Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Salesforce's AI products are growing at triple-digit rates while the stock sits near a 52-week low, and that gap between momentum and valuation may be exactly what the market keeps getting wrong.

The 24/7 Wall St. price target for Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) is $346.52 over the next 12 months. Shares trade at $242.92, so the target implies about 42.6% upside.

24/7 Wall St. Price Target Summary

Metric
Value

Current Price
$242.92

Price Target from 24/7 Wall St.
$346.52

Upside/Downside
42.6%

Model Rating
BUY

Confidence Level
90%

Our model has high confidence in that rating. The thesis comes down to one point: Agentforce and Data 360 are growing much faster than the share price reflects, and a large buyback keeps reducing the share count.

The market still prices Salesforce like a mature app vendor. The AI numbers point to something more.

Braze Deal Revives the Cost Debate After a Choppy Year
Over the past week shares rose 2.06%, and over the past month they gained 2.1%. They are still down 7.65% year to date. The stock trades 9.3% below its 52-week high of $267.80 and 66.3% above its low of $146.06. On Tuesday, Salesforce announced a deal to buy Braze (NASDAQ:BRZE), and the stock fell as investors balked at the price tag (MarketWatch).

Second-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue came in at $11.345B, +10.8% YoY, beating consensus. Non-GAAP EPS of $5.90 exceeded the $3.27 estimate, although about $2.53 per share came from gains on strategic investments. Management raised full-year revenue guidance to $46.10B-$46.40B.

Why Bulls See $387 Within Reach
Agentforce ARR passed $1.5B, +240%+ YoY, and combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR reached about $3.9B. Agentic Work Units hit 3.2 billion in the quarter, up 97% sequentially. Only 5% of eligible knowledge workers have moved to premium editions, which carry a 60% to 80% premium.

That leaves a long time for upgrades, and ClaudeForce requires premium editions. Analyst sentiment is positive too: 6 strong buy and 32 buy ratings against a consensus target of $285.68. The bull case reaches $387.36.

Acquisition Costs and Flat Profits Could Stall the AI Payoff
Operating income was $2.331B (flat YoY), and restructuring charges rose to $94M vs $4M. Free cash flow is expected to grow only ~4-5% this year. Shareholders’ equity fell 37.42% after the debt-funded buyback.

Integrating Informatica, Contentful, Fin and now Braze also adds execution risk. On the other side, the buyback cut diluted shares to 821M from 962M at an average price of $176 per share, and that will boost per-share earnings. The bear case of $282 still stands above today’s price.

Salesforce Trades Cheaper Than Microsoft and Generates More Cash Than Oracle
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) competes head-on through Copilot and Dynamics. Its AI run rate hit $37 billion, yet it trades at 30x earnings and 59x free cash flow. Salesforce trades at 27x and 13.85x.

Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) shows the capital-heavy path to AI. Revenue grew 29.61%, but free cash flow was -$5.396B. Next to these two, our 24/7 Wall St. price target looks reasonable.

Company
Trailing P/E
Latest Quarter Revenue Growth

Salesforce
27x
10.8%

Microsoft
30x
17.75%

Oracle
Not available
29.61%

AI Momentum Supports a BUY Rating
The 24/7 Wall St. price target of $346.52 comes with a buy rating at 90% confidence. The deciding factor for me is AI revenue growing past 200% while the stock trades at 16x forward earnings (the same AI expansion is raising a whole group of suppliers we profiled in a free report on seven AI stocks that aren’t chipmakers).

My view improves if premium-edition upgrades speed up. It weakens if deal costs keep operating income flat.

Year
Price Target from 24/7 Wall St.

2026
$252.93

2027
$346.52

2028
$443.40

2029
$536.67

2030
$594.23

The projections assume Salesforce keeps executing on its current strategy. The biggest key factors are how quickly Agentforce consumption grows and whether the acquisitions integrate smoothly.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM, XETRA:FOO)’s $5.66 billion deal for Braze Inc (NASDAQ:BRZE) sent the customer-engagement software company’s shares soaring, with rival Klaviyo also climbing as investors reassessed the sector’s value.

Salesforce will pay $47.50 in cash for each Braze Class A share, representing a 58% premium to the previous closing price of $30.04.

Braze shares remained below the agreed offer price, leaving a $2.22 gap between the market price and the proposed cash payment as the transaction awaits completion.

The deal is valued at approximately $5.66 billion on an enterprise-value basis and is expected to close in Salesforce’s financial year 2028, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.

