AI application "Bull Market Narrative" further strengthened! Intelligent entity leverages Salesforce, Inc. (CRM.US) for a new round of growth curve.

Focus on customer relationship management software (CRM) field, the US cloud software giant Salesforce, Inc. (CRM.US) announced its performance report for the third quarter of the 2026 fiscal year ending on October 31, as well as future outlooks on early Thursday morning Beijing time. The financial data shows that AI intelligent agents are helping the company achieve a new round of growth trajectory, with actual performance for Q3 and outlook for the current quarter and the full fiscal year 2026 stronger than Wall Street analysts' expectations, driving the stock price to surge over 8% in after-hours trading on the US stock market. Salesforce, Inc.'s strong growth performance and future outlook highlight the bullish narrative of the stock market AI application software sector, experiencing another deep reinforcement, as AI applications are showing comprehensive explosive growth on both the enterprise and consumer sides. In terms of the performance outlook that global investors are focusing on, Salesforce, Inc.'s management has given guidance for revenue for the current quarter higher than the average expectations of Wall Street analysts, indicating the success of the software company in convincing its large customers to purchase its AI application tools and the "AI intelligent agents" that the company has been strongly investing in this year. In a performance statement released on Wednesday local time, the company expects total revenue for the quarter ending in January to reach between $11 billion and $11.2 billion, surpassing the average analyst expectation of about $10.9 billion. The company expects the remaining performance obligations (cRPO) for the quarter to increase by approximately 15%, while analysts had previously expected an increase of 10%. For the quarter ending in January, after excluding certain items, the adjusted earnings per share range is expected to be $3.02 to $3.04, slightly higher than the average analyst expectation of $3.03 per share. For the full fiscal year 2026 ending in January, the company's management expects the adjusted operating profit margin to be around 34%, with the full fiscal year adjusted earnings per share range at $11.75 to $11.77. The company's management raised its revenue expectations for the full fiscal year to a range of $41.45 billion to $41.55 billion, indicating a potential growth of 9% to 10% in total revenue for the full fiscal year, which is mostly consistent with the average Wall Street expectations. This quarter's revenue forecast includes a 3% growth contribution from Informatica. Informatica is a data integration software manufacturer that Salesforce, Inc. acquired last month for $8 billion in a transaction. In terms of the outlook for the current remaining performance obligations, Informatica contributed 4 percentage points. In the third quarter of fiscal year 2026, the strong incremental growth driven by the "AI intelligent agents" of Agentforce led to a total revenue increase of 8.6% to $10.3 billion for Salesforce, Inc. After excluding certain items, the adjusted earnings per share were $3.25. According to data from institutions, both of these core data points are in line with the average Wall Street expectations. Analysts have recently been raising their average expectations for adjusted earnings per share to $2.86 and total revenue of around $10.3 billion due to the acquisition of Informatica, showing that Salesforce, Inc.'s latest performance is not inferior to the continuously rising market expectations. Salesforce, Inc.'s current remaining performance obligations for the third quarter stand at $29.4 billion, an increase of over 11% year-on-year, exceeding the average Wall Street analysts' expectations of around $29.1 billion. In the third quarter, the GAAP operating profit margin was 21.3%, and the non-GAAP operating profit margin was 35.5%. The company's operating cash flow for the quarter was approximately $2.3 billion, a 17% increase year-on-year; and free cash flow was around $2.2 billion, a 22% increase year-on-year. The company's two core product lines, sales and service cloud software platforms, both achieved revenue growth of 8% after currency adjustments, with subscription and support revenue reaching $9.7 billion in the third quarter, a 10% year-on-year increase, or 9% growth at fixed exchange rates. Citigroup analyst Tyler Radke wrote before the financial report that the company still faces significant competitive pressure from peers focusing on AI in its core products. AI application product lines like "AI intelligent agents" Agentforce are driving strong growth The world's largest customer relationship management software manufacturer is trying to push for the adoption of Agentforce - a proud AI intelligent agent tool that can perform tasks like sales expansion and precise customer service without human supervision. However, senior analyst Derrick Wood from TD Cowen wrote before the financial report that its use is still mainly limited to enterprise trial phases, partly due to large customers being confused about pricing and messy actual data. