Photo Credit: City of Indianapolis | Mayor’s Office/Flickr.com

Recently, Salesforce (CRM) announced its second quarter results that beat the market expectations, which helped the stock climb 4% in the after-hours trading session on Friday. The company remains focused on AI, and recently announced the acquisition of Tenyx to continue to add to its AI portfolio.

Salesforce’s Financials

Salesforce’s revenues for the quarter grew 8% to $9.33 billion, ahead of analyst estimates of $9.23 billion. Adjusted earnings of $2.56 per share were also better than the market’s forecast of $2.36 per share. By segment, Subscription and support revenues grew 10% to $8.8 billion. Professional services and other revenues fell 7% to $0.56 billion.

For the third quarter, Salesforce forecast revenues of $9.31-$9.36 billion and an EPS of $2.42-$2.44. The market was looking for revenues of $9.41 billion and an EPS of $2.43. It expects to end the year with revenues of $37.7-$38 billion and with an EPS of $10.03-$10.11. Analysts were expecting revenues of $37.84 billion and an EPS of $9.89.

Salesforce’s Tenyx Acquisition and AI Focus

Salesforce continues to expand its AI portfolio, and the company recently announced the acquisition of California-based Tenyx for an undisclosed sum.

Tenyx is a developer of AI-powered voice agents that create natural conversational experiences to enhance customer service. It was founded in 2022 by Itamar Arel and Adam Earle who met while working together at IBM and McD Tech Labs. It has leveraged AI and machine learning capabilities to build voice agents that help improve customer service across industries ranging from e-commerce to hospitality, and travel.

The deal is expected to close in 2025 and will help build on Salesforce’s existing offerings. It will integrate Tenyx’s use-case-specific features to help improve Salesforce’s autonomous agent capabilities for its Agentforce Service Agent and Service Cloud, and to advance the vendor’s overall AI-driven solutions.

Salesforce believes that with Tenyx, it will be able to “set new standards” in customer experience to provide more seamless customer service. Prior to the acquisition, Tenyx was privately and did not disclose its funding or financial details.

Meanwhile, Salesforce entered a partnership with Workday to launch a new AI-powered employee service agent. As part of the agreement, Salesforce’s Agentforce Platform and Einstein AI will integrate with the Workday platform and Workday AI to enable organizations to create and manage agents for employee service use cases.

This AI agent will be powered by the customer’s Salesforce CRM data and Workday financial and HR data to communicate with employees in natural language. It will help simplify the onboarding, health benefit changes, career development, and other such employee-focused use cases. The companies will also enhance the existing integration with Slack to provide an improved conversational interface for users to access and collaborate.

Salesforce’s stock was recently seen trading at around $243.97 with a market capitalization of $233.2 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $318.72 in March and a 52-week low of $193.68 in October last year.

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