Braze provides software that allows businesses to coordinate personalised customer communications across mobile apps, websites, email and messaging services, adapting interactions to customer behaviour in real time.

Its artificial intelligence tools help marketers optimise content, offers, communication channels and timing, giving Salesforce additional technology to strengthen its marketing and customer-management products.

The acquisition forms part of Salesforce’s broader push into artificial intelligence as software companies seek to strengthen their offerings amid concerns that the technology could disrupt traditional software demand.

Klaviyo’s rise suggests investors are reassessing valuations across the customer-engagement software sector following Salesforce’s willingness to pay a substantial premium for Braze.

Klaviyo also provides marketing technology that helps businesses use customer data to personalise communications and automate campaigns, making it a relevant comparison for investors evaluating the acquisition.

Salesforce does not expect the proposed acquisition to change its financial year 2027 outlook, although the agreement includes termination fees of $300 million for Salesforce and $191.4 million for Braze if the deal is abandoned under specified circumstances.

Salesforce stock CRM gained more than 2% on Monday after Bank of America upgraded the shares to Buy from Underperform, citing the potential for artificial intelligence to strengthen demand for enterprise software platforms.

The company also announced an agreement to acquire Loops, an AI-powered analytics startup, as it expands its strategy for AI-driven business intelligence.

Bank of America raised its price target for Salesforce to $285 from $160, arguing that large enterprises are unlikely to replace software platforms that manage their data, workflows, business processes, and compliance requirements as they adopt AI.

The upgrade comes as Salesforce shares have declined about 14% in 2026, amid investor concerns that wider AI adoption could reduce demand for traditional software tools.

Bank of America analyst Tal Liani said large enterprises were unlikely to abandon the platforms that support their core business operations. Instead, he expects AI to increase companies' reliance on existing software infrastructure.

“If anything, AI should deepen dependence on these platforms,” Liani said.

The analyst said Salesforce was positioned to benefit across the AI value chain, potentially reducing the risk that foundation models would displace its software.

Greater platform usage, premium upgrades and stronger revenue growth could support the company's long-term performance, according to the brokerage.

Bank of America also cited improving business momentum, including growth in net new annualized order value and stronger performance at Slack.

The bank raised its subscription and support revenue growth forecasts to 10.4% for fiscal 2028 and 10.5% for fiscal 2029, from previous estimates of 9.9% and 10.2%, respectively.

Its revised $285 price target values Salesforce at 16 times its expected free cash flow for 2027, compared with nine times previously, said a Seeking Alpha report.

However, Liani identified slower-than-expected AI adoption as a near-term risk, noting that AI-related revenue remains small relative to Salesforce's overall business.

Salesforce has been expanding its enterprise AI strategy, including its Agentforce platform of autonomous AI-powered agents.

Bank of America's upgrade reflects expectations that these initiatives could help the company attract more customers and support a return to faster growth.

The brokerage's positive view is broadly consistent with analyst sentiment.

According to LSEG data, 36 of the 51 analysts covering Salesforce had Buy or Strong Buy ratings.

Separately, Salesforce announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Loops, an AI-powered analytics platform designed to monitor business performance, explain changes in key metrics, and identify opportunities for improvement using machine learning.

The acquisition is intended to advance Salesforce's strategy for agentic analytics, which uses AI agents to help customers understand the factors driving business results and determine what actions to take.

Salesforce plans to integrate Loops' technology into Tableau, its data visualisation and analytics platform.

Mark Recher, executive vice president and general manager of Tableau, said the acquisition would build on the platform's existing focus on helping users interpret data and make decisions.

“Loops accelerates this mission, using powerful agentic AI to uncover the drivers behind business performance and surface where teams and agents can take action in real time,” Recher said.

The transaction is expected to close in early November next year.

AI adoption remains a key test for SalesforceThe BofA upgrade highlights an important aspect of Salesforce's AI strategy: increasing the value of its existing software platforms and expanding the use of AI agents to analyse business data.

The brokerage expects improving order growth and Slack performance to support stronger revenue expansion over the coming quarters.

Its forecasts point to a gradual acceleration in subscription and support revenue growth through fiscal 2029.

However, the financial contribution from AI remains an important uncertainty. If customers adopt Salesforce's AI tools more slowly than expected, the anticipated boost to revenue growth could take longer to materialise.

Investors weighing whether the AI-driven rebound has further to run can follow analyst ratings and track the stock’s progress through investment apps.

