Salesforce shares edged higher on Monday after CEO Marc Benioff detailed a plan to channel nearly $300 million into Anthropic token usage in 2026, signaling a deepening commitment to AI-driven enterprise automation. The stock closed up 3.44% at $179.73, recovering some of its year-to-date losses, as investor fears about AI rendering legacy SaaS companies obsolete began to ease.
The heavy spending on Anthropic’s Claude and other AI models is targeted at coding workloads and internal development. Benioff noted that AI tools have boosted production-ready code output by roughly 30%, shifting bottlenecks to testing and review. Salesforce is maintaining a multi-model strategy, using OpenAI, Google Gemini, GitHub Copilot, and its own CodeGen alongside Anthropic, aiming to avoid vendor lock-in while offering enterprise clients flexibility.
Meanwhile, Salesforce’s Agentforce platform is gaining real traction. The AI agent builder and companion Data Cloud now generate $2.9 billion in annual recurring revenue, with Agentforce alone reaching $800 million—up 169% year-over-year. Over 60% of new bookings came from existing customers, suggesting strong product stickiness. The Q4 results reinforced the narrative: subscription revenue grew 13% YoY, and non-GAAP EPS jumped 37%.
The recent upswing was also supported by broader sector optimism. Figma reported 46% revenue growth with early AI monetization, and ServiceNow announced an AI partnership with Experian, countering the “SaaS Rout of 2026” narrative. Despite a 29% year-to-date decline, Salesforce trades at just 12.7x forward earnings—a 40% discount to the software sector average—prompting Wall Street’s Moderate Buy consensus with a $260.48 average price target.
