Four software firms posted 2026 growth rates that would embarrass most funded startups1345. Each posted those rates beside a caveat, a layoff, or a silence. Marc Benioff's Salesforce gave the clearest agent figure of the year. Agentforce revenue passed $1.5 billion a year by August, up more than 240%, seven months after the company cut roughly 1,000 jobs from teams that included Agentforce itself2. Bill McDermott's ServiceNow guided subscription revenue up 21.5% and held back any product-level figure for Now Assist. Alex Karp's Palantir grew trailing revenue 78.9% and kept the commercial breakdown analysts expect out of sight. The revenue story checks out. Disclosure runs thinner.
Agentforce revenue grew more than 240%, against 78.9% at Palantir and a guided 21.5% at ServiceNow
Year-over-year growth in the 2026 figure each firm reported or guided, percent
Each bar is one firm's 2026 growth figure: the magenta bar is Salesforce's Agentforce, and the gray bars are Palantir's trailing revenue and ServiceNow's subscription guidance.
Sources: Salesforce [1]; Wikipedia [3]; stockanalysis.com [4]. Chart by Ryan Elliott Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Salesforce Agentforce | 240% | Recurring revenue past $1.5 billion a year, up more than 240% |
| Palantir trailing revenue | 78.9% | $6.16 billion over the twelve months through the Aug. 3, 2026 report |
| ServiceNow subscription guidance | 21.5% | Guided growth in 2026 subscription revenue |
Salesforce Posts the Sharpest Numbers, and the Sharpest Cut
The company released fiscal second-quarter 2027 results on Aug. 261. Total revenue hit $11.3 billion, up 11%. Guidance for the year rose to a range of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion. Agentforce alone crossed $1.5 billion a year in recurring revenue, up more than 240%. Add Data 360 and the pair reached nearly $3.9 billion, up over 210%. Benioff put it plainly. "We just delivered one of our best quarters ever, outperforming across every key metric". He went further on the product: "AI is delivering value across every layer of our platform. We're seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products, with ARR about to cross $4 billion."
Robin Washington, the president and chief financial officer, added the number a sales chief watches. "NNAOV growth is the strongest it's been in four years, keeping us on track for second-half organic revenue reacceleration."1 Salesforce also reports a volume figure few software firms publish at all. Agentic Work Units count the tasks agents finish. They reached 7.0 billion to date across Agentforce and Slack, with 3.2 billion in the quarter, up 97% in three months.
Seven months earlier, the company cut roughly 1,000 jobs in marketing, product and data2. Reporting at the time named the Agentforce team among them. Growing a flagship agent product 240% a year while trimming the team that built it reads as ordinary reshuffling rather than contradiction. Big software firms move people around a shifting product mix all the time. It still complicates the story the press release tells, and an analyst modeling Agentforce owes readers both figures.
ServiceNow Guides High and Tells Less
Bill McDermott has run ServiceNow since 2019, after he led SAP3. His firm's 2025 revenue reached $13.28 billion, and 2026 guidance calls for 21.5% growth in subscriptions. Deals came with it. ServiceNow tied up with Anthropic and OpenAI in January 2026 to put their models inside its platform, then bought Pyramid Analytics a month later. What the public materials skip, at least in what this reporting found, is any Now Assist revenue or deal count to match what Salesforce gives for Agentforce. The gap is worth naming. ServiceNow sells Now Assist with the same energy Salesforce brings to Agentforce.
McDermott's wider bet puts two rival labs inside one platform. Picking the wrong partner costs real money to undo right now, and taking both removes the choice. Anthropic and OpenAI each gain reach across ServiceNow's customer base, whichever model wins a given job.
Palantir Grows Past Its Doubters
Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer, have argued for years that software analysts underrate Palantir4. Growth backs the pitch. Revenue over the twelve months through the Aug. 3, 2026 report hit $6.16 billion, up 78.9%. Full-year 2025 revenue landed at $4.48 billion, itself up 56.18%. Growth sped up into 2026 rather than slowing against a bigger base, the harder result for any firm past a few billion a year. The commercial breakdown investors watch closely proved harder to find in the public channels this reporting checked. Karp's favorite story rests on totals, absent the US-commercial detail that would let a skeptic test it.
Microsoft Builds Its Agent Brand on a Rival's Framework
Redmond booked $331.8 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue, more than every other company in this piece combined5. That scale makes its agent branding read strangest of all. On March 9 the company unveiled Copilot Cowork, built on Claude Cowork, Anthropic's own agent framework. Read that once more. The firm fighting Anthropic hardest for enterprise AI dollars shipped its agent product on Anthropic's code.
Maia 200, Microsoft's own chip, went into production in Iowa and Arizona during 2026, running Microsoft 365 Copilot work beside OpenAI's GPT-5.2 models5. Real hardware sits behind the Copilot brand. Judson Althoff, who runs the commercial side, has spoken in public about where Copilot is headed. This reporting found silence rather than a 2026 seat count, in his remarks or in the filings. A firm that reports $331.8 billion to the decimal keeps its best-known AI product's user count out of the numbers it publishes.
The Rest of the Field Talks Strategy
SAP, Workday and UiPath ran similar agent plans through 2026. All three folded agent features into suites they already sold, rather than launching standalone products with Salesforce-style disclosure. Each kept agent-specific revenue out of the materials this reporting found. Their position reads through product announcements and partnerships, apart from the hard numbers Salesforce volunteers each quarter. The pattern carries its own signal. Firms with strong agent numbers publish them, and firms with thinner ones describe strategy instead.
Industry research reads the broader pattern the same way, across every vendor chasing Agentforce-style growth. Anushree Verma, a senior director analyst at Gartner, assessed agentic AI's return on investment for CIO in February 2026. "If we're still talking about time savings and individual productivity, that's not justifiable for the investment clients are making," Verma said6. Her assessment spans the category whole, Salesforce and ServiceNow and Palantir and Microsoft included, since each counts on the same client spending to keep flowing.
By the numbers
- Agentforce passed $1.5 billion a year in revenue by August 2026, up over 240%1.
- Nearly $3.9 billion: Agentforce and Data 360 together, up over 210% year over year1.
- Roughly 1,000 jobs went in Salesforce's February 2026 cut, and reporting named the Agentforce team2.
- ServiceNow guided 2026 subscription revenue up 21.5%3.
- Palantir's trailing revenue reached $6.16 billion through the Aug. 3, 2026 report, up 78.9%4.
- Seven billion Agentic Work Units have completed to date, 3.2 billion of them in the second quarter1.
- Redmond booked $331.8 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue, against zero published Copilot seat count in the sources checked5.
- March 9, 2026: the date Microsoft unveiled Copilot Cowork, built on Anthropic's Claude Cowork framework5.
What to watch
Salesforce's next filing answers one question first. Does Agentforce hold a 240% growth rate against a bigger base1? ServiceNow and Microsoft can both close their gap35. A Now Assist revenue figure, or a published Copilot seat count, would let analysts compare all four firms on the same footing. Palantir's next call tests whether Karp and Sankar's story survives the scrutiny a full US-commercial breakdown invites4.
Sources
- Salesforce Newsroom, "Salesforce Delivers Record Second Quarter Fiscal 2027 Results," Salesforce, Aug. 26, 2026, https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/08/26/fy27-q2-earnings/.
- Sasha Semjonova, "Salesforce Lays Off Nearly 1,000 Employees in Early 2026 Cuts," Salesforce Ben, Feb. 10, 2026, https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-lays-off-nearly-1000-employees-in-early-2026-cuts/.
- Wikipedia contributors, "ServiceNow," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ServiceNow.
- stockanalysis.com, "PLTR Stock Price and Financials," stockanalysis.com, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/PLTR/.
- Wikipedia contributors, "Microsoft," Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft.
- Pat Brans, "Why Most Agentic AI Projects Stall Before They Scale," CIO, Feb. 18, 2026, https://www.cio.com/article/4132031/why-most-agentic-ai-projects-stall-before-they-scale.html.