"There are very smart people in our industry...who are saying absolute nonsense" - Salesforce's Marc Benioff gears up for Dreamforce with some agentic home truths

Revenue up. Profit up. Agentforce users up. Share price down. Just another day on AI-greedy Wall Street yesterday as Salesforce turned in its Q2 ’26 numbers.

Total revenue was up 10% year-on-year to $10.24 billion, while profit for the quarter was up from $1.43 billion a year ago to $1.89 billion. Other stats of note from the post results analyst call:

• Data Cloud and AI Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was $1.2 billion, up 112% year-on-year.

• Data and AI products were in 60 deals greater than $1 million during Q2.

• 70% of the top 100 wins in the quarter included five or more Salesforce clouds.

• There are now 12,500 overall Agentforce deals out there - last official number was 8,000 back in June - with around 6,000 of those being paid for.

• 40% of Agentforce new bookings during the quarter came via extensions from existing customers.

• The company cites a 60% increase sequential quarter  increase in customers who've gone from Agentforce pilot to production.

Customers

For CEO Marc Benioff, with Dreamforce now around a month away, it's a case of keep on keeping on with the agentic evangelism that has characterised the past year:

It's a complete transformation. And for our customers, the agentic enterprise is a complete re-invention in many cases of who they are and what their potential is. It's a shift from traditional hierarchies to re-shaping the entire company, from busy work to orchestrating workflows, from siloed teams to seamless collaboration, from clicking and routing to natural conversations and hours are shrinking to seconds, employees and customers are being augmented.

Some of Salesforce’s biggest and longest-standing customers are picking up the Agentforce baton, he said, such as DIRECTV:

DIRECTV saves billing reps nearly 300 hours of inquiry handling with Agentforce. An employee AI agent executed 50,000 actions in a week. I've been working with DIRECTV for more than 20 years at Salesforce and I'll tell you…it just kind of occurred to me, ‘Wow, I think only about a year ago, we hadn't even started using the word agent or agentic or Agentforce at Salesforce., and here we are talking about one of our largest and most important customers receiving this incredible benefit.

Retailer Williams Sonoma was also picked out for comment:

They rolled out [Agentforce] along eight of their brands and as well as agents for other use cases, including a sous chef agent that is helping customers choose cookware and guiding them step-by-step through recipes. They are finding incredible new ways to use the Agentforce platform. And they're doing it side-by-side across their entire Salesforce deployment.

And with eating up his own dog food in mind, he pointed to Sales at Salesforce as a case in point:

In Sales, every prospect is finally getting a call back, agents qualify at scale, humans close the deal…Our Sales Cloud for years has been an app that thousands or millions of salespeople use to manage their sales every single day. But now riding alongside every salesperson is an agentic salesperson. And that agentic salesperson is calling every single person back.

How that relates to Salesforce [is] maybe somewhere between 20 million and 100 million people who have contacted Salesforce in the last 26 years, they haven't been called back. It's just because we didn't have enough people. But now with our new agentic Sales, everybody is getting called back. It's a huge breakthrough and something that every company is going to benefit from.

He added:

Over 26 years, we just let too many millions of prospects go untouched. Mea culpa, that was our fault. But in the last seven weeks, this Sales agent that we've just built, well, it's had conversations with tens of thousands of inbound leads, even setting up appointments with human SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) and helping close deals. And we have it running in customers as well. It's been incredible what the opportunity is.

And with the recent launch of Agentforce for Public Sector in mind, Benioff talked up Salesforce’s work with the US military:

The Army is already planning to launch a digital front door for its Human Resource Command, providing 24/7 powered service and support to all soldiers and personnel and millions of veterans. And we have lots and lots of ideas at where we're going to be able to provide value for the US Army. And in the 21st century, agents just aren't optional, we know that they're mission-critical.

Of course, Benioff made the headlines this week with comments made during an appearance on “The Logan Bartlett Show” YouTube show to the effect that Salesforce has been able to shed 4,000 customer service roles in favor of agentic tech. While he wasn’t specifically asked about this on the analyst call - why?!? -  he did say of Service at Salesforce:

You can see our agents are handling millions of conversations while humans are delivering the empathy and expertise. Well, it's a bigger story than that, where we have delivered in the last nine months about 1.5 million conversations just for our own company on help.salesforce.com. And you also know that we continue to have thousands of humans who are also delivering their support answers. Well, guess what, the CSAT scores are about the same.

My take

 If you go back a year ago, was I even talking about agentic or Agentforce or agents? And now if you talk about the agentic enterprise, it's another layer above that. So you're going to see that we are rapidly moving to what the next generation of technology is. And at Dreamforce, you're going to see incredible new capabilities…You’re going to see Agentforce version 4. Well, it's going to be amazing, and you're not going to want to miss it.

As ever, diginomica will be on the ground at Dreamforce next month. Check back for our dedicated event hub coming from 14 October through the week.

One last thing of note from this latest analyst call - that damn silly question about the end of SaaS, promoted by remarks from one-time (one-off?) Dreamforce keynote guest, Sam Altman, reared its head yet again. (I said it wouldn’t be last time it would be trotted out to little effect over the course of the coming events diary car crash of a season!). Benioff’s response was as dismissive as that of his counterpart at Workday, Carl Eschenbach:

It's not about the fundamental elimination of SaaS. What I would say [is] it’s the fundamental extension of SaaS…we are seeing one of the greatest transformations in software, the idea that we're moving from that enterprise software is just for human beings to where it's also having an agentic layer and that, together, it's more powerful to serve customers and that it can create enterprises that are much lower cost and much more efficient and much more capable and much more powerful. And it's [up] against this strange narrative that's out there that somehow enterprise SaaS or apps or something are going away.

Now I guess, nothing lasts forever, okay? But I just look at how I'm running my own business and the business of our customers, I don't understand what the replacement is…But to hear some of this nonsense that's out there in social media or in other places, people say the craziest things, but it's not grounded in any customer truth.

Clearly warming to his theme, he added, with sarcasm:

Some of the other nonsense that's out there, I just cannot get my head around. And by the way, I take everything very seriously, so when somebody makes some big comment, I'm like, ‘All right, well, I'm going to go out there and really look at that’ because I guess AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is going to happen tomorrow. So I'm ready for that! Or ‘SaaS apps are going to go away’ - I'm going to go check that out, but there's so much nonsense.

You got to separate the forest from the trees or for those of us who are Bible readers, maybe we separate the wheat from the chaff. And I'll just tell you, as we separate the wheat from the chaff, just know there is truth out there, and you have to go out there and really find it. And the truth is always with the customers.

And just in case you haven’t got the point:

There are very smart people in our industry and other executives who are saying absolute nonsense. And I don't understand why they're saying this nonsense. Maybe it's just to create a certain level of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) in the market. But I think it's inappropriate at this point and what it's done for the whole enterprise software industry, I think, is crazy.

Onwards to Dreamforce.

In the meantime, hear more from Benioff in our Executive Intelligence podcast series here.