Salesforce used its annual Dreamforce conference to set a new revenue goal for fiscal 2030 of more than $63 billion. The target is above Wall Street expectations: analysts surveyed by LSEG had been looking for annual sales of $59.2 billion by that point.
The updated outlook comes as the company tries to reinforce its position amid rapid shifts in the software industry driven by artificial intelligence. At the event, CEO Marc Benioff said the sector is at a turning point, with broad changes underway for enterprise customers.
Salesforce has had a turbulent year, as investors worried that advances in artificial intelligence could hurt traditional software vendors. Sentiment improved after last month’s earnings report, when the company delivered better-than-expected results and a more upbeat forecast.
Profit was helped by a $2.6 billion gain from strategic investments tied to Salesforce’s bet on Anthropic. After that report, the stock rose almost 23%, its best performance since 2020. Salesforce also announced Claudeforce, which lets organizations work with Salesforce data inside Anthropic’s Claude.
This year’s Dreamforce featured some of the most prominent leaders in AI. Marc Benioff brought OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang on stage. Salesforce executives also introduced a new AI reasoning model called Koa, based on a model from Nvidia, and demonstrated custom dashboards containing Salesforce data that can be accessed in Claude.
Patrick Stokes, Salesforce’s president of applications and marketing, said as many as 1,000 customers have signed up for the beta version with Claude. Over the past three months, Slack — the chat app Salesforce bought for $27.1 billion in 2021 — has also emerged as a hub for communicating with AI agents, according to Alexa Vignone, the company’s president and chief revenue officer.
Operating chief Miguel Milano said at the event that he no longer wants to use the term “SaaSpocalypse,” signaling a shift in market mood. Salesforce also took advantage of this year’s stock decline: chief operating and financial officer Robin Washington said the company has now repurchased a cumulative $60 billion of its own shares.
Benioff added that Salesforce spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Anthropic stock and said the holding could eventually be worth tens of billions. He said the company will probably sell the stake and use the proceeds to pay down accelerated share repurchase debt. Salesforce shares closed above $250 on Wednesday.
