Salesforce is clearly accelerating. After months of moderate growth, the company not only raised its forecasts for fiscal 2026, but also returned to the market for major acquisitions. In the background: stable demand for cloud solutions and growing expectations for AI monetisation .
The company’s revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2026 came in at $9.83bn, beating market expectations. Forecasts for the full year have also been revised upwards – to $41-41.3bn, meaning Salesforce is targeting growth of up to 8% y-o-y. That’s not a bad result, given that the company has until recently struggled with investor pressure on operational efficiency and AI ROI.
The biggest question mark remains Agentforce, an AI platform integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem. The company boasts more than 8,000 transactions since launch and annual revenue in excess of US$1bn from Data Cloud and AI. However, the rate of AI adoption among customers has not yet beaten investors’ expectations. In the background, one can hear the question: is Salesforce building another growth engine or just a new product line?
The answer could be the acquisition of Informatica for around $8bn. This is the first such major move since the acquisition of Slack in 2020. The acquisition of the data management tool provider is a signal that Salesforce is trying not only to add value to AI, but also to regain the growth rate that organic growth alone no longer guarantees.
Counterintuitively, then, it is not just about AI, but about the completeness of the offering – the ability to store, process and analyse data in a single environment. In the age of integrating AI into business processes, this approach could prove decisive.
For the market, it’s a sign that the cloud combined with AI remains a safe direction for large B2B players, even amid macroeconomic uncertainty. For Salesforce – it is an attempt to regain its leadership position not only as a CRM provider, but also as an end-to-end platform for data processing and decision automation.
Conclusion? AI can drive growth, but only in tandem with a strong data infrastructure. Salesforce has just bet on both horses.
