The AI application “Bull Market Narrative” has been strengthened again! Smart devices leverage a new round of CRM.US growth curve

Zhitong Finance App learned that US cloud software giant CRM.US (CRM.US), which focuses on the customer relationship management software (CRM) field, announced the results report and future outlook for the third fiscal quarter of the 2026 fiscal year ending October 31, Beijing time on Thursday morning. According to financial data, AI intelligence is helping the company's new round of performance growth trajectory. The actual Q3 results and outlook for the current fiscal season and the full fiscal year 2026 were better than Wall Street analysts' expectations, driving the stock price to rise more than 8% during post-market trading in the US stock market. Salesforce Inc. (Salesforce Inc.)'s strong growth performance and future prospects highlight that the “long-term bull market narrative” of the AI application software sector in the stock market has once again been further strengthened, and AI applications are fully exploding on the enterprise side and consumer side.

In terms of performance outlook guidance focused on by global investors, SAFTSE management gave guidance on revenue for the current fiscal quarter that was higher than the average expectations of Wall Street analysts. This shows that the software company successfully persuaded its huge customers to buy its AI application tools and the “AI intelligence” that the company has continued to increase its layout since this year.

The company said in a performance statement on Wednesday local time that the overall revenue for the fiscal quarter ending January next year is expected to reach 11.1 billion US dollars to 11.2 billion US dollars, exceeding the average expectations of Wall Street analysts of about 10.9 billion US dollars. The company expects bookings, as measured by the classic measure of “current remaining performance obligation” (CrPO), to increase by about 15%, compared to a 10% increase previously generally anticipated by analysts.

As of the fiscal quarter ending January, after excluding some items, the adjusted earnings per share range is expected to be between $3.02 and $3.04, which is slightly higher than analysts' average earnings of $3.03 per share.

For the entire 2026 fiscal year ending January, the company's management expects the adjusted operating margin to be about 34%, and the adjusted earnings range for the full fiscal year is $11.75 to $11.77. The company's management raised the revenue forecast range for the full fiscal year to $41.45 billion to $41.55 billion, that is, total revenue for the full fiscal year is expected to grow 9% to 10%, which is basically in line with Wall Street average expectations.

This quarterly revenue forecast includes a 3 percentage point increase from Informatica. Informatica, a manufacturer of data integration software, was acquired last month by Saflex in an $8 billion deal. Informatica contributed 4 percentage points to the current outlook for remaining performance obligations.

In the third fiscal quarter of fiscal year 2026, strong increments brought about by the “AI intelligence” Agentforce drove Safransit's total revenue growth of 8.6% to US$10.3 billion. Excluding some items, adjusted earnings per share were $3.25. According to data compiled by the agency, these two core figures are in line with Wall Street average expectations. Compared with analysts' recent average expectations due to the acquisition of Informatica, the adjusted earnings forecast is 2.86 US dollars per share, and the total revenue forecast is about 10.3 billion US dollars, which is enough proof that the latest SAFTSE performance is not inferior to market expectations that are constantly being revised upward.

SAFTSE's current remaining performance obligations for the third fiscal quarter were US$29.4 billion, up more than 11% year on year, higher than Wall Street analysts' average expectations of about US$29.1 billion. The operating margin for the third fiscal quarter under GAAP standards was 21.3% and the non-GAAP operating margin was 35.5%. The company's operating cash flow for the third fiscal quarter was approximately US$2.3 billion, up 17% year on year; free cash flow was about US$2.2 billion, up 22% year on year.

The company's two core product lines, the sales and service cloud software platform, both achieved an 8% increase in revenue after exchange rate adjustments. Subscription and support revenue for the third fiscal quarter reached 9.7 billion US dollars, which meant a 10% year-on-year increase and a 9% increase at a fixed exchange rate. Citibank analyst Tyler Radke wrote before the earnings report that the company “still faces tremendous competitive pressure from AI-focused peers” in its core products.

AI application product lines such as the “AI agent” AgentForce are growing rapidly across the board

The world's largest manufacturer of customer relationship management software is trying to drive adoption of AgentForce — an AI intelligence tool that it is proud of, capable of completing tasks such as sales expansion and accurate customer service without human supervision. However, Derrick Wood, a senior analyst from TD Cowen, wrote before the earnings report was released that its use is still mainly limited to the corporate trial stage, partly because large customers are confused about pricing and the actual data is cluttered.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff praised the actual adoption of this AI intelligence tool on the enterprise side. He said, “Our Agentforce and Data 360 products are the core drivers of performance momentum.”

