Dive Brief:
- Salesforce saw demand soar for agentic AI platform Agentforce in its third quarter, executives said during the company's Q3 2026 earnings call Wednesday. Annual recurring revenue for the product grew 330% year over year, surpassing a half billion dollars, according to Salesforce.
- Growing demand for the agentic product fueled overall revenue growth for the CRM titan. Revenues reached $10.3 billion for the period ending Oct. 31, as the company racked up nearly 10,000 paid Agentforce deals since its launch in Sept. 2024. Salesforce raised its fiscal 2026 revenue guidance to 9%.
- "Six of our top 10 deals in the quarter are now driven by companies that just want to transform with Agentforce," CEO Marc Benioff said during the earnings call. "That's a big thought because a year ago, we were basically just starting to ship the product."
Dive Insight:
Salesforce called Q4 of 2025 “the quarter of Agentforce,” but the agentic platform is also dominating its 2026 fiscal year. The company is betting on a land-and-expand strategy to plug Agentforce into more parts of the organization, which includes the IT department.
Just before its annual Dreamforce conference in October, the company released its Agentforce IT Service aimed at providing end-to-end IT service management functionality.
“We never really went after this before,” Benioff said. “We realized we have the top service product in the world, and then we've got the top field service product in the world. And customers want this kind of trinity from us that includes IT service.”
Pentagon Federal Credit Union deployed Salesforce agents for IT services among other tasks, Benioff said, leading to a projected 30% reduction in operational expenses.
Also in October, the company — best known for its customer relationship management platform — launched Agentforce Vibes, an AI-powered integrated development environment. The company also unveiled Vibe Codey, an autonomous AI agent that collaborates as second coder to accelerate development.
But the field is getting crowded, as vendors swarm CIOs with agentic AI offerings. Earlier this week, AWS unveiled a trio of what it calls frontier agents, offering automated software development, security engineering and DevOps services. The agents can operate autonomously and at scale, according to the AWS announcement.
CIOs are closely watching the vendor market evolve — with an eye toward ROI.
“Salesforce’s vision for an agentic enterprise is ambitious and timely,” Forrester analysts said in an October blog post following the company’s Dreamforce conference. “But ambition alone won’t guarantee success. Customers need clarity on architecture, governance and cost, not just pricing and a pragmatic roadmap to success. Most of all, they need evidence that AI agents pay off in a proper return on investment.”