Salesforce just delivered a massive earnings beat, sent analyst targets soaring, and still managed to lose ground against the broader market. Something about the AI story is not adding up, and the next two quarters will force a reckoning.

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) trades at $228.97. The stock keeps swinging hard in both directions no matter how strong the reported numbers look. CNBC recently described the shares as sitting at the epicenter of AI confusion.

Salesforce leads the market for customer relationship management software and now wants to be the system enterprises use to run AI agents through Agentforce. Its latest quarter brought non-GAAP EPS of $5.90 against a $3.27 estimate, and revenue of $11.35 billion. Shares jumped 22.58% on earnings day, then fell 10.61% over the next 30 days.

Agentforce Momentum Meets a 14x Forward Earnings Multiple Agentforce ARR exceeded $1.5 billion, up over 240%, and combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR reached nearly $3.9 billion. Current RPO rose 14% to $33.5 billion. The stock still trades at a forward P/E of 14 with a free cash flow yield of 7.64%.

Management raised fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion and non-GAAP EPS guidance to $16.67 to $16.71. Analysts followed, with 48 upward revisions and zero downward over 30 days. A buyback cut diluted shares to 821 million from 962 million.

Earnings Beats Keep Fading While Next Year’s Estimates Soften Salesforce has delivered six consecutive EPS beats, yet the stock is down 12.9% year to date. The latest beat contained about $2.53 per share of investment profits, and operating income stayed flat at $2.33 billion. Restructuring charges rose to $94 million from $4 million.

The consensus for fiscal 2028 EPS is $16.02, below the fiscal 2027 figure of $16.75. The January quarter drew 32 downward revisions versus 6 upward. Cash flow growth is expected to only 4% to 5%. Its headless strategy, where “people don’t have to come to Salesforce to get work done,” could also weaken seat-based pricing power.

Strong Demand, Unproven Monetization Model Net new AOV growth was the strongest in four years, and attrition sits near record lows. Those figures point to durable demand. AI pricing, though, still includes per-user, per-agent, consumption and outcome-based models, and management admitted to “continued volatility in overall license revenue.”

Two items will decide it: the promised second-half organic reacceleration and smooth completions of the Contentful and Fin deals. Third-quarter guidance calls for revenue of $11.42 billion to $11.5 billion and cRPO growth near 14%.

Wall Street Sees 24% Upside That the Market Keeps Ignoring The average analyst target of $283.36 implies about 23.75% upside. Among 55 analysts:

Strong Buy: 6 Buy: 32 Hold: 15 Strong Sell: 2 Targets are one input and guarantee nothing. Over the past year, Salesforce fell 5.79% while the S&P 500 gained 16%. Year to date, the index is up 14.17%. The 52-week range of $146.06 to $267.80 shows how much the stock has moved.

Salesforce Needs AI to Show Up in Organic Growth At $228.97, Salesforce faces a key test.

The valuation is cheap, but cheap stocks can stay cheap. After each of the last two quarterly reports, the stock fell more than 10% within 30 days. That pattern suggests investors see the AI story as unproven.

A stronger outlook would require third-quarter organic revenue growth at the top of guidance, steady cRPO growth and stable fiscal 2028 estimates. A weaker outlook would follow a missed reacceleration or slipping integration progress. The next one or two quarters will test that theory.

Salesforce trades at a low multiple, and Agentforce must lift organic growth to change the market’s view.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Shares of Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM, XETRA:FOO) were up 3.2% on Wednesday after the company signed a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research and human simulation platform. 

Listen Labs' AI agents design studies, conduct in-depth research and synthesize insights, shrinking a process that typically takes months down to days.  

The acquisition will expand Salesforce's customer and user understanding capabilities, complementing Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud and its broader AI portfolio. 

The platform's agents can draw from a global network of more than 50 million participants and run interviews around the clock in more than 120 languages. Its digital twins, AI simulations grounded in real customer behavior, let teams compare approaches and refine plans before further customer or user testing. 

"We look forward to expanding access to these agentic capabilities through Salesforce, helping more companies and governments make faster, better-informed decisions that deliver exceptional customer experiences," said Aman Naimat, President of AI Labs at Salesforce. 

Alfred Wahlforss, CEO and co-founder of Listen Labs, said the combination will put customer understanding at the heart of every decision. 

"With AI, a company can now have thousands of real conversations at once and even simulate how customers will respond before making a move," Wahlforss said. 

