Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) is set to report second-quarter earnings Wednesday after market close, with all eyes on whether AI momentum is translating into signed contract value.
The company’s Agentforce platform, which deploys AI agents to handle tasks like resolving support cases and qualifying sales leads, hit $1.2 billion in annual recurring revenue last quarter.
That figure represents a 205% year-over-year increase, a striking growth rate that has energized investor enthusiasm around the enterprise software giant.
Agents on the platform have collectively been assigned 3.8 billion tasks to date, underscoring the scale at which enterprise customers are putting the technology to work.
Despite those adoption numbers, the value of signed customer contracts has not accelerated in the way management suggested it would when it promised faster growth nearly a year ago.
Salesforce monetizes its agent business through three main channels, each designed to capture different parts of how customers engage with AI-powered automation.
The first channel involves upgrading existing users to premium editions that include unlimited agent use, with bookings for those higher-tier seats growing nearly 60% year over year in the first quarter.
The second channel involves selling new seats across its core Sales and Service Clouds, with management noting that seven of the top 10 deals last quarter added seats.
The third revenue path runs through Flex Credits, a prepaid balance customers draw down to fund automated work, though much of that usage gets bundled inside traditional flat-fee contracts.
That bundling creates a visibility problem for analysts and investors trying to measure how much agent activity is actually flowing through the business at any given time.
The key metric investors are watching is current remaining performance obligation, or cRPO, which measures the actual dollar value of contracts due within 12 months rather than raw usage figures.
Organic cRPO, which strips out the contribution of recent acquisitions, is the cleaner number that investors want to see accelerate alongside the platform’s impressive usage statistics.
Salesforce shares have rebounded roughly 40% from their June low heading into this week’s report, reflecting growing optimism around the company’s AI transition.
The stock now trades at 15 times forward earnings estimates, a valuation that prices in meaningful execution on the Agentforce growth story over the coming quarters.
The broader debate around the future of SaaS business models remains unresolved, with the central question being whether enterprises use AI agents to reduce per-user seat counts or continue expanding overall software spending.
Software renewal windows over the next one to two years will be the real proving ground for which direction enterprise buying behavior moves at scale.
