(Reuters) -Salesforce beat Wall Street estimates for third-quarter revenue on Tuesday and raised the lower end of its annual revenue forecast, helped by robust spending on its enterprise cloud portfolio, sending its shares up 7% in extended trading.
Client spending on Salesforce (NYSE:)’s software products and data cloud has remained healthy as companies seek to streamline and enhance their corporate workflows and process large quantities of data while integrating artificial intelligence.
The company’s revenue for the third quarter rose 8% to $9.44 billion, beating the average analyst estimate of $9.35 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Salesforce has been betting big on its new Agentforce product to help reinvigorate growth rates, joining other tech companies such as Microsoft (NASDAQ:) in developing AI agents that can autonomously complete tasks.
The Agentforce platform is underpinned by the company’s data cloud which continues to perform strongly and is the fastest growing organic product in its history, the company said in August.
Rivals such as data analytics provider Snowflake (NYSE:) and software firm ServiceNow (NYSE:) gave upbeat revenue forecasts, reflecting the burgeoning demand for AI software services and growing client budgets.
Salesforce now expects revenue between $37.8 billion and $38 billion, compared with its prior forecast range of $37.7 billion to $38 billion.
It also nudged up its forecast for full-year operating margin to 19.8% from 19.7%.
On an adjusted basis, Salesforce earned $2.41 per share, beating estimates of $2.44.