Wall Street spent all year convinced AI would hollow out Salesforce's business model, and every time the stock dipped, one investor kept adding to the position anyway. Here is why the cash flow and buyback math convinced him the crowd…

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I keep buying Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) because the market spent most of this year arguing about whether AI would kill it, and management kept quietly stacking evidence that AI is doing the opposite. Every dip this year, I added. Now the sell-side is finally catching up, and I am still not done.

Why My Money Keeps Landing Here The pull is simple. Salesforce owns the system of record where the enterprise actually lives, and the AI layer everyone was afraid would replace it is instead pouring recurring revenue back into it. Agentforce ARR hit $1.5 billion, and combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR reached nearly $3.90 billion, up over 210% year-over-year. Marc Benioff put it flatly on the Q2 call: “AI isn’t replacing Salesforce. It’s unlocking more value across all four layers of our platform.” That is the thesis in one sentence, and the customer proof points back it. Xero rolled Agentforce to 100% of customers with a 62% deflection rate across more than 200,000 interactions. Uber for Business pointed Agentforce at its lead pile and saw 60% more leads converting within two weeks.

Three Receipts I Keep Rereading First, the cash machine. FY26 free cash flow was $14.402 billion, up 15.83% year-over-year, and Q2 free cash flow of $1.098 billion was up 81.49% year-over-year. Against that, free cash flow yield sits at 7.50% and price-to-free-cash-flow at 13.33. That is a rounding error of a multiple for a business growing subscription revenue 12% year-over-year with gross margins of 77.68%.

Second, the buyback is doing real work. Diluted share count fell to 821 million from 962 million a year ago thanks to a $25 billion ASR, with a new $50 billion repurchase authorization behind it. The quarterly dividend of $0.44 was raised 5.8% year-over-year. The yield is still modest, and it is growing on a shrinking share count.

Third, the visibility. Current RPO of $33.5 billion, up 14% year-over-year, is future revenue already signed. Management raised full-year FY27 revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion and reaffirmed the FY30 target of $63 billion. Q2 also marked the sixth consecutive quarter of beating EPS expectations, with non-GAAP EPS of $5.90 versus $3.27 consensus.

Why Not the Obvious Alternative The reflex AI trade in enterprise software is Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and I own it too. But CRM is where I keep adding, because CRM’s forward P/E of 14 and 7.50% free cash flow yield are simply not what Microsoft offers at its current valuation. I am paying a low-teens multiple for double-digit subscription growth and a $50 billion buyback. That math wins my next dollar.

Risk I Refuse to Wave Off Balance-sheet leverage jumped. Total liabilities rose 96.56% year-over-year to fund the ASR, and shareholders’ equity declined 37.42%. That is real. What keeps me steady is interest coverage of 27.5x and net debt/EBITDA of 0.78. This company can service the debt with cash flow it prints in a single quarter.

Conviction From Here The Street is warming up now, with an analyst target price of $281.89 against a current price of $233.28 and 40 buy or strong-buy ratings against just 2 strong sells. I was buying when shares were down 11.32% year-to-date. I will keep buying while the cash flow keeps compounding and the shares keep disappearing.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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Marc Benioff said that OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft prevented Salesforce from investing. Bloomberg/Getty Images Not being able to invest in OpenAI may have worked out perfectly for Salesforce.

On an episode of the Sources Podcast published Tuesday, Marc Benioff told host Alex Heath that he originally wanted Salesforce to invest in OpenAI. Instead, the company backed its rival Anthropic, a decision the Salesforce CEO now thinks could be worth a fortune.

"I knew Sam Altman very well," Benioff said. "I was like, 'Hey, I'd really like to be investing now in the company.' And he's like, unfortunately, because of the Microsoft relationship, we were not allowed to invest in OpenAI."

Microsoft, an enterprise software competitor to Salesforce, holds roughly 27% of OpenAI, has rights to use OpenAI technology in its products, and sells access to OpenAI models through Azure. Benioff said the situation changed Salesforce's approach.

"We felt like, whoa, we can't go here, we're going to have to go everywhere else," Benioff added, saying it was "not because we were so smart" and spotted an overlooked winner.

Benioff believes the bet could pay off handsomely and said that the investment has become a close business partnership. Salesforce's Slackbot and other new interfaces are powered by Claude, Anthropic's AI model.

"It's because we have been pushed so close with Anthropic," Benioff said. "I think we'll make not just billions but maybe tens of billions of dollars on it."

