Salesforce’s third quarter of fiscal 2026 lands as a very “new Salesforce” kind of quarter: less about hyper-growth, more about disciplined profitability and early proof that its big bet on agentic AI is turning into real money. Revenue for the quarter reached $10.3 billion, up 9% year over year (8% in constant currency), with subscription and support at $9.7 billion, up 10%. That’s not the 20%+ growth era of old, but it’s exactly in the 8–10% range the company has been repositioning toward. What makes it interesting for investors is the combination of that slower, steadier growth with very strong profitability: GAAP operating margin came in at 21.3%, while non-GAAP operating margin reached 35.5%. Operating cash flow was $2.3 billion, up 17% year over year, and free cash flow hit $2.2 billion, up 22%. This is Salesforce behaving like a high-quality, cash-rich software incumbent rather than a “grow at any cost” story stock, and that’s very much by design.
The backlog picture backs up that quality narrative. Current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) stands at $29.4 billion, up 11% year over year, while total RPO is $59.5 billion, up 12%. In plain language, Salesforce has a large, growing book of contracted future revenue that is actually growing a bit faster than reported revenue. Management is guiding Q4 cRPO growth to around 15%, about 13% in constant currency, with roughly 4 percentage points of that coming from the Informatica acquisition. Strip that out and you still have low double-digit organic cRPO growth, which is perfectly fine if you’re underwriting this as a durable compounder rather than a momentum trade. RPO does move with seasonality and renewal timing, but the trend here suggests the 8–10% growth lane can be maintained into the back half of the decade, especially if AI attach and data products continue scaling.
On the full-year outlook, Salesforce nudged guidance higher. FY26 revenue is now expected in the $41.45–$41.55 billion range, implying 9–10% year-over-year growth, around 9% in constant currency, including roughly 80 basis points from Informatica. Subscription and support revenue is guided to grow slightly above 10% (slightly below 10% in constant currency), again with about 80 basis points of help from Informatica. GAAP operating margin is now pegged at 20.3% for the year, while non-GAAP margin is held at 34.1%. Operating cash flow and free cash flow are both expected to grow about 13–14%. Put differently, you’re looking at high-single to low-double-digit top-line growth paired with mid-30s non-GAAP margin and double-digit cash-flow growth. That puts Salesforce neatly into the “profitable growth framework” they talk about and easily above a Rule-of-40 style threshold, even if the market sometimes wishes the top line would re-accelerate.
The real narrative pivot is around Agentforce and Data 360, which Salesforce is using as proof that its AI strategy is more than just marketing. Combined ARR for Agentforce and Data 360 is now nearly $1.4 billion, up 114% year over year. Agentforce alone has surpassed half a billion in ARR, growing a blistering 330% year over year. The company has closed over 18,500 Agentforce deals since launch, with more than 9,500 paid deals, up 50% quarter over quarter. Agentforce accounts in production increased 70% quarter over quarter, and the platform has processed over 3.2 trillion tokens through Salesforce’s LLM gateway. Those are big, “usage feels real” numbers, not vanity metrics. Data 360, meanwhile, ingested 32 trillion records in Q3, up 119% year over year, including 15 trillion records via its Zero Copy architecture, up 341%. Unstructured data processed grew 390%. All of this reinforces Salesforce’s pitch that the “agentic enterprise” is not just about chatbots in CRM screens; it’s about a data plane and orchestration layer that can feed AI agents with high-quality, governed data at massive scale.
Within the business mix, you can see the shift very clearly. The “Agentforce 360 Platform, Slack and Other” bucket grew subscription and support revenue 19% in constant currency, making it the standout growth engine. Classic Sales and Service clouds grew a more modest 8% in constant currency, Integration and Analytics 6%, and Marketing and Commerce barely moved with 1% growth in constant currency. That tells a straightforward story: core CRM is mature and highly penetrated, with growth largely driven by expansion in existing customers, while platform, collaboration, and data-centric products are where the incremental growth is now coming from, heavily supported by AI attach. Geographically, revenue grew 8% in the Americas, 7% in Europe, and 11% in Asia Pacific in constant currency. APAC still has a small growth premium, but it’s not some giant emerging-market rocket; this is a global, fairly balanced footprint with modest regional variation.
Capital allocation is now a big part of the Salesforce equity story. In Q3, the company returned $4.2 billion to shareholders, including $3.8 billion in buybacks and $395 million in dividends. Treasury stock on the balance sheet has swelled past $28 billion at cost, reflecting years of repurchases. At the same time, the balance sheet remains solid: Salesforce holds $8.98 billion in cash and cash equivalents plus $2.35 billion in marketable securities, versus $8.44 billion of noncurrent debt. Non-GAAP diluted EPS for the quarter came in at $3.25 versus $2.41 a year ago, and full-year non-GAAP EPS is guided to $11.75–$11.77. With the share count edging down, per-share economics are improving faster than the headline revenue line suggests. For investors who care more about cash yield and EPS compounding than raw top-line growth, this is exactly what they want to see.
The Informatica acquisition is now formally embedded in the model and guidance, and it sits right at the intersection of AI, data, and governance. Management is calling out roughly 80 basis points of FY26 revenue growth from Informatica and about three points of Q4 growth. Strategically, Informatica’s data catalog, integration, governance, quality and metadata stack is an obvious fit under Data 360 and the bigger Agentforce story. To make agentic workflows truly enterprise-grade, you need not just models, but a deeply integrated data layer that knows where data lives, what it means, whether it’s compliant, and how it should be stitched together. That’s the thesis. The trade-off is more complexity and more integration risk: regulators are watching big tech acquisitions closely, enterprise buyers will expect clean integration not just slideware, and internal execution has to juggle product integration with cultural and go-to-market alignment. Salesforce’s own risk disclosures lean into that reality, flagging acquisition and integration risk, AI and ESG regulatory uncertainty, and broader macro-volatility as key variables.
Market reaction, unsurprisingly, has been cautiously constructive rather than euphoric. The stock bounced on the beat-and-raise and the strong AI/Agentforce metrics, but this wasn’t the kind of quarter that suddenly re-rates the name back into high-growth territory. The setup now looks more like this: you have mid-30s non-GAAP operating margins, low-double-digit cRPO growth, a sturdy free-cash-flow profile, and a credible AI vector growing triple digits off a roughly $1.4 billion ARR base. The bull case is that by FY30, Agentforce and Data 360 are large enough to bend the overall growth curve higher, supporting the company’s “$60 billion+ organic revenue” and “Profitable Growth Framework 50” targets. The bear case is that AI and data growth might simply offset continued deceleration in the older clouds, leaving Salesforce stuck in a 8–10% growth band and increasingly dependent on acquisitions and price/upsell lever-pulling to maintain that range.
Right now, though, this quarter supports the idea that Salesforce is executing the strategy it promised: transitioning from a land-grab growth story to a margin-rich platform with a serious, measurable AI business on top. Growth is slower, but it’s paid for with real cash. AI is not yet dominating the P&L, but it’s no longer just a buzzword in the slides either. For investors willing to own a mature SaaS blue-chip with a strong free-cash-flow engine and a live option on agentic AI scaling into something much bigger over the next five years, Q3 FY26 is another data point in favor of staying in the trade rather than abandoning it just because the days of 25% growth are gone.
