Salesforce Q1 2026 Earnings Preview: 5 Things To Know

Salesforce should see about 10.4 percent cRPO (current remaining performance obligation) growth year over year, ignoring foreign exchange, according to a Bank of America report.

Updates to Agentforce’s performance, evolving pricing options for artificial intelligence, and another reported attempt to buy Informatica.

These are some of the topics expected to come up during Salesforce’s latest quarterly earnings report Wednesday. CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff and his team will cover earnings for the three months ended April 30.

Salesforce should see about 10.4 percent growth year over year, ignoring foreign exchange, in its current remaining performance obligation, according to a Bank of America report in May. (Current remaining performance obligation measures the total value of contracted revenue yet to be recognized.) The firm expects second fiscal quarter cRPO growth to decelerate to about 9.5 percent–with new Salesforce Chief Operating and Financial Officer (COFO) Robin Washington potentially taking a conservative approach to the 2026 fiscal year.

Salesforce Q1 2026

Still, the company sees any “weakness” in the results as temporary, calling Salesforce “ahead of the AI agent curve” with its Data Cloud product pulling in $900 million of annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the prior quarter, more than double year over year.

Agentforce could add 1 to 2 percentage points of incremental growth over the next one or two years, grow Salesforce’s total addressable market (TAM) and contribute to a durable growth rate in the low- or mid-teens, according to Bank of America.

The vendor’s channel chief revealed to CRN that efforts to grow Salesforce’s partner ecosystem have resulted in reaching about 16,000 partners, 9,000 of them in consulting—more than 30 percent growth in total partners and around 50 percent growth in consulting partners compared with last summer.

Here’s what you need to know ahead of Salesforce’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday.

Economic Impact, Channel Feedback

Boding well for Salesforce’s Wednesday report is “better than feared” first calendar quarter 2025 results from other software vendors, Morgan Stanley said in a report this month. That, plus most topline revenue growth for Salesforce comes from renewals over net-new customers.

Major IT vendors–including Snowflake, IBM, ServiceNow and Microsoft–reported little demand impact so far from tariff negotiations, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and other economic considerations. But these factors “could create drags on demand at some point,” according to the firm.

Salesforce may face more difficult timing compared to other vendors, with global volatility growing in April as the vendor was closing its quarter.

Multiple analyst reports pointed to channel partners seeing longer sales cycles and more cautious buying by customers due to economic uncertainty.

Some partners “noted slow decision making and some pushing out of deal closures leading to modest downward revisions in the full-year outlook,” according to Morgan Stanley. Nonprofit sector customers in particular see cautious spending due to cuts at the U.S. federal government and manufacturers hit by tariff uncertainty.

Partners said they saw “modestly below expectations across the board,” but assuming tariff negotiations eventually settle down, that “deal slippage” could show up in later quarters and boost Salesforce’s financial outlook, according to Morgan Stanley.

Agentforce Updates

Salesforce executives on the call will likely have updates on how the Agentforce AI agent creation and deployment platform is performing with customers. In the lead up to the earnings call, Salesforce introduced a version of Agentforce for health care, financial services and other regulated industries.

The vendor also revealed role-based governance and protocols to meet regulated industries’ strict rules. Morgan Stanley said in a Thursday report that by pushing deeper into life sciences by partnering with system integrators, Salesforce “is building a credible case to be a formidable competitor” against the likes of Veeva Systems, a provider of applications for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries.

Customer data is still not in a state for agents to “do anything valuable,” which has been the case for months, KeyBanc said in a report Wednesday. The firm found that real use cases have been forming in retail and customer service, but industries such as financial services still need data work.

“Eventually, this data issue should turn the corner, and we want to be there for it, but we totally understand if you're reading this and wondering, ‘When will you tell me something new?’” according to the report.

Morgan Stanley, in a May report, struck a more positive tone on Agentforce, saying its product cycle is “accelerating Salesforce’s ‘at bats’ to expand contract value with customers.”

Channel partners told the firm that despite “a more muted Q1 performance,” Agentforce deals were “active and advancing, with customers realizing durable cost benefits,” according to Morgan Stanley. About 20 percent of clients interact with Agentforce, still in initial pilots and proofs of concept (POCs). Once in production, Agentforce adoption lifted average contract value about 15 percent to 25 percent.