Salesforce has not disclosed how much of Anthropic it owns, but an Anthropic IPO could establish a public market value for Salesforce's stake and eventually offer a way to sell shares. The Claude maker has been preparing for a potential listing, although the timing is uncertain. OpenAI is also considering a public debut, but Altman said its IPO would not happen in 2026.

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Katherine Li You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts.

Katherine Li is a reporter on Business Insider's West Coast business news team. She covers career,  the future of work, and how AI is changing hiring practices and workplace trends.Previously, she was a newsroom fellow who wrote international breaking news and produced newsletters for Semafor. Before that, she wrote about climate policies for The Lever, covered the AAPI community for the SF Chronicle as a freelancer, and wrote about the 2019 Hong Kong protests as an intern for The New York Times.She is an alumna of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a graduate of the international journalism program at Hong Kong Baptist University with minors in French and English literature.  Email Katherine at [email protected] and follow her on Bluesky @katherineli.bsky.social. 

Salesforce Anthropic AI More Big Tech Venture Capital

Salesforce just unveiled Koa, its first homegrown AI model built for CRM reasoning, but a gap between launch and availability raises a pointed question: can a model nobody can buy yet actually move the stock?

Salesforce’s (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) Investor Day at Dreamforce on September 16, 2026, gave the company a stage to introduce Koa, a model it describes as its first tailored to CRM reasoning and actions. Salesforce post-trained Koa on an NVIDIA Nemotron foundation and says it controls the resulting weights, which is real ownership without the capital burden of frontier pretraining.

Select customers are piloting Koa now, with broader U.S. availability coming later. That gap matters because a model no one can buy yet cannot lift bookings, retention, or margins this quarter, and CRM closed at $243 Thursday after a 2.84% intraday decline.

What Post-Training on Nemotron Actually Buys Post-training adjusts a pretrained model rather than building every layer from scratch, buying control over behavior, cost, and deployment, and specializing a general model for the workflows already sitting inside Salesforce’s cloud.

Salesforce claims Koa produces roughly three times fewer errors on CRM actions than leading alternatives on its own benchmark. That is a meaningful engineering signal but weak commercial proof, because the test is vendor-run on tasks Salesforce chose.

Independent validation would look like accuracy in live deployments, cost per action, whether Koa carries separate pricing, and whether it measurably lifts paid Agentforce adoption or reduces churn.

Why Winter Timing Governs the Revenue Impact Enterprise customers typically time major deployments around the Dreamforce Winter release, so a September unveiling tends to convert into billable consumption months later. Agentforce ARR already exceeded $1.5 billion, up over 240% year-over-year in Q2 FY27, with combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR nearly $3.9 billion.

Marc Benioff told investors, “AI is delivering value across every layer of our platform. We’re seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products, with ARR about to cross $4 billion.”

Salesforce added 2,000 paying customers into production last quarter, although management conceded that “Most of them have not started their AI transformations yet.”

Where CRM Sits Against Microsoft and ServiceNow Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) already ships Copilot inside the productivity suite most enterprises pay for, a distribution edge Koa’s benchmark score does not address. ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) is monetizing its own agentic tier on similar consumption logic.

CRM’s 7.62% year-to-date decline against a $275.60 analyst target suggests the market is waiting for paid seat and consumption growth to catch the AI narrative.

Bull and Bear Case for CRM Stock The bull case rests on compounding paid adoption. Q2 free cash flow reached $1.098 billion, up 81.49%, and management raised FY27 revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion. If Koa lifts Agentforce win rates through the Winter release, a forward multiple near 15x looks inexpensive.

The bear case is that model capability is only an input to commercial outcomes. Noncurrent debt jumped to $39.3 billion to fund the accelerated buyback, and Q2 GAAP EPS was materially flattered by $2.61 billion in strategic investment gains.

The deciding variable is whether Koa carries pricing power and whether pilot accounts convert to production before fiscal year-end.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Marc Benioff has a plan for the most profitable investment Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) ever made: sell it and retire debt.

Speaking to a gathering at Dreamforce this week, the Salesforce CEO said the company spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Anthropic stock, a position he expects will likely be worth tens of billions, according to CNBC. 

CRM stock is moving. See the chart and price action here.  “We’ll end up probably selling it,” Benioff said, adding that proceeds would pay off the accelerated share repurchase debt Salesforce took on earlier this year. “So it’ll be a good trade for us.”

The Math Behind the BetSalesforce Ventures first backed Anthropic in early 2023. Since then, the AI lab’s valuation has gone vertical. Anthropic closed a $30 billion round in February at a $380 billion post-money valuation. By late May, a $65 billion Series H pushed the figure to $965 billion, vaulting Anthropic past OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup.

