Salesforce Acknowledged as a Key HR Software Provider by APPS RUN THE WORLD in the HCM Top 500 Market Report

Salesforce Strengths, Domain Expertise, and Key Differentiators

As Salesforce is banking its future on Agentforce, its shorthand for what Generative AI is capable of delivering, the ramifications of agentic automation on its customers and key stakeholders could be more far-reaching than previously expected, an outcome that could transform the vendor, or for that matter the enterprise applications market.

Early adopters suggest that Agentforce will add considerable value by improving customer experience, rather than cutting costs. Some expect the payoff will come overtime, having already seen tangible benefits earlier from using Einstein Co-pilot, the predecessor to Agentforce, for predictive analytics especially in email marketing that combines personalization with proprietary sales insights derived from direct customer interactions.

Salesforce is sitting pretty in CRM applications with a commanding lead of more than a quarter of available market shares, or nearly 20-point advantage over Adobe, the No. 2 vendor. The same applies to Analytics and BI with Salesforce projecting to extend its lead after buying Informatica to control nearly 20% of the market in 2025, a full 10-point lead over the No. 2 rival SAP.

In fiscal year 2025, Salesforce Data Cloud & AI achieved $900 million in annual recurring revenue, affirming its position as the intelligent activation layer for enterprise AI. With ongoing innovation in unified data architectures, real-time processing, structured and unstructured content handling, robust governance, and enhanced search, Data Cloud continues to redefine the customer data platform category. It serves as the foundation for agentic AI by enabling intelligent activation across systems and seamlessly powering AI agents via Agentforce.

In March 2025, the Adecco Group, supported by investments from both Adecco and Salesforce, jointly established a new company in a strategic partnership with Salesforce to enable organizations to build and manage an integrated workforce of humans and AI agents at scale. This venture empowers senior leaders to strategically plan and deploy both human talent and digital labor using customer data, Adecco’s expansive workforce insights, and Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, facilitating seamless collaboration between people and intelligent agents in everyday workflows.

Capabilities include data-driven deployment analytics, workforce simulation for demand surges or M&A scenarios, prescriptive efficiency recommendations, and integrated oversight tools—all embedded within familiar applications such as Salesforce and Slack. By launching agents via Agentforce and listing them on AgentExchange, the company positions itself to help businesses construct hybrid workforce models where human and AI workers coexist and thrive.

Salesforce Recent Developments

In May 2025, Salesforce expanded its AI-driven industry offerings with two significant innovations tailored to the retail and HR sectors. For retailers, the company unveiled Agentforce for Retail alongside Retail Cloud with Modern POS, equipping store associates, customer service representatives, and digital merchants with AI-powered tools—such as pre-built agent skills for order management, guided shopping, appointment scheduling, and loyalty promotions—while unifying online and offline data to drive personalized, efficient, and scalable shopping experiences.

Later that month, Salesforce introduced Agentforce for HR Service, embedding intelligent agents within Service Cloud to enable conversational, self-service HR across Slack and employee portals; these agents can manage tasks like PTO requests, profile updates, expense submissions, and case tracking, freeing HR teams to focus on strategic priorities and achieving 96% self-service resolution in early internal use.

Salesforce continues to expand its industry‑specific AI portfolio with the introduction of Agentforce for Financial Services, Consumer Goods, and Field Service, each tailored to automate domain‑specific tasks and enhance operational efficiency. Agentforce for Financial Services integrates deep industry expertise across banking, insurance, and wealth management to streamline workflows, improve customer engagement, and strengthen risk and compliance management. Agentforce for Consumer Goods leverages a comprehensive solution to automate essential processes across procurement, merchandising, logistics, and marketing, enabling teams to redirect their focus toward strategic decision‑making. Meanwhile, Agentforce for Field Service augments dispatchers and technicians by handling routine, time‑intensive tasks, such as scheduling, diagnostics, and case updates, through intelligent, autonomous agents embedded directly in the workflow.

