Shares in Salesforce were up nearly 11% in Wednesday morning's pre-market trading on the back of its latest results.
Salesforce, which provides customer relationship management (CRM) software, posted 8% revenue growth year on year to $9.44bn (£7.46bn) in the third quarter, which was ahead of expectations of $9.35bn.
Earnings per share of $2.41 just missed Wall Street estimates of $2.44.
However, Salesforce slightly raised the lower end of its full-year revenue guidance. The cloud-based software company is now expecting revenue to come in between $37.8bn and $38bn for the year, up from a previous estimate of $37.7bn to $38bn.
Salesforce's big bet on AI was a major focus for investors in this set of results. According to a Reuters report, Salesforce executives said in a post-earnings call that they were planning to hire 1,400 in the fourth quarter to help with demand for its Agentforce platform, a suite of autonomous AI agents.
In the release, CEO Marc Benioff said that Agentforce was "at the heart of a groundbreaking transformation".
"The rise of autonomous AI agents is revolutionising global labor, reshaping how industries operate and scale," he said.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms, is another tech leader reportedly looking to secure some influence in US president-elect Donald Trump's incoming administration.
The Financial Times (FT) reported on Tuesday that Sir Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said in a press briefing that Zuckerberg was keen to play "an active role in the debates that any administration needs to have about maintaining America’s leadership in the technological sphere".
He reportedly added that this leadership “is tremendously important given all the geostrategic uncertainties around the world, and particularly the pivotal role that AI will play".
This comes as Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, who owns social media platform X, prepares to assume his advisory role co-leading the extra-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump returns to office in January.
Clegg also said that the social media company previously "overdid it a bit" with moderating pandemic-related content, according to the FT's report.
A spokesperson for Meta had not responded to Yahoo Finance UK's request for further comment at the time of writing.
Clegg's comments came on the back of a report that Meta published on Tuesday, looking into what the company saw on its platforms during elections around the world in 2024. He said in the report that Meta found that the impact of generative AI in these elections was "modest and limited in scope".
Shares in Meta were flat in pre-market trading on Wednesday.
Shares in data analytics software maker Palantir surged nearly 7% in Tuesday's session, after the firm announced that it had been granted a higher government cloud security rating.
Palantir said on Tuesday that it had been granted a FedRAMP (Federal risk and authorisation management program) high baseline authorisation. This US government compliance program offers a standardised security authorisation for cloud service offerings.
The program promotes the adoption of secure cloud services across US government agencies, enabling them to use the likes of Palantir's technology to process sensitive data.
Akash Jain, chief technology officer and president of Palantir USG, said: "This milestone is an affirmation of our ongoing commitment to upholding the highest security standards and being trusted to handle our government partners’ most sensitive data and workloads, as well as our commitment to enabling the entire American technology base to support critical government needs."
Palantir shares have been trading at record highs, up 313% year-to-date, with shares rallying on the back of its recent earnings and last month's US election. Investors are betting that the company could benefit from greater defence spending, given some of its products are used in this space.
AT&T said it also expected to produce more than $3bn in cost savings by the end of 2027.
In addition, AT&T announced that it was expanding its fibre network to more than 50 million total locations.
The telecoms business is also planning to repurchase $10bn in shares by the end of 2026, with an additional $10bn scheduled for 2027, bringing the total buyback to $20bn.
Legal & General said in a statement on Wednesday morning that it anticipated returning to shareholders a proportion of capital not deployed on strain this year. The firm said that this would form part of its board's wider consideration of buyback capacity, which would be outlined in its 2024 full-year results in March.
The company also said it was making "good progress" on delivering on its strategy set out at its investor event in June and was on track to deliver mid-single-digit operating profit growth for the year.
This update provided a welcome boost to shares, which are still nearly 9% in the red year-to-date. The stock tumbled in August after Legal & General reported that profit before tax had fallen to £223m ($282m) in the first half, from £377m last year.
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Other companies in the news on Wednesday 4 December:
