Salesforce accelerates AI amid restructuring

Salesforce (CRM) reported fiscal 2026 revenue of $41.5 billion, a 10% year-over-year increase for the period ending January 31, 2026. The company’s remaining performance obligations reached $72 billion, indicating a sizable project pipeline. Current RPO, representing contracted revenue expected within 12 months, rose 16% year over year to $35.1 billion, signaling continued customer commitment.

Management has positioned Salesforce to capitalize on artificial intelligence as it moves from experimentation to large-scale deployment in customer relationship management. The company’s AI strategy centers on building an integrated, secure platform that links enterprise data, core business applications, and AI agents within a single system.

Salesforce’s AI efforts are anchored by Agentforce, a platform for creating, managing, and deploying AI agents that automate tasks across business workflows. By the end of fiscal 2026, Agentforce had reached an annual revenue run rate of about $800 million, reflecting 169% year-over-year growth. Salesforce closed roughly 29,000 Agentforce deals in the first 15 months after launch.

AI functionality is increasingly bundled with Salesforce’s core services. In the fourth quarter, more than 75% of the company’s top 100 deals included both Agentforce and Data 360, its platform that unifies customer data from multiple systems so AI models and applications can operate on it. Following the acquisition of Informatica, Salesforce added cloud data management tools to clean, organize, and connect enterprise data, further supporting its AI agents.

Together, Agentforce and Data 360, including Informatica, generated more than $2.9 billion in annual recurring revenue at the end of fiscal 2026, growing over 200% year over year. Salesforce states that this combination shows it is moving beyond adding isolated AI features and toward an end-to-end AI and data platform.

Customer deployments highlight how Salesforce’s AI tools are being used in practice. Wyndham Hotels has rolled out more than 5,000 Agentforce deployments across a network of over 8,300 hotels. The company reported a 200-basis-point increase in direct bookings driven by AI voice agents powered by Salesforce.

Consumer brand SharkNinja reported that Salesforce agents handled nearly 250,000 customer interactions shortly after deployment in the fourth quarter of 2025. More broadly, Salesforce’s platform has processed more than 19 trillion tokens, reflecting the scale at which its AI systems operate.

To track AI activity in more detail, Salesforce introduced a metric called Agentic Work Units, which measures work performed by AI agents rather than model usage alone. As of the fourth-quarter earnings date, the company reported 2.4 billion Agentic Work Units completed, including 771 million in the fourth quarter.

According to its latest Annual Report, Salesforce employed 83,334 people as of January 31, 2026. Staff span roles from engineering and data science to sales, customer support, and corporate functions. The company maintains offices in 93 cities worldwide, with about 10,000 employees based at its San Francisco headquarters in Salesforce Tower.

Salesforce’s transition toward an AI-driven, agentic enterprise has coincided with layoffs. In September 2025, the company eliminated 4,000 customer support positions, nearly 5% of its workforce at that time, after AI began handling up to 50% of its work, according to CNBC. Earlier, as pandemic-related demand eased in 2023, Salesforce cut 8,000 jobs and reduced office space, with leadership citing over-hiring during the period of rapid remote-work expansion.

The company continues to face competition in CRM from Microsoft (MSFT) and HubSpot, and its shares declined 20% in 2025 amid pressure to accelerate AI offerings. Salesforce highlights 26 years of accumulated customer data as a differentiator, arguing that relevant data is essential for effective AI agents and for reshaping how CRM software operates.