In September 2024, Salesforce introduced Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents designed to augment employees across service, sales, marketing, and commerce. Built on the new Agentforce Atlas reasoning engine, this platform empowers organizations to scale a digital workforce—automating processes like customer inquiries, lead qualification, and campaign optimization—with a few clicks, while ensuring low-hallucination, high-accuracy outcomes. Its low‑code tools enable rapid agent customization and deployment across any industry, supporting seamless handoffs to humans and integration with existing Salesforce apps, marking a powerful new phase in enterprise AI.

Salesforce Customers in ARTW Customer Database

Leveraging a rigorous data-centric research methodology, APPS RUN THE WORLD asks the simple question: Who’s buying Salesforce applications and why? And we provide the answers – supported by decades of research – to our clients around the world. Our Customer database has over 100 data fields that detail company usage of Salesforce and other enterprise apps by function, customer size, industry, location, implementation status, partner involvement, Line of Business Key Stakeholders and IT decision makers contact details. List of Verified Salesforce Commerce Cloud Digital, Salesforce Community Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Quote-to-Cash, Service Cloud, Salesforce Wave Analytics, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Tableau, Agentforce customers.

Salesforce Key Cloud and HCM Applications

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Digital, Salesforce Community Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Salesforce Quote-to-Cash, Service Cloud, Salesforce Wave Analytics, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Tableau, Agentforce

Salesforce HCM and Cloud HCM Applications Revenues, $M:

Salesforce Revenue Breakdown by Type:

Salesforce HCM Applications Revenues By Sub-Functional Markets, $M:

Salesforce HCM Applications Revenues By Verticals, $M:

Salesforce Total and HCM Applications Revenues by Region:

Salesforce Direct vs Indirect sales

Salesforce Customers - Breakdown by Geo, Size, Vertical and Product

List of Verified Salesforce Customers

No. of Salesforce Customers: 280000

No. of Salesforce HCM Applications Customers: x

No. of Salesforce Cloud HCM Customers: 250000

No. of Salesforce Cloud HCM Subscribers: x

In Q4 FY25, Salesforce achieved significant traction with Agentforce, closing approximately 5,000 deals, including over 3,000 paid implementations, since its October 2024 launch. Nearly half of the Fortune 100 are now using both AI and Data Cloud solutions, and all of Salesforce’s top 10 Q4 wins involved a combined Data and AI strategy. Internally, Agentforce has handled 380,000 conversations on help.salesforce.com, resolving 84% autonomously and requiring human escalation for only 2% of requests

By acquiring Informatica, Salesforce will significantly expand its customer base. Informatica has over 5,000 enterprise customers, including more than 80 of the Fortune 100. When integrated into Salesforce’s platform, particularly Data Cloud and Agentforce, these customers will gain access to enhanced data management, governance, and AI-driven analytics capabilities, deepening enterprise relationships and cross-selling opportunities within Salesforce’s ecosystem.

By acquiring Slack, Salesforce is not only bolstering its portfolio of enterprise applications and filling out its broader software suite as it seeks new areas of growth, it is directly adding over 130,000 paying customers.

The acquisition of Tableau added 86,000 customers to Salesforce's current base of 280,000 accounts. While there are overlaps between the two, it's fair to assume that the purchase will allow Salesforce to increase its wallet share among its clientele.

Additionally, the MuleSoft purchase has already added at least 1,200 customers, while the August 2018 deal to buy Datorama for its marketing intelligence products provided access to another 3,000 customers including PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, Trivago, Unilever, Pernod Ricard, and Foursquare.

Salesforce Market Opportunities, M&A and Geo Expansions

In June 2025, Salesforce introduced Marketing Cloud Next, marking a significant evolution in its marketing platform by embedding agentic marketing capabilities across the entire customer funnel. Built natively on the Salesforce Platform, this new offering transforms “do-not-reply” communications into interactive, two‑way engagements by integrating autonomous AI agents that orchestrate campaign assembly, performance optimization, and personalized messaging at scale. The platform leverages actionable data and cross-functional workflows to dynamically adjust and refine marketing efforts in real time, fundamentally redefining how brands connect with their audience and shifting toward fully conversational, AI-driven customer interactions.

