artificial intelligence<\/a> would decimate \u200csoftware makers have sapped investor confidence in the industry.<\/p>\nSoftware CEOs such as Salesforce’s Marc Benioff have tried to \u200breassure shareholders that proprietary data, decades of enterprise experience and in-house AI offerings would keep customers loyal, even as AI tools from the likes of Anthropic encroach on legal, marketing and customer-service work.<\/p>\n
But that has not stemmed a selloff in the sector, with the \u200csoftware and services index down \u2060around 16% since the start of the year, widely underperforming the broader S&P 500’s 3.2% rise.<\/p>\n
\u2022 ServiceNow will kick off earnings for \u2060major software-as-a-service firms on Wednesday, followed by Workday and Salesforce likely in May.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Wall Street expects Salesforce’s first-quarter revenue to have increased 12.5% to $9.83 billion, its fastest growth in 13 \u200bquarters, \u200baccording to analysts polled by LSEG.<\/p>\n
\u2022 But profit \u200bgrowth at the company, one \u200cof the most aggressive AI adopters with its Agentforce autonomous agent platform, will likely slow to a near three-year low as costs rise.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Meanwhile, ServiceNow is expected to post slightly faster quarterly revenue growth of 21.1%, while Workday’s revenue will likely increase at a slightly slower pace at 12.4%.<\/p>\n
\u2022 “From a short-term stock market perspective, nothing (software) companies report \u200cthis quarter or next quarter can really refute \u200bthat long-term bear case,” said Joe Maginot, portfolio \u200bmanager at Madison Investments.<\/p>\n
\u2022 “It’s this more \u200bexistential question on how things will evolve over the coming three, \u200cfour, five years and even longer.”<\/p>\n
\u2022 Experts \u200bexpect software makers \u200bto use earnings to show more aggressively how AI is boosting revenue, how wide their adoption is and whether they are helping retain customers.<\/p>\n
\u2022 “The opportunity is \u200bthere for many incumbents to \u200cbe successful, especially as the rollout of AI in enterprise is going \u200bto take many years,” Bernstein analysts said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Aditya Soni and Deborah \u200bSophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Aditya Soni and Deborah Mary Sophia April 22 (Reuters) – Salesforce will likely report its fastest quarterly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448099,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,18,19,17,29241,197679,14609,14083,22138,197678,82],"class_list":["post-448098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-marc-benioff","tag-quarterly-revenue-growth","tag-revenue-growth","tag-salesforce","tag-servicenow","tag-software-makers","tag-technology"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116448233063344573","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}