Is it justified? Is the world ending?

Salesforce just reported second-quarter results and, as usual, the numbers are like a Marc Benioff keynote: part rock concert, part séance, part fever dream about AI.

The company raked in $10.2 billion in revenue — up 10% year over year — while its AI and Data Cloud division doubled recurring revenue.

You’d think Wall Street would celebrate by throwing cloud-shaped confetti. Instead, investors reacted like Salesforce just tried to upsell them an extra Slack license: unimpressed.

CNBC called it an “extended stretch of meager revenue growth.”

Translation: the Street wants 25% growth, not a healthy-but-boring 10%.

Meanwhile, Benioff went on CNBC declaring that Salesforce has already “replaced 4,000 customer service roles with AI,” which is one way to say “we built Agentforce, but also, good luck explaining that to regulators.”

Still, while the stock dipped, it’s worth noting that Salesforce has been through this cycle before: Workflow skeptics, Apex confusion, Flow headaches… and now the AI panic.

And yet, like the Tower of Benioff looming over San Francisco, the company remains firmly planted.

Why Salesforce is still the market leader (even when Wall Street pouts):

• Sales Cloud still prints money. The OG platform for sales automation remains the system of record for thousands of companies who couldn’t even spell “pipeline hygiene” without it.
• Service Cloud is the sticky glue. Customer support operations run on it — and now Agentforce gives every support rep a little AI intern, whether they asked for one or not.
• CPQ Cloud keeps the cash flowing. Complex quotes, approvals, renewals — the kind of stuff Excel melts under — Salesforce automates so enterprises can sell without crying.
• Agentforce is the next chapter of workflow automation. From Workflows → Apex → Flows → Agentforce, Salesforce has always been in the business of automating repetitive work. Agentforce is just the AI-native evolution, embedding large language models into the same trust-and-compliance wrapper Salesforce has sold for decades.

💡 Takeaway: Wall Street may be gloomy, but Salesforce’s empire isn’t built on vibes — it’s built on recurring revenue, sticky clouds, and a 20-year habit of making boring enterprise workflows just automated enough to keep the C-suite paying.