Stock Market Today, Aug. 27: Salesforce Surges 23% on Anthropic Partnership and Q2 Earnings Beat
Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), a cloud CRM and AI-powered enterprise software provider, closed at $252.10, up 22.60% Thursday. The move followed a strong Q2 earnings beat, raised full-year guidance, and fresh AI partnership momentum. Investors are watching Salesforce's next earnings report and AI-related revenue traction. Trading volume reached 53.3M shares, coming in about 246% above its three-month average of 15.4M shares. Salesforce IPO'd in 2004 and has grown 5,763% since going public.
How the markets moved today
The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX:^GSPC) closed at 7,730, up 0.71%, while the Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX:^IXIC) finished at 26,541, up 1.57%. Among enterprise software and customer relationship management (CRM) applications peers, ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) closed at $138.44, up 10.05%, and Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) closed at $193.57, up 1.48%, reflecting broad enthusiasm for large-cap software after Salesforce's results.
What this means for investors
Salesforce reported Q2 earnings and soared past Wall Street's expectations as sales and current remaining performance obligations grew 11% and 14%. The company also raised full-year guidance, stating that sales will grow between 11% and 12% this year.
However, the news that stole all the headlines was Salesforce's announcement that it was partnering with Anthropic to develop Claudeforce. CEO Marc Benioff explained, "By fusing Claude's extraordinary reasoning with the trusted data, workflows, and governance every enterprise runs on, we're delivering a dynamic interface that thinks, reasons, and acts. This is how every business will run."
This certainly quiets some of the fears surrounding a potential SaaS-pocalypse (at least in respect to Salesforce) and could make the CRM leader a true, AI-first behemoth. Even before this partnership, Salesforce grew its agentic workforce units by 97% in Q2 as AI agents continue to tackle a broader array of tasks for its customers.
Trading at 16 times free cash flow, Salesforce isn't outrageously priced considering today's interesting developments and steady growth rates, but investors will want to watch this new partnership closely for progress in the upcoming quarters.
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Josh Kohn-Lindquist has positions in ServiceNow. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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