After the initial lanched of Agentforce in September 2024, in December Salesforce launched Agentforce 2.0, introducing AI agents with expanded functionalities across Salesforce's Sales, Marketing, Slack, and other clouds. These agents now leverage the Atlas engine to deliver improved reasoning capabilities. Salesforce has also broadened Agentforce's scope to interact seamlessly with external platforms such as SAP, Workday, and Adobe.

The platform could contribute an incremental 1% to 2% of revenue growth annually in FY26 and FY27. Adoption of Agentforce is accelerating, with over 1,000 paid deals signed—a sharp increase from 200-plus deals reported at the end of Q3 2025. Key feature updates in Agentforce 2.0 include sales development and coaching capabilities within Sales Cloud, campaign creation tools in Marketing Cloud, and merchandising functionalities in Commerce Cloud, all of which are available immediately.

Salesforce Risks and Challenges

The deal to buy Informatica raises integration challenges for MuleSoft and Tableau. However, it appears that the inclusion of Informatica will help address near-term master data management requirements for anyone wanting to cleanse, validate and inject validated data into use for their AI development work.

The mixed reactions to Agentforce from many of its customers, borne out by ARTW's recent survey work, suggested that it will be a while before they decide to take the plunge. Recent pricing changes of Agentforce also underscore the difficulty of Salesforce to take a good pulse of user and channel reactions.

In its core CRM market, competition is stiffening with Adobe remaining a looming danger and the deep-pocket Microsoft representing a much-reviled existential threat. Meanwhile, ServiceNow is now partnering with Five9, Genesys, and Zoom in its bid to expand into the CRM space, having already dominated IT Service Management.

Salesforce Ecosystem, Partners, Resellers and SI

In early 2025, Salesforce significantly strengthened its international footprint and commitment to AI-driven enterprise solutions by establishing a new regional headquarters in Riyadh—announced at Davos and at LEAP 2025—with a $500 million investment in Saudi Arabia to support Hyperforce, Arabic-language Agentforce adoption, and workforce development initiatives including upskilling 30,000 Saudi citizens by 2030.

Shortly thereafter, in late May, Salesforce opened a flagship office in Amsterdam’s sustainable Edge Stadium, equipped with smart building systems, hybrid workspaces, and a SpaceBuzz education partnership, highlighting rising European demand for Agentforce and reinforcing its mission to lead the “agentic revolution” by empowering businesses with autonomous AI agents—while emphasizing sustainability and community engagement.

In May 2025, Salesforce strategically launched a network of certified life sciences partners—including IQVIA, ComplianceQuest, Honeywell, among others—to accelerate customer adoption of its Life Sciences Cloud and enable seamless deployment of Agentforce across clinical, medical, and commercial functions. By integrating these partners’ domain-specific expertise and AI-driven solutions into the platform, pharmaceutical and medtech organizations can more efficiently unlock unstructured and structured data, enabling the rapid rollout of context-aware, autonomous AI agents that drive insight generation and operational efficiency across the enterprise.

In early 2025, Salesforce expanded its strategic partnership with Google Cloud to offer unprecedented flexibility in building and deploying AI-powered agents. As part of this expansion, customers can now develop Agentforce agents using Google’s multimodal Gemini models and deploy Salesforce applications—Agentforce, Data Cloud, and Customer 360—on Google Cloud infrastructure, accessible through the Google Cloud Marketplace. This builds upon the existing integration that enables bidirectional data flow between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google BigQuery via zero-copy technology, providing the unified data access, AI capabilities, trust and security, and action-oriented infrastructure needed to support autonomous agents within enterprise workflows

Research Methodology

Data used in research reports are derived from publicly available documents, continuous surveys of applications vendors, customers, resellers, Independent Software Vendors, systems integrators and other verifiable sources.

Vendor shares and market forecast results are based on a combination of existing databases as well as demand side and supply side research conducted throughout the year with validation from vendors, customers, channel partners and documentations such as earnings releases and 10Q and 10K filings, vertical industry studies, regional and country-level statistics from public and private institutions(i.e. colleges, universities, government agencies and trade associations).

For additional information on our methodologies, here's the link: