Salesforce’s third quarter of fiscal 2026 is the kind of quarter that reinforces why the company remains the defining force in enterprise software. Revenue reached $10.3 billion, up 9% year over year (8% in constant currency), with subscription and support revenue hitting $9.7 billion, up 10%. Current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) climbed to $29.4 billion — up 11% — while total RPO rose to $59.5 billion, also up a solid 12%. These are healthy, broad-based numbers, especially given the mixed macro backdrop and the post-pandemic normalization of enterprise IT budgets.
Margins told an equally strong story: GAAP operating margin reached 21.3%, while non-GAAP operating margin surged to 35.5%, one of Salesforce’s strongest profitability profiles in its history. Cash flow was a highlight too, with operating cash flow up 17% year over year to $2.3 billion and free cash flow up 22% to $2.2 billion. This is the “profitable growth” Salesforce has been promising since its 2023 restructuring and cost discipline cycle — and they’re now delivering it consistently.
But the real headline, the one Wall Street is writing in bigger text than anything else, is AI. Marc Benioff didn’t hold back: Agentforce and Data 360 have hit nearly $1.4 billion in ARR, growing an explosive 114% year over year. Agentforce ARR alone is now more than half a billion dollars, up 330%. Salesforce has closed over 18,500 Agentforce deals since launch — with 9,500 being paid deals — and Agentforce has processed more than 3.2 trillion tokens through the company’s LLM gateway. That’s not experimentation. That’s production-scale enterprise AI adoption flowing through an ecosystem built on CRM, service workflows, and low-code automation.
Data 360 is generating equally impressive velocity: 32 trillion records ingested in Q3 (up 119%), including 15 trillion via Zero Copy (up 341%), and a massive 390% jump in unstructured data processed. The Informatica acquisition, now completed, deepens Salesforce’s data moat, pulling a full suite of catalog, governance, MDM, and privacy capabilities directly into the platform. The more data Salesforce can ingest, classify, govern, and connect, the more embedded its AI services become — and the more durable its ARR.
On guidance, Salesforce lifted its full-year revenue range to $41.45–$41.55 billion (9%–10% growth), reflecting both organic strength and roughly 80 basis points of Informatica contribution. GAAP operating margin is now expected to reach 20.3%, with non-GAAP operating margin steady at a strong 34.1%. Free cash flow and operating cash flow growth are expected to rise 13%–14% for the year. For Q4, Salesforce expects revenue of $11.13–$11.23 billion and cRPO growth of around 15% — including a notable 4-point boost from Informatica. In short, management is signalling controlled acceleration rather than a sudden surge.
From a stock-market angle, Salesforce sits in a very particular place. Investors have been rotating back into large-cap software with strong cash flow and durable ARR, and Salesforce checks every one of those boxes. But the stock has already rerated significantly since its post-2022 lows, and the market is now searching for the next breakout catalyst. That’s where AI fits in — but expectations are high. The Agentforce/Data 360 ARR explosion gives Salesforce a legitimate multi-billion-dollar AI runway, but investors will want to see this turn into accelerating subscription growth rather than just fast-growing adjacencies.
The financial setup going into 2026 is attractive: consistent margin expansion, buybacks (over $3.8 billion repurchased in Q3 alone), and dividends that reinforce shareholder-friendly discipline. The company’s “Profitable Growth Framework” target of 50 by FY30 — revenue growth + operating margin equalling 50 — sounds ambitious, but after watching GAAP operating margin clear 20% this quarter while maintaining high-single/low-double-digit growth, it no longer feels outlandish.
Still, Salesforce faces the same valuation tension that Snowflake and other AI-heavy names do: markets are no longer rewarding “steady.” They’re rewarding rapid acceleration. Salesforce is executing extremely well, but it isn’t re-accelerating top-line growth dramatically — at least not yet. If AI adoption continues at its current pace, and if Informatica quickly boosts multi-cloud data consolidation workflows, subscription growth could gradually bend higher over the next few quarters. That’s the bull case: AI as a meaningful long-term uplift to growth and margin.
For now, Salesforce exits Q3 with strong momentum, exceptionally fast-growing AI ARR, disciplined profitability, and a clearer multi-year pathway than most legacy software giants. It’s not a hypergrowth story — it’s a mature, highly profitable AI-first enterprise platform that is carving out a defensible role in the next phase of enterprise automation. Whether the stock breaks higher depends less on execution (which is solid) and more on whether the market starts believing this AI wave is big enough to lift Salesforce’s long-term growth curve meaningfully above the 9%–11% range it’s currently guiding.