The markups have reshaped Salesforce’s income statement. Last quarter’s profit was boosted by a $2.6 billion gain on strategic investments tied to the Anthropic bet, and the stock jumped almost 23% — its best day since 2020.

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Why the Debt MattersBenioff’s exit logic ties back to March, when Salesforce funded a $25 billion accelerated share repurchase — it’s largest on record — with newly issued debt. The buyback retired roughly 103 million shares immediately, lifting per-share earnings while loading the balance sheet with obligations that did not exist a year ago.

Selling a private stake to extinguish that debt would close the loop neatly. Two paper gains become one cash event.

Timing remains the open question. Anthropic is still private, so any sale depends on a secondary transaction or an eventual public listing, and Benioff offered no calendar. 

Salesforce is simultaneously one of Anthropic’s largest customers, with Benioff projecting roughly $300 million in token spending this year, mostly on coding workloads. Unwinding equity in a critical supplier carries its own strategic wrinkles.

What it Means for Investors Gains on strategic investments have been dismissed as non-cash noise, and skeptics noted that most of last quarter’s earnings beat came from the markup rather than software sales. Benioff’s remarks suggest management views the position as a funding source and not an accounting artifact.

A sale would also strip a volatile input from Salesforce’s future quarters as Anthropic’s swings currently move Salesforce earnings by hundreds of millions.

CRM Stock Price Activity: Salesforcestock was down 2.13% at $245.21 at the time of publication Thursday, according to data from Benzinga Pro.

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Snap on Wednesday announced partnerships with companies including Salesforce, Nvidia and Amazon Web Services to integrate workplace tools into its Specs augmented-reality ​glasses, courting enterprise demand to carve a foothold in the heavily ‌contested market.

Unveiled in June with a hefty price tag of $2,195, Specs is a major bet by the Evan Spiegel-led social media company (SNAP.N) in a category drawing increasing investments and consumer ​interest and dominated by Big Tech rival Meta (META.O).

Apple (AAPL.O), however, has ​seen mixed results in making its Vision Pro headset a mainstream success, ⁠underlining the challenges facing the AI-powered gadgets segment.

To drive sales in ​a tough market, Snap is positioning its AR glasses as a workplace device for ​businesses seeking hands-free computing solutions in environments traditionally disconnected from desktops, such as factory floors, retail outlets and field service operations.

Snap said enterprise software maker Salesforce (CRM.N) would add ​its AI agent platform Agentforce into Specs, allowing workers to access company ​data and automate tasks through the glasses.

Nvidia (NVDA.O) will power the AI, enabling Specs to ‌interpret ⁠a worker's visual environment and retrieve relevant company data, while Amazon Web Services (AMZN.O) will offer its AI assistant, allowing employees to use voice commands for tasks such as checking product availability.

Snap did not disclose the financial terms ​of the partnerships, ​which include those ⁠with software company Trifork and augmented-reality software firm Hololight.

Specs' charging case, sold separately, will have cellular connectivity through its ​telecom partners, including Verizon (VZ.N) in the U.S., Orange (ORAN.PA) in ​France and ⁠BT Group's (BT.L) EE in the UK.

Snap, which also announced Specs Intelligence AI service on Wednesday, has previously said shipping for the glasses is expected to ⁠begin ​later this fall in the U.S., UK and ​France.

Starting in October, consumers can try Specs at the Westfield Century City shopping mall in ​Los Angeles, Snap said.

Jim Cramer is calling Salesforce's massive buyback a stroke of genius, but today's price action tells a more complicated story about whether the software giant's rough stretch is truly behind it.

Jim Cramer used his Mad Dash segment on Wednesday to make a bullish call on Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction), arguing that the software giant’s aggressive buyback is aging well and that sentiment around the name has turned. His summary line: “There’s a lot of sense that whatever was ailing the stock is over.” Cramer is describing a sentiment he detected around the company, not citing a specific metric.

Why Cramer Thinks the Buyback Looks Smart Cramer’s core argument was about timing. He told viewers Salesforce “bought a huge amount of stock back in the 170s, according to CNBC. That looks like it’s a pretty smart deal. People felt that they were hurting their balance sheet. Well, it turns out it didn’t even dent their balance sheet. It’s a very positive story.” The characterization of the balance sheet is Cramer’s, not ours.

The program he is referring to has been reported at $25 billion in size, disclosed alongside the company’s most