Salesforce came through in the clutch.
The enterprise software giant on Wednesday delivered better-than-expected results for its fiscal second quarter and issued guidance for the current period that makes good on the company’s pledge to reaccelerate into the end of the year
The one-two punch not only validates the once-struggling stock’s recent resurgence. It is also sending shares up 12% in extended trading, reaching levels last seen in late January — before the market’s concerns about artificial intelligence displacing traditional software vendors reached a fever pitch and sent their stocks into a tailspin. If this wasn’t enough, Salesforce on Wednesday announced a new product integration with Claude chatbot maker Anthropic, the very startup whose rapid technological advances this year fanned much of those AI disruption fears.
The tie-up should help some skeptical investors grow more confident that Salesforce — thanks to troves of proprietary customer data housed within its applications — has a role to play in this new AI world. Revenue in the three months ended in July totaled $11.35 billion, topping the LSEG consensus of $11.32 billion. On a year-over-year basis, revenue rose 9.9%.