Look at this stock at Salesforce right after the close. The cloud software kingpin reported a gigantic blowout quarter, also rolled out a major expansion of their partnership with Anthropic, where they'll be embedding their customer relationship management software in Anthropic's Claude. Wall Street was terrified that companies like Salesforce would be eaten alive by AI competition, but this partnership puts these worries to bed, maybe permanently. Earlier this afternoon, I got to speak with Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff and Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei about their new partnership on Closing Bell: Overtime. But now I want to bring Marc Benioff to go into more detail on his amazing quarter. Marc, welcome back to Mad Money.
Jim, it is always great to be with you, and welcome and thank you from San Francisco.
All right, let's just go right to it, Marc. This was a fantastic second-half acceleration guidance moment because that's what people are worried about: is it going to accelerate? Tell us how come you're able to accelerate the way we had hoped.
Jim, you know, this SaaS-pocalypse narrative has been such nonsense. I mean, I've heard you say it yourself many times, and here you can see, Jim: net new AOV growth is the strongest in four years. Skeptics said seats would decline, Jim, and Agentforce Sales and Service and Slack all grew seats year-over-year. Skeptics said customers are going to leave, and attrition is near its lowest level ever. And Jim, skeptics said pricing power would erode, and here we are with our A1 and A4X bundles, bookings more than doubled quarter-over-quarter. And Jim, contract length terms improved across all segments, new business and renewals. Agentic use of the platform has surged six times—six times, Jim, because agents are using more Salesforce than ever via our Model Context Protocol calls, and apps are not dying; they are growing. Nine out of the top ten AI companies—most of them are within one block of us here, as you're going to see at Dreamforce, Jim—nine out of those top ten AI companies use Salesforce and Slack. Their spend, Jim: 435% year-over-year growth. Frontier models depend on CRM; they don't replace it. You just heard from Dario, the CEO of Anthropic, the number one AI in the world, how he's standardized on Salesforce. He uses it every day, and now together, we've built ClaudeForce so you can build the next generation of enterprise apps.
Some of the nonsense I heard—let's say while we're on a roll here, let's defeat all the nonsense people say: Slack's not working that well. This was blowout Slack.
Jim, I can't describe the success of Slack. It's like nothing I've ever seen in the industry. We saw some triple-digit bookings growth from Slack in the quarter, but you can see the numbers are just awesome. And it's because every new company in AI is built on Slack. We've also got some great replacements. I was just with one of our customers, Nike—great company, I love the products, I use them every day myself—they're standardized on Slack. General Motors: standardized on Slack. We're having just tremendous success with Slack all over the place. Incredible.
Now, these new customers are quite exciting. Look, we could start with FIFA because World Cup just happened, Cisco, Sysco climb because they're the largest—
Also standardized on Slack.
Exactly. But I want to mention one that many of our viewers use, and I think they're going to be surprised that you and Robinhood have teamed up, which I knew from the very beginning it could happen, but now it is a reality.
And I'll tell you about Robinhood. Well, first of all, you know how I feel that Vlad is very much the Steve Jobs of our time in financial services. I have never met an entrepreneur quite like that before. I've known him for a long time. And you may remember he went through a horrible crisis, but it transformed him. He became a great executive. And yes, he standardized on Salesforce and he uses Slack as well. And, you know, I have a huge amount of respect for him and the company and everything he's doing. It's so exciting. And I'll tell you, it's not just Robinhood in financial services; it's many other companies as well who have all made these deep commitments to Salesforce, like JPMorgan, like Bank of America. All of the largest financial institutions are built on Salesforce.
Department of the Army, on top of Veterans... well, these are very big contracts.
All 15 US agencies use Salesforce. And you're right, the Army runs it, and we're also rebuilding the IRS as well. I mean, there's huge opportunities for efficiency and automation inside the US government, and the idea that we can start to take and advance some of those older systems and update them to kind of these AI-based systems like Salesforce is a tremendous opportunity for the US government. I could not be more excited. You know, the Secretary of the Army took me aside and he said, "I have completed my recruiting four months early because of Salesforce." So not only do they have human—
Hit his numbers four months early. It's very hard to do.
Because not only does he have human agents, but he also has AI agents, so he's able to recruit more people than ever before. And now Human Resources Command in the Army, they expect to drive 55 million Agentforce conversations every single month. Now, 55 million, Jim—I mean, that's "Be all you can be."
I like that. Yeah, you're an army of one yourself, Marc. Now, the one thing when I listen to these contracts, the first thing I think of is it can't just be your silo. It can't just be sales. You must be taking share inside the organization from some of these other companies that maybe really are a little more capitalized.
Well, Jim, I'm super excited about the success of Salesforce's ITSM product. What we're doing in IT systems is very exciting. We have more than 450 companies now on Salesforce's ITSM offering, and we had a huge conversion this month from ServiceNow, from McAfee. So I think we're going to have a lot more as well to talk about, but we're very excited in ITSM. And service overall is a huge area. I've done more than 5 million autonomous service completions myself using Agentforce. Jim, if you just look at help.salesforce.com, you can see that. And for the 5 million that I completed, well, 2.5 million that required humans were auto-escalated from the AI agent right into the human call center. That's really the way it should happen. That was really a powerful moment for me, pretty amazing that this is really working now.
Speaking of really working, we had a chance to speak with Dario earlier. This is Anthropic. A lot of people feel like the reason why they were afraid of being in Salesforce was because of Anthropic. I think what they should be afraid of is being in a company that is not Salesforce, because this does sound like a very good tie-up. I know it's the first of many. I know that it's not necessarily exclusive, but it's going to be very additive in the future because you might not have those customers otherwise.
