Street View: Salesforce's strong forecast renews faith in H2 growth acceleration
CRM•Salesforce raises outlook and rolls out Anthropic plug-in
** Salesforce CRM.N raised its annual revenue and profit forecasts on Wednesday and rolled out a new plug-in combining its capabilities with Anthropic's Claude AI models
** Shares jump 11% to $228.8 premarket
Analysts say the update supports hopes for second-half acceleration
** Morgan Stanley ("equal-weight," PT: $235) says better AI monetization signals and a modest organic guide raise confidence in H2 acceleration
** Barclays ("overweight," PT: $236) says Claudeforce's integration of CRM data with Claude, alongside Slack, could create a major unlock for enterprise adoption
** Raymond James ("strong buy," PT: $310) says the Anthropic partnership reinforces expectations that AI model developers will increasingly align with leading apps vendors who can provide distribution and more application specific solutions than the model vendors
** Baird ("outperform," PT: $275) says, "while the Street had largely thrown in the towel on the H2 revenue growth acceleration, a solid Q2 and organic guidance raise makes that achievable"
