- SNOW
- CRM
For much of the past year, the “AI trade” has been focused on infrastructure: processors, data centers, and cloud capacity. Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW)’s blowout quarter, which was reported after the market closed on September 2, provided something unique: clear evidence that AI is translating into real, incremental spending within software companies that are closer to the end customer. The reaction echoed throughout corporate software the next morning, adding to a rally that, for Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in particular, had already begun for its own reasons.
Snowflake’s Numbers
Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW) boosted its fiscal 2027 product revenues target to $6.07 billion from $5.84 billion, following a 37% increase in second-quarter product revenue to $1.49 billion. CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy stated that the company’s AI products accounted for around half of that growth acceleration, which analysts took as implying that AI demand is increasing Snowflake’s core data platform, instead of just adoption of standalone AI add-ons. UBS analyst Karl Keirstead said the figures, together with Palantir and Databricks’ rapid growth, gave compelling proof of robust enterprise AI adoption.
Snowflake’s beat rippled across enterprise software, with ServiceNow, Atlassian, Adobe, Intuit, and Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) all up 3.5% to 6% on the same day, while the sector-wide iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF rose 3%.
Salesforce Already Had Its Own Moment
That Snowflake-driven spike was piled on top of a much bigger adjustment made by Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) on its own. The company released its second-quarter fiscal 2027 results on August 26, a week before Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW), with revenue of $11.35 billion, up 11% year-over-year, with current remaining performance obligations up 14% to $33.5 billion and adjusted EPS of $5.90, exceeding the $3.27 consensus. Along with those results, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, an expanded partnership that initially brings Salesforce data, workflows and business logic directly into Claude through a plugin with 37 prebuilt sales skills. The companies plan additional integrations across Claude, Salesforce and Slack. That said, Salesforce recorded $2.61 billion in net gains on strategic investments during the quarter, which added $2.53 per share to non-GAAP EPS.
Taken together, the two events suggest that enterprise AI adoption can increase the value and consumption of established software platforms when AI is connected to existing corporate data and workflows
