. What we're really wanting to be is probably the world's first hyper value provider, which is we can provide massive sort of ability for companies to come into this ecosystem but ultimately drive better performance of their business. So we're not -- I don't pay a lot of time or attention thinking about like how many tokens that fulfills our work. What I care about is that our customers come to us and they perform better as an organization. That's why this signal of more outcome or value-based sort of pricing as a new lever for us puts us into a shared value space for what our clients expect when they come to our platform that they're getting utility from. So that's where I would really kind of think about kind of maybe my ask is taxonomize different companies for really what is the pure function that they're aligning to do. And for us at Salesforce, like I said, the world is going to be made off of companies that perform better with this technology. That's our mission.
Brent Thill
AnalystsWe really appreciate your support. And hopefully, we get the new Head of IR down here. We heard a really, really cool guy and I didn't get the call. So I'm feeling a little left out.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesI know if you took the call. No, I'm kidding.
Brent Thill
AnalystsLooking forward having, Mark.
Bill Patterson
ExecutivesThank you. Thank you. Really appreciate.
Brent Thill
AnalystsTo you.
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