Salesforce delivered what its own executives called a record quarter on Wednesday, posting profits that blew past Wall Street estimates and triggering a double-digit stock surge — a rare jolt of good news for an enterprise software sector that investors had grown increasingly skeptical of this year.

The San Francisco-based CRM giant reported second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $11.3 billion, up 11% year-over-year, alongside non-GAAP diluted earnings of $5.90 per share — more than double the prior year's figure. GAAP diluted EPS came in at $4.29, up 119% year-over-year. Operating cash flow jumped 71% to $1.3 billion, and free cash flow rose 81% to $1.1 billion, according to the company's official earnings release.

Shares, which closed the regular session at $205.62, leaped as much as 13% in extended trading to above $231, according to Yahoo Finance's after-hours coverage. The rally reflects both the earnings beat and a raised outlook: Salesforce now expects full-year revenue of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion and non-GAAP EPS of $16.67 to $16.71, up sharply from its prior forecast of $14.06 to $14.12.

The AI angle

The bigger surprise came bundled with the numbers. Salesforce and Anthropic announced an expanded partnership dubbed "Claudeforce," making Claude the default AI model across Slack, Slackbot, Agentforce Coworker and a new plugin called Salesforce in Claude, which bundles 37 prebuilt sales skills for reasoning over live pipeline data. The plugin is live for pilot customers now, with a broader beta slated for September, according to Anthropic's own announcement.

Salesforce disclosed it expects to spend roughly $300 million on Anthropic's AI tokens this year, on top of an equity stake in the AI startup now valued at close to $5 billion. The company's homegrown Agentforce and Data 360 products together generated nearly $3.9 billion in annualized recurring revenue, up 210% year-over-year, with Agentforce alone surpassing $1.5 billion in ARR — up 240%.

"AI is delivering value across every layer of our platform," said CEO Marc Benioff, pointing to 7 billion cumulative "agentic work units" the platform has now processed, 3.2 billion of them in this quarter alone.

The results mark a turnaround narrative for a stock that had lagged the broader software sector for much of the year amid doubts about whether Agentforce could translate AI hype into real revenue. Wednesday's numbers, paired with a partnership that effectively puts a rival AI lab's technology at the center of Salesforce's own roadmap, appear to have quieted at least some of that skepticism — for now.

Salesforce reports its next quarterly results in late November. Investors will be watching whether the Claudeforce rollout, expected to reach open beta next month, converts pilot interest into the kind of recurring revenue growth that justified Wednesday's rally.