AI Pricing Options

Various vendors are experimenting with different pricing options for their AI products, with Salesforce no exception.

Analysts on Wednesday’s call may seek more information on Salesforce’s pricing strategy and customer feedback–with a common customer concern being what happens to costs when agents act autonomously and execute potentially billable actions on their own.

The vendor offers at least three ways to buy Agentforce, including $2 per conversation, a 10-cent “Flex Credit” per action option and, coming in the summer, an employee-facing agent with unlimited usage per user, per month. Salesforce has also said that customers can swap between credits and seats as they experiment with AI products and cost models.

“Partners have indicated the total price does not seem to be the main hurdle to overcome for testing and adopting; rather, complexity around pricing, employee adoption, and tracking the right data seem to be a bottleneck,” according to the Wednesday KeyBanc report.

Morgan Stanley’s May report saw the 10-cent Flex Credits as a positive that “should better align Agent pricing to outcomes completed and therefore value derived from the solution suite, which could accelerate broader adoption ahead.”

Salesforce rival Microsoft, in another example of an AI vendor introducing multiple payment options, plans to introduce in June a billing model for GitHub Copilot that incorporates “premium requests.” Some of Microsoft’s AI products remain per-license, and some are consumption-based.

M&A Strategy

Leading up to the earnings call, Salesforce revealed an agreement to buy England-based AI agent startup Convergence.ai to boost Agentforce’s capabilities and Bloomberg reported that Salesforce is trying yet again to buy data management tech developer Informatica.

Salesforce didn’t disclose the terms of the Convergence deal but said to expect a closing date in the second quarter of the 2026 fiscal year.

Executives on the call may go deeper into the acquisition and Salesforce’s M&A strategy. The deal reflects startup attitude toward Salesforce as “an excellent distribution network for that technology to proliferate” and scale, according to a KeyBanc report in May.

Analysts could seek information on where Salesforce is investing in organic innovation compared to where the vendor feels better off buying.

Salesforce’s leadership team may also have updates on the integrations and sales performances of recent acquisitions–unstructured data management provider Zoomin and data protection and data management tools provider Own Co. Both deals closed in November.

The vendor ended fiscal 2025 on Jan. 31 with $8.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents, according to Salesforce.

Cross-Platform Sales, Growing Competition

Salesforce execs have discussed publicly efforts to increase customer purchases of products across the vendor’s portfolio, an area where solution providers can help. Analysts may seek information on progress in that endeavor.

Agentforce could see a ripple effect with customers buying Data Cloud to better aggregate structured and unstructured data from disparate sources combined with Salesforce’s industry-focused products, according to multiple reports from analyst firms leading up to the call.

Salesforce partners believe the Sales and Service clouds performed as expected during the quarter, according to Morgan Stanley. Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Tableau and MuleSoft showed more mixed performances during the quarter.

Sales Cloud has seen total subscription growth between 9 percent and 10 percent and should generate about $7.9 billion in subscription revenue this fiscal year. Bank of America thinks the number could accelerate to 12 percent, according to a May report by the firm.

Sales Cloud has about 25 percent share of the $39 billion customer relationship management (CRM) industry, which it should hold through at least 2027. The vendor sees competition including Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot and Zoho gaining share, but Salesforce “will be able to sustain the leading position due to its product and platform strength,” according to Bank of America.

Salesforce might see more competition from ServiceNow in CRM, with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott saying on his most recent quarterly earnings call that CRM was in 16 of the vendor’s top 20 deals of the quarter. In April, ServiceNow said it plans to boost its CRM offer with the acquisition of AI‑powered configure, price, quote (CPQ) tool provider Logik.ai.

“We believe strongly that our massive capabilities have emboldened us to go after CRM in a differentiated way,” McDermott said, according to a call transcript.

Although Salesforce is the larger company with $35.7 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue, compared to ServiceNow’s $10.6 billion for its fiscal year ended Dec. 31, Melius Research said in a May report not to underestimate the smaller vendor. “Agentic AI is fueling the motivation to move faster horizontally to create capabilities to infringe on others' turf,” according to the report. “Given agents work for you without interacting with your familiar interface, you can move fast horizontally to take share.”