Salesforce Q4 2025 Earnings Preview: Five Things To Know

Partners have been reporting positive early work around Salesforce's Agentforce AI platform, according to multiple investment firm reports issued in the lead-up to the earnings call.

Growth in artificial intelligence offers. A combination COO and CFO. And more insight into the post-DeepSeek AI market.

These are some of the subjects expected to come up Wednesday when Salesforce reports results for its fourth fiscal quarter ended Jan. 31.

Partners have been reporting positive early work around the San Francisco-based CRM vendor’s Agentforce AI platform, according to multiple investment firm reports issued in the lead-up to the earnings call. Salesforce has about 12,000 partners worldwide.

Salesforce Fourth-Quarter 2025

Still, the hiring of a combination CFO-COO could mean Salesforce delivers a conservative forecast for its 2026 fiscal year, multiple investment firms said.

Partners who spoke with Morgan Stanley said that they see budget scrutiny and extended deal cycles but are optimistic for demand improving with the U.S. presidential election over and generative AI deals moving from proof of concept to monetization.

“Salesforce’s position as a consolidator of front office data that is ripe for GenAI disruption and a sticky workflow application to expose new functionality positions the company in the right place for the shift towards Agentic Computing,” the investment firm said in a report Monday.

KeyBanc predicted in a Friday report that Salesforce reports less revenue for the quarter compared with the Wall Street consensus. The investment firm predicted $10.02 billion in revenue—representing 7.9 percent growth year over year—compared with the consensus’ $10.05 billion, representing 8.2 percent growth year over year.

The firm predicted 9 percent to 9.5 percent forecast subscription revenue growth, a slight deceleration from the prior fiscal year.

Here’s more of what to expect when Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his team report quarterly earnings Wednesday.

Salesforce Agentforce Updates

Benioff and his executives are very likely to give listeners an update on Agentforce and the vendor’s AI offerings, which have presented new opportunities for Salesforce and its channel.

Agentforce became generally available in October, and Salesforce should deliver version 3.0 around May.

Partners have reported optimistic outlooks on Agentforce and its effects on fiscal year 2026, marking this summer as when they’ll see results from customer AI execution and use cases, KeyBanc said in a report this month. Some partners have said that AI decisions are taking longer than expected.

“The world is telling customers that AI is akin to the discovery of fire, so the margin decision is much larger than the typical should-I-add-this-feature decisions that is typically made,” according to KeyBanc. Decisions around AI strategies “invariably bring in more parties and more decision makers and this does not lend itself to ink on paper in the near term.”

Partners have reported to KeyBanc the need for cost parameters to keep customers from burning through credits, the investment firm said. Those parameters could restrict Agentforce from its full potential.

Salesforce may provide more details around its pricing model for Agentforce, which is about $2 per interaction with variability based on interaction complexity and the AI model used. AI vendors have been experimenting with different ways to price AI, with Salesforce rival Microsoft making some offers consumption-based and others license-based.

KeyBanc praised Salesforce’s pricing model for potentially preventing power users “from bottlenecking margin expansion with scale for the longer term,” according to the firm.

Agentforce could add 2 percentage points of year-over-year subscription revenue growth to Salesforce’s second half, according to a January report by Bank of America. That could mean an incremental $675 million in Salesforce’s 2026 fiscal year and $1.6 billion in the 2027 fiscal year.

Washington Named New COO-CFO

On March 21, Salesforce board member Robin Washington takes on a combination chief operating and financial officer role, replacing CFO Amy Weaver—whose departure was announced last year—and COO Brian Millham, whose departure was announced this month.

Millham will retire May 1 and become an adviser. On past earnings calls, Millham—a 25-year veteran of the vendor—delivered details on customer demand trends and even updated listeners on the performance of Salesforce’s channel.

For example, on December’s earnings call, Millham said that global partners were involved in 75 percent of Agentforce deals in the quarter and nine of Salesforce’s top 10 wins in the quarter.

Benioff will likely use Wednesday’s call to highlight Millham’s work and introduce Washington. It is possible that Washington’s work will put her close to Salesforce’s channel.

Salesforce’s stock has fallen about 11 percent since it announced Millham’s departure.

Washington has served on Salesforce’s board since 2013. She has also served on the boards of Google parent Alphabet and Honeywell International and will stay on Salesforce’s board, but not as an independent director, according to the vendor.

Her resume includes about 12 years with Gilead Sciences, leaving as executive vice president and CFO in 2019, serving as an adviser until 2020. She served as CFO of Hyperion Solutions for about a year.

Washington’s selection and combining the COO and CFO roles came as a “surprise” to KeyBanc. Although “Washington's credentials are stellar,” according to the investment firm, her “most recent hands-on operating role ended over five years ago and was in healthcare, not technology.”

Washington’s years on the board could ease her transition into the role, William Blair said in a report this month. Overseeing sales and finance could mean “a streamlined leadership structure with more integration,” according to the investment firm.

DeepSeek AI Observations

This marks Salesforce’s first earnings call since China-based AI lab DeepSeek rocked the AI world by allegedly producing comparable offers at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI and other heavyweights.

Analysts could seek observations from Benioff and his team on what the technology means for Salesforce AI. Benioff has long dismissed AI models as commodities, with the data and metadata Salesforce’s wares handle “the new gold” in the AI era, better positioning Salesforce compared with others.

In a January report, Bank of America said that “DeepSeek has positive implications for AI names in the application layer,” including Salesforce Agentforce, Microsoft Copilot, ServiceNow Now Assistant and HubSpot’s Breeze AI.

“A lower cost of compute could bring down AI computing costs of sales and drive better margin on AI enabled offerings,” according to the investment bank. “More importantly, agentic application providers could pass savings on to enterprises via lower price, which could provide a catalyst for adoption/proliferation of agents.”

Systems integrators who have spoken with Bank of America have called cost “the biggest hurdle to adoption of AI applications,” according to the report.

However, Salesforce’s expected capital expenditures, which would represent about 2 percent of revenue for the 2025 fiscal year, is about the same year over year, suggesting that Salesforce doesn’t need “heavy AI infrastructure investment to support Agentforce,” according to KeyBanc.

Data Cloud, The Acquisitions

On Wednesday, Salesforce leaders will likely update listeners on customer demand for its Data Cloud data unification product and integration efforts with recently acquired Zoomin and Own Co. Both acquisitions were completed in November.

Calling Data Cloud “the backbone to Agentforce for enterprises with disparate data systems,” KeyBanc said that it is looking for improvement to the $400 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) and 90 percent growth year over year for Data Cloud Salesforce disclosed last year.

As for Salesforce subsidiaries Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack, KeyBanc called their quarterly performance “lackluster.”

Salesforce channel partners have reported “an uptick in Data Cloud deal attached to renewals for use with Agentforce,” according to a Bank of America report in January.

Partners have seen customer opportunities adopting Data Cloud with Agentforce or cross-selling opportunities with MuleSoft if the customer decides not to go with Data Cloud, Morgan Stanley reported on Monday. Partners saw strength in Salesforce’s industry clouds, Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, but saw weaker performance in the Marketing and Commerce clouds.

Salesforce, Google Deal

Wednesday’s earnings call is the first since Salesforce and Google revealed an expansion of their partnership that allows Salesforce Agentforce to use Google Gemini AI models, allowing Salesforce agents to work with images, audio and video as well as use real-time insight and answers grounded in Google Search with Vertex AI.

Salesforce leadership will likely talk up the partnership and what it means as they take on Microsoft in AI, CRM and productivity applications.

Salesforce getting closer with Google comes after strong criticisms from Benioff of Google rival Microsoft’s AI offerings and business practices.

As part of the deal, Salesforce Service Cloud will bring real-time voice translation, intelligent agent-to-agent handoffs, personalized agent recommendations, AI-driven conversational insight across all channels and other enhanced AI-enabled contact center capabilities through greater integration with Google Customer Engagement Suite.

Agentforce, Salesforce Data Cloud,and Customer 360 applications will run on Google Cloud infrastructure. Salesforce customers and partners will have access to new regions and procurement through Google Cloud Marketplace.