Why Salesforce Q3 Earnings Will Be a Tipping Point for Agentforce

Salesforce’s Q3 results are being revealed next week on December 3, and all eyes will be on the cloud giant to see how well it has performed in its first major fiscal announcement since Dreamforce. 

The results will be coming shortly after the world’s most valuable company and AI bellwether NVIDIA posted record Q3 results with a revenue of $57B, and Palantir saw enormous growth of 63% year-over-year (YoY) in its Q3 figures earlier this month. 

At the end of October, Salesforce rival ServiceNow reported a quarter of impressive financial results, with subscription revenues of $3.3B, representing 21.5% Y/Y growth – and forecasts and guidance being exceeded across most major metrics. 

Bearing this tech sector boom (some might say bubble) in mind, are we likely to see equally impressive results from Salesforce this quarter? Well, it might not be quite that simple. Let’s take a look at why… 

Why We Need to Pay Attention to Q3 Results

It’s been a monumental year for Salesforce following its hard pivot into the realm of agentic AI with the company’s poster child Agentforce taking center stage in just about every major announcement. 

But if we look at Salesforce’s stock, it paints a less-than-rosy picture over the last year. 

Salesforce stock has been dropping, with the price of CRM dropping 29% year to date (YTD).

It’s a far cry from the >$300 stock price days of late 2021 and early 2025. If Salesforce reports less-than-ideal earnings next week, CRM stock price could sink closer to the $200 mark, which would arguably be very bad news for the tech giant. 

In August, activist investor hedge fund Starboard Value, which publicly pushed for Salesforce to make a number of changes three years ago, bought 50% more CRM stock amid a sharp dip in its value.

Might a further stock price dip mean yet more activist investors coming aboard? It seems arguable that returning to the combative days of 2022 is the last thing Salesforce Founder and CEO Marc Benioff needs right now, when all efforts seem to be steering towards making Agentforce as big a success as it can be.

Salesforce’s Q1 FY26 revenue was $9.8B, representing an 8% rise Y/Y and CC; Q2 revenue was $10.2B, up 10% Y/Y and 9% in CC. Those figures are decent, but Salesforce had forecast Q3 revenue below Wall Street estimates – between $10.24B and $10.29B, with the midpoint coming below analysts’ average estimate at the time of $10.29B, according to LSEG data.  

Benioff had said at the time of his company’s Q2 results that Salesforce is “on track for fiscal 2026 to be a record year with nearly $15B in operating cash flow”. Impressive, yes, but when compared to other tech giants, the numbers do seem somewhat less impressive: 

• Earlier in November, ServiceNow recorded total Q3 revenue of $3.41B – 22% more than the previous year and $60M above the London Stock Exchange Group estimate.
• NVIDIA reported record Q3 revenue of $57B – beating estimates and representing a 22% rise from the previous quarter, and 62% from last year.
• Palantir revenue grew by 63% Y/Y (18% QoQ) to $1.181B, the company revealed in its Q3 financial results.

Of course, in a field of giants, it’s hard to stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. 

However, former Salesforce Co-CEO Bret Taylor only launched Sierra – alongside former Google executive Clay Bavor – in February 2024, and earlier this week, we reported how the enterprise agent startup has officially surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue, representing one of the fastest ARR ramp-ups in recent enterprise software history.

Salesforce Ben Founder Ben McCarthy said: “Sierra has just hit $100M in revenue… Surely with Salesforce’s army of 75,000+ employees, and huge partner ecosystem, they should be growing way faster than Sierra?”

But, amid the release of the Salesforce Q2 results, analysts had claimed that investors might feel “frustration” in regards to the timeline for getting adequate returns on AI investments.

Ben added: “What Wall Street and the industry really want to see is an AI product that works and is being adopted.”

Going All in on Agentforce

In the age of AI, seeing results for Agentforce is really the only thing that matters for Salesforce in the long term. 

Beyond the obvious factors like revenue, investors will likely want to see meaningful growth in Agentforce deals. Salesforce appears to be wagering its existence on the success of Agentforce, and so it’s not too big a leap to say those wagering their capital on Salesforce will want to start seeing some serious results. 

Salesforce has been keen to highlight Agentforce wins in its fiscal results, including, most recently, ‘Data Cloud and AI’ annual recurring revenue over $1.2B, up 120% YoY; more than 12,500 Agentforce deals closed since launch, of which more than 6,000 are paid; and Agentforce handling more than 1.4M requests on help.salesforce.com.

With Salesforce’s recent pivot to consumption-based pricing, no Agentforce adoption means no Agentforce revenue. But it could be argued that Data 360 – which is also consumption-based – has been growing nicely, so perhaps it’s simply a matter of time before Agentforce follows suit.

In April, we reported how Salesforce’s Chief Financial Officer, Amy Weaver, said the company expects “modest” sales of Agentforce over the following year and that the company’s overall sales would rise 7% to 8% – its slowest ever growth rate.

At Dreamforce 2025, Benioff was grilled over the arguably low adoption of Agentforce, with 12,000 adoptions from 150,000 customers equating to a rate of around 8%. Benioff said: “It’s the fastest-growing product in our history. There’s never been a faster-growing product.”

The CEO stressed that large enterprises, which represent many of their customers, take time to make architectural changes for such deep enterprise technology, and the product was only fully released at the end of October 2024, making the 11-month adoption period impressive.

One might be tempted to make the counterpoint that OpenAI projects that by 2030, 8.5% of an estimated 2.6B weekly users (around 220M people) will subscribe to its chatbot, positioning ChatGPT among the world’s largest subscription businesses.

The Information reported in September that OpenAI generated around $4.3B in revenue in the first half of 2025 – about 16% more than it generated all of last year – and OpenAI expects to generate about 20% of its revenue from new products like shopping- and advertising-driven features. 

It should be noted that ChatGPT, unlike Salesforce, requires zero implementation, so it’s hardly an apples-to-apples comparison. But when investors are looking to see results, the number of users might be one of the most important factors they consider. 

The most important thing people need to look out for next week, in my opinion, is how rapidly the number of Agentforce customers (free and paid) is increasing, with an honorable mention for Data Cloud revenue and consumption.  

Final Thoughts

While Salesforce is still a healthy company that is growing nicely and is profitable, the business continues to market itself as an industry leader. In the world of CRM, this is undeniable, but as the company seems to tilt more towards the realm of AI, the claim of industry leadership is a little harder to justify. 

We’re often told that AI (and, by implication, Agentforce) is the future. It might be trite to say, but with other tech titans reporting unfathomable success in their own quarterly results, Salesforce needs to turn Agentforce into the present. Everything is riding on this. 

It’s been said that Salesforce has somewhat lost touch in recent years, which was emphasized at Dreamforce with a question to Co-Founder Parker Harris. But this is not Salesforce’s first rodeo. Can we really count Marc Benioff and the CRM titan out of the AI race already? Or would it be foolish to bet against such an incredible 26-year success story?