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised the adoption of this AI intelligent agent tool in the enterprise sector, stating, "Our Agentforce and Data 360 products are the core drivers of performance momentum." Agentforce was launched at the end of last year, and the company stated that since then, it has signed over 9,500 subscription fee transactions, up from 6,000 in the previous quarter. The company mentioned that the business segment that includes AI tools dominated by Agentforce, such as data governance and intelligent agent models, had an annual recurring revenue of approximately $1.4 billion in the quarter ending on October 31. Senior analysts Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard from Bloomberg Intelligence wrote in a report after the release of Salesforce, Inc.'s financial report that the outlook for the current remaining performance obligations indicates a lukewarm spending trend among enterprise clients. "However, the successful adoption scale of Agentforce and Data 360 makes us optimistic that these two flagship AI applications are poised to become a larger-scale sales growth driver starting from the second half of 2026," they wrote. After closing at $238.72 in the New York market, the stock surged by approximately 8% in after-hours trading. As of the Wednesday close, the stock had already fallen by 29% this year, mainly due to investors' increasing concerns that emerging AI application competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic will disrupt traditional software vendors. This is also the core logic behind Salesforce, Inc.'s continued strong emphasis on AI this year, aiming to fully integrate AI with its flagship cloud software products. Salesforce, Inc.'s current AI deep deployment plan focuses on establishing a foundation with "Data Cloud/Data 360" for AI applications, overlaying the innovative "Einstein AI platform + Agentforce AI intelligent agents," striving to embed strong AI modeling capabilities deeply into all business lines like Sales, Service, and Marketing within Salesforce, Inc. Using Data Cloud/Data 360 as the foundation and Einstein/Agentforce as the central components, the company aims to deeply integrate AI into every business scenario of Salesforce, Inc.'s "CRM suite." From a statistical perspective, Agentforce has generated over 9,500 paid transactions in just over a year, with related AI business ARR at approximately $1.4 billion, indicating that Salesforce, Inc. has moved beyond a "purely conceptual AI story" into a phase of generating actual revenue from AI applications. Salesforce, Inc. further reinforces the bullish narrative of the AI application software sector For the global stock market AI application sector, the bullish narrative logic, as demonstrated by Salesforce, Inc.'s performance and outlook, serves as a somewhat positive growth signal, validating the feasibility of the AI application story and preemptively heating up the potential accelerating growth trend in the post-2026 era. After Alphabet Inc. Class C launched the Gemini3 AI application ecosystem in late November, this cutting-edge AI application software quickly gained popularity around the world, driving a sudden surge in AI computing demand for Alphabet Inc. Class C. Upon its release, the Gemini3 product series brought an incredibly large volume of AI token processing, prompting Alphabet Inc. Class C to significantly reduce free access to Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, and temporarily restrict access for Pro subscription users, in addition to recent Korean trade export data showing a continuous strong demand for HBM storage systems and enterprise-level SSDs. This further validates the early stage of construction of the "AI application acceleration penetration period and the ongoing AI frenzy" due to the undersupply of AI computing infrastructure. Therefore, Salesforce, Inc.'s strong financial data and performance outlook signify a deep reinforcement of the bullish narrative of the AI application software sector. As the global technology stock investment trend extends to both the AI computing infrastructure side and the AI application software side, companies like Applovin, Trade Desk, Duolingo, and Palantir specializing in AI applications have seen significant valuation boosts, indicating that killer-level generative AI applications covering various industries in both the B2B and B2C space, as well as the highly likely explosive growth of "AI intelligent agents" that could greatly increase human societal productivity, are imminent. This explains the recent influx of global funds into software stocks. Previously, leaders in cloud computing and search engine sectors such as Alphabet Inc. Class C, leaders in "AI + digital advertising" like Applovin, leaders in "AI + data analysis" like Palantir, and the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, have all announced incredibly strong financial data and future performance outlooks this year. This not only indicates a strong demand for AI computing infrastructure represented by NVIDIA Corporation's AI GPUs, but also a similarly strong demand for enterprise-level AI application software that can significantly improve operating efficiency and reduce operational costs, permeating across various industries. From the current technological trajectory, the development direction of AI application software is focused on "generative AI application software" (such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Sora, and Claude introduced by Anthropic which are globally popular AI application software solutions), and the shift from AI functions based on chatbot-style question-answer interactions to "autonomous AI agents capable of performing various tedious and complex tasks." Companies are urgently pushing forward the widespread application of the two core categories of AI application software - generative AI applications and AI intelligent agents - to enhance efficiency and reduce operational costs. The emergence of AI intelligent agents is likely to be the major trend in AI applications by 2030, as it signifies the transition of artificial intelligence from an information tool to a highly intelligent productivity tool.