Salesforce blames its Claude addiction for denting profit margin guidance

AI AND ML

But investors hear CRM giant is now in 'refinement mode,' picking models more carefully

Salesforce was unable to improve its margin forecasts because of the dollars it is spending on Claude tokens, an investor conference heard last week.

As an example of how heavily the CRM giant is investing in its own AI capabilities to build products for customers, Mike Spencer, deputy CFO and head of finance Salesforce, told the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference last week that spending with Anthropic — the LLM-builder with which it has launched a new partnership — was sufficient to manage investor expectations in terms of margins.

In its results last week, Salesforce said its operating margin, according to accounting rules, would be 20.5 percent in its Q2 results (ending July 31), but its guidance for the full year is 20.1 percent.

Spencer said the drop comes because it was spending...

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