The company reported results for its fiscal first quarter of 2027 (the period ended April 30, 2026) in late May, and the numbers were strong. So why does the stock keep falling?

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The answer has little to do with the latest quarter and almost everything to do with a single fear: that artificial intelligence (AI) agents will erode the per-seat subscriptions that software companies like Salesforce have long sold. If a handful of agents can do the work of many employees, the worry goes, customers will eventually need fewer paid seats. In addition, there's an overarching fear that AI will increasingly handle what software companies do today.

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The fiscal first-quarter results suggest that fear may be overblown, at least for now. Salesforce's revenue rose 13% year over year to $11.1 billion, though about 4.4 percentage points of that growth came from its recent Informatica acquisition. Stripping that out, organic growth was closer to the high-single-digit pace the company has run at for a while.

More telling, however, was what happened beneath the top line. Salesforce's AI and data products generated $3.4 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR), up about 200% from a year earlier, and its Agentforce agentic AI offering alone crossed $1 billion in ARR after more than tripling. And rather than shrinking, the seat count in the company's largest products grew.

"Our largest applications, sales and service, saw year-over-year seat growth with humans and agents both expanding on the platform," said Salesforce chief operating and finance officer Robin Washington in the company's fiscal first-quarter earnings call.

That dynamic, with customers paying for more seats rather than fewer even as they adopt automation, sits at the center of the bull case. Salesforce is also leaning hard into new ways to charge for AI, including usage-based pricing and a recent $3.6 billion deal to acquire Fin, an AI customer service platform.