Agentforce launched late last year, and the company said it has signed more than 9,500 paid subscription transactions since then, up from 6,000 in the previous quarter. According to the company, in the fiscal quarter ending October 31, the annual recurring revenue of business units dominated by Agentforce AI-related tools, including data governance and the smart agent model, was about 1.4 billion US dollars.

Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard, senior analysts from Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a report after the release of SAFTSE's earnings report that the outlook on current remaining performance obligations indicates that corporate customer spending is tepid. “However, the scale of successful adoption of Agentforce and Data 360 makes us optimistic that these two flagship products for AI applications are expected to drive larger sales growth starting in the second half of 2026,” they wrote.

After the New York market closed at $238.72, the stock rose sharply by about 8% in after-hours trading. By the close of trading on Wednesday, the stock price had dropped 29% this year, mainly due to growing concerns among investors that emerging AI application competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic will disrupt existing traditional application software vendors. This is also the core logic of Saifushi, which has continued to increase the layout of AI since this year, striving to fully integrate AI with its flagship cloud software products.

The core of Saifushi's AI in-depth layout plan is “Data Cloud/Data 360 lays the foundation for AI applications and superimposes the original Einstein AI platform + Agentforce AI agent”, striving to deeply embed strong AI model capabilities into Seflex's main cloud business lines such as Sales, Service, and Marketing; with Data Cloud/Data 360 as the foundation, and Einstein/Agentforce as the center. Embed AI deeply into every business scenario of Safran's “CRM Family Bucket”.

Judging from statistics, Agentforce has signed more than 9,500 paid transactions in more than a year since its launch, and the related AI business ARR is about 1.4 billion US dollars. This indicates that in this wave of AI applications, Safrus has moved from “telling AI stories from a pure concept” to the stage where AI revenue generation can be realized with real money.

The AI application layer's “bull market narrative” has been further strengthened by SEFTSE

As far as the bullish narrative logic of the AI application sector in the global stock market is concerned, Saifushi's performance and outlook is a positive growth signal, “verifying the viability of AI application stories + warming up the potential for accelerated growth trends after 2026 in advance.”

After Google launched the Gemini 3 AI application ecosystem in late November, this cutting-edge AI application immediately became popular all over the world, driving an instant surge in demand for Google's AI computing power. Once released, Gemini3 series products brought huge AI token processing capacity, forcing Google to drastically reduce the amount of free access to Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, and also imposed temporary restrictions on Pro subscribers. Combined with South Korea's recent trade export data, the demand for HBM storage systems and enterprise-grade SSDs continues to be strong, further verifying what Wall Street called “the period of accelerated penetration of AI applications and the AI boom is still in the early stages of construction where the supply of computing power infrastructure is in short supply.”

Therefore, Saifushi's strong performance data and performance outlook mean that the AI application software sector's “bull market narrative” has once again been strengthened in depth. As the focus of the global technology stock investment wave also covers the AI computing power infrastructure side and AI application software side, it continues to provide significant support to the valuation of AI application companies such as AppLovin, Trade Desk, Duolingo, and Palantir. In the future, killer generative AI applications covering all walks of life covering the B-side or C-side, and “AI agents” that are likely to greatly boost human social productivity are likely to explode. This is why global capital has recently poured into software stocks.

Previously, Google, a leader in cloud computing and search engines, AppLovin, an AI application leader focusing on “AI+ digital advertising,” Palantir, a leader in “AI+ data analysis,” and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, have all published extremely strong performance data and future performance prospects since this year. This means that not only is the demand for AI computing power infrastructure represented by Nvidia's AI GPUs extremely strong, but demand for AI software applications, especially enterprise-level AI application software that can comprehensively improve B-side operating efficiency, is also strong, and it is rapidly penetrating all walks of life.

Judging from the current technological trajectory, the development direction of AI application software is focused on “generative AI application software” (such as DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Sora, and Claude launched by Anthropic), and on the basis of generative AI, AI functions are shifting from chatbox-style question-and-answer to “AI agents that independently perform various complicated and complex tasks.” The urgent need for companies to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs can be described as vigorously promoting the two core categories of AI application software — generative AI applications and the widespread application of AI agents. Among them, AI agents are most likely a major trend in AI applications before 2030. The emergence of AI agents means that artificial intelligence is beginning to evolve from an information support tool to a highly intelligent productivity tool.