Salesforce Q3 2024 Earnings: 5 Things To Know

Salesforce Agentforce progress, Microsoft competition and enterprise technology spending indicators heading into 2025 are topics likely to be covered in today’s fiscal 2025 third quarter earnings call.

Salesforce Agentforce progress, Microsoft competition and enterprise technology spending indicators heading into 2025.

These are some of the major subjects expected to come up Tuesday during Salesforce’s quarterly earnings call for the three months ended Oct. 30.

Cloud application giant Salesforce, which has about 12,000 partners worldwide, reported $9.33 billion in fiscal 2025 second-quarter revenue in August, an increase of 9 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange.

Salesforce Q3 Earnings Preview

Multiple reports from investment firms reviewed by CRN suggest Salesforce should meet revenue expectations of around $9.31 billion for the fiscal 2025 third quarter, which would mark a 7 percent increase year over year.

The firms also expect Salesforce to keep its expected guidance of $37.7 billion to $38 billion for all of fiscal 2025, which would mean year-over-year increases of 8 percent to 9 percent.

Here’s more on what you can expect during Salesforce’s earnings call for the third quarter.

Agentforce Updates

Tuesday’s call will give Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his team a chance to update the world on traction Agentforce, the company’s AI agents offering, which became generally available in October.

Multiple investment firm reports said to expect more customer demand with Agentforce in the summer of 2025 as the vendor works on more AI integrations throughout its product portfolio.

In November, Salesforce introduced agentic lifecycle management tools to automate Agentforce testing, prototype agents in secure sandbox environments, manage agent usage at scale and other activities to simplify Agentforce adoption.

Potential obstacles to Agentforce adoption are its complex pricing structure – which includes $2 per conversation and up to $10 for human cost per interaction, legal and compliance scrutiny around conversational AI responses, plus higher data consumption costs from AI bots, according to KeyBanc.

A December report by Wedbush put Salesforce’s annual revenue increase from monetizing AI in its installed base at more than $4 billion. “While this will not happen overnight, the AI monetization story at CRM will be a key growth catalyst for the tech stalwart over the coming years,” according to the report.

Agentforce: A Partner Opportunity

During the vendor’s Dreamforce conference in September, Salesforce introducedan Agentforce Partner Network to bring systems integrators and other partner business models to the go-to-market (GTM) effort.

Some of the earliest Agentforce Partner Network members include 2024 CRN Solution Provider 500 members Accenture, Capgemini and Slalom, along with Deloitte Digital and PwC.

Analyst reports citing feedback from Salesforce partners paint a mixed bag on Agentforce adoption so far. In a November report investment firm KeyBanc said it has heard from some partners that “it has become tougher doing business with Salesforce, as AI initiatives are being pressured to the channel.”

Other partners “are bullish on the prospect of what Agentforce could be, but until the product is released to a broader set of the company's clouds, the impact on financials remains unknown.”

“Nearly every partner we spoke with has fully bought in and believes in the value creation opportunities for customers,” according to KeyBanc. “Customers are paying partners and deploying Agentforce, but it seems for simpler use cases, for now.”

The firm noted increased funding from Salesforce for systems integrators for creating customer proofs of concepts starting in October. “Partners are cautiously optimistic on the opportunity for the demand environment to improve into CY25/FY26 benefiting from less political uncertainty after the election and better understanding of GenAI plans to convert” proofs of concept into deals, according to Morgan Stanley.

Microsoft Competition

Benioff and his team at Salesforce do not mince words when comparing Salesforce’s AI products and capabilities against those of rival Microsoft. And it’s likely the CRM application giant will make more comparisons on Tuesday’s call.

On the fiscal second quarter earnings call, Benioff said Microsoft’s AI “has disappointed so many customers.” During Dreamforce 2024, Benioff attackedMicrosoft’s business practices and the quality of AI results generated by ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Executives with Salesforce have positioned the vendor as the world’s true enterprise AI platform due in part to the data customers house in its portfolio of products – data needed by AI to unlock tailored insights.

Salesforce leadership may keep up the barrage of attacks against Microsoft on Tuesday’s call, especially now that Microsoft has been touting its investments in AI agents for customers, including the general availability of AI agents inside SharePoint, announced at Ignite 2024.

A November report by Melius Research said Microsoft’s AI agents could serve as “the onramp for agent creation for the masses” and remove the need for users to access CRM applications. Microsoft “may turn out to be the AI interface/gateway of choice for enterprises given its digital real estate and enhanced security capabilities,” according to the firm.

Tableau Updates

Salesforce will likely provide an update on its Tableau data visualization product, which starting in February will have a new Tableau Einstein Alliance partner community.

Tableau Einstein, a reworked version of the data analytics platform Salesforce bought in 2019, already includes 25 initial members in the community, with CRN 2024 Solution Provider 500 members Capgemini, IBM Consulting and Slalom Consulting among them.

Tableau Einstein was unveiled in September, with some of its services already available through the Tableau+ premium offer and plans to make Tableau Einstein a stand-alone product as well as an integrated part of existing Salesforce offerings, according to the vendor. Salesforce has about 12,000 partners worldwide.

Cloud Product Performances

Salesforce partners sell products across the vendor’s entire portfolio and so Tuesday’s expected updates on other Salesforce offerings including Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud will be important for partners’ businesses.

Salesforce has also positioned Data Cloud as an enabler of AI use cases, perhaps meaning greater demand awaits as partners unlock more AI customers for the vendor.

A November report from Bank of America said that surveys with channel partners showed “steady growth” in the Sales, Marketing and Service clouds and outperformance in health care, life sciences, financial services and government.

Morgan Stanley said that Salesforce’s Marketing and Commerce clouds have seen weakened demand for partners, according to a November report. Service and Data clouds have seen strong demand.