The Department of Veterans Affairs awarded Salesforce a one-year agentic enterprise license agreement, with two optional renewal years bringing the total ceiling to $1.6 billion. The deal bundles Missionforce, Agentforce Public Sector and Health, Slack, MuleSoft, Data 360, and Tableau across a system that has already handled more than 40.6 million veteran calls, with a stated goal of cutting the average 28-day community-care scheduling wait to minutes. It’s the clearest evidence yet that federal agencies are willing to write large, multi-year checks for Salesforce’s agentic stack — the exact monetization signal Morgan Stanley said was missing.

Salesforce climbed 4.51% on July 28 and another 3.8–4.02% on July 29 as investors rewarded the VA contract and broader optimism that enterprise AI spending is shifting from infrastructure to applications — a category where Salesforce is positioned as a direct beneficiary. Shares closed July 31 at $184.02, up 1.83% on the day. That puts the stock roughly 8% above its July 21 post-downgrade close of $170.06 and about 26% above the June 26 low of $146.32, though still down an estimated 33% year-to-date.

Salesforce will report fiscal second-quarter results after market close on August 26. It’s the print that has to reconcile this week’s rally with Morgan Stanley’s underlying thesis: strong Agentforce KPIs that still haven’t shown up as an inflection in current remaining performance obligations. Three weeks of good news — the VA deal, the AI-optimism rally, ServiceNow’s prior beat — have to convert into cRPO acceleration, or the stock likely gives this bounce back.

Anthropic has recruited 45 Salesforce employees over the past six months and OpenAI another 40, concentrated in sales, marketing, and go-to-market roles — making Salesforce the single largest external source of Anthropic’s GTM hires. The draw is Salesforce’s Fortune 500 relationships and its specialized lead-to-close sales playbook. The irony: Salesforce is simultaneously planning to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026, funding the same lab that’s recruiting its sales force.

Early reports from Salesforce enterprise partners suggest that pairing Data Cloud with the latest AI capabilities is measurably reducing friction in customer workflows, positioning Salesforce as a beneficiary of what analysts are calling the “second wave” of AI spending — the shift from infrastructure build-out to application-layer execution. It’s a smaller, less headline-grabbing data point than the VA contract, but it’s the kind of production-usage evidence Morgan Stanley said was still missing from the Agentforce story.

The same day it downgraded Salesforce, Morgan Stanley cut Workday from Equal Weight to Underweight and slashed its price target from $185 to $145, citing HCM growth deceleration that’s “more persistent than the market priced in.” CLSA piled on with a fresh Underperform initiation and a $92 target. Shares fell as much as 5.89% intraday on July 30 before recovering to $160.34 by July 31. The read-through: Wall Street’s legacy-SaaS skepticism this earnings season is a sector call, not a single-name one.

HubSpot reports second-quarter results after the close on August 5, with as-reported revenue guided to $897–898 million (up 18% year-over-year) and non-GAAP operating income of $173–174 million (a 19% margin). The number investors actually care about is adoption of Breeze AI’s Customer, Prospecting, and Data agents — the mid-market proof point for whether AI features can lift net revenue retention at a company far smaller than Salesforce or ServiceNow, without the balance-sheet cushion to absorb a slow AI ramp.

Gartner now forecasts enterprise software spending rising 14.7% in 2026 to more than $1.4 trillion, with generative AI cited as the primary accelerant, and projects that 40% of enterprise applications will be integrated with task-specific AI agents by year-end — up from under 5% a year ago. That’s the structural backdrop against which every Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow print this earnings season gets judged: total spending is expanding fast, but which vendors capture it is now a wide-open contest.

A survey of 300 SaaS CEOs found 97% plan to move away from pure per-seat pricing within two years, with hybrid models — a base seat fee blended with usage or outcome-based credits for AI features — now the most common structure being adopted. It’s the pricing-model evidence behind the “SaaSpocalypse” framing that’s dogged Salesforce and Workday all summer: the seat isn’t disappearing, but it’s no longer the only unit anyone’s pricing against, and vendors that don’t adapt their pricing risk leaving revenue on the table even where usage is growing.