Salesforce Transforms into Agentforce and Sees Stock Rise 14% After AI ARR Surges 240% in the Quarter

The Quarter in Which Agentforce Became a Business Line

Salesforce reported $11.35 billion in revenue for the second fiscal quarter of 2027, ending on July 31, marking an 11% increase year-over-year and slightly above Street consensus, which projected $11.32 billion. Net income surged 87% to $3.53 billion, or $4.29 per diluted share, driven by a one-time gain of $2.6 billion from the company's stake in Anthropic, marked on the balance sheet at fair value.

The number that propelled the stock up 14% in after-hours trading was another. Marc Benioff announced that the annual recurring revenue (ARR) of Agentforce, the product of autonomous agents launched in late 2024, exceeded $1.5 billion, a 240% increase over twelve months. Combined with Data 360, the data unification platform, the combined ARR reached $3.9 billion, more than tripling year-over-year. For the line that faced public skepticism from analysts at Bernstein and JPMorgan during the first quarter, this figure represents a tactical victory.

The company raised its full-year fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to a range of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, an increase of 11% to 12% in dollar terms. The growth of the average order value (AOV) of new contracts was the strongest in four years, according to Benioff, signaling that the company is monetizing Agentforce through larger contracts and not just free pilots.

From Token Consumption to Agent Pricing

The metric that became the key indicator of the quarter is the number of Agentic Work Units (AWUs). Salesforce delivered 7 billion AWUs across its base since the launch of Agentforce, with 3.2 billion delivered in the second quarter alone, a sequential increase of 97%. AWU is the billing unit the company adopted in June to replace the per-conversation model: each autonomous task executed by an agent becomes an AWU, priced differentially based on complexity.

This model is a response to the problem that hampered initial monetization. At launch, Agentforce charged $2 per conversation, leading to disputes with clients whose implementations returned millions of irrelevant interactions. Consumption by AWU aligns cost with the completed task, a format closer to what Klarna, Wiley, and OpenTable publicly requested in the first quarter.

The Gain in Anthropic

Salesforce Ventures led a $500 million funding round in Anthropic in 2023 and expanded its position in subsequent rounds. With Anthropic marked at a $350 billion valuation in the latest primary round, conducted in July by Iconiq Capital, Salesforce's stake was revalued, generating the accounting gain of $2.6 billion that doubles the quarterly net income.

A point of caution is that the gain is non-cash and depends on maintaining the private valuation. If Anthropic opts for an IPO in the first half of 2027, as reported by The Information, this number could materialize into cash, potentially paving the way for more aggressive stock buybacks. Salesforce ended the quarter with $12 billion in cash and an active buyback program of $20 billion.

The Context of Agentforce Outside the United States

The reported growth is global, but the distribution is asymmetric. In the United States, Agentforce currently operates in at least 8,000 corporate clients, according to the company. In Europe, adoption faces friction with the AI Act, whose transparency rules for autonomous agents took effect on August 2 and require Salesforce to label each AWU executed in interactions with European citizens. The Irish DPC opened a preliminary investigation in July regarding data transfer for training, with no fines applied as of yet.

In India, where Infosys and Wipro signed implementation partnerships with Agentforce in 2025, the volume of AWU is growing at a pace comparable to the U.S., but at 40% lower prices per unit, diluting revenue expansion. In Brazil, the local distributor still operates on the old user license model for most of the base, with migration to AWU planned for the first quarter of 2028. Meanwhile, integrators such as CI&T, Falconi, and Accenture Brazil are hiring certified Agentforce developers at three times the average rate of the previous year, according to recent movements on LinkedIn.

Salesforce's quarter answers one question and raises another. The answered question is whether Agentforce becomes a business, and the answer is yes, with double-digit billion ARR and AOV growing at record pace. The open question is whether the company can maintain its competitive distance over Google's AgentSpace and Microsoft's Copilot Studio, which price agents at half the value per AWU but still operate without native integration to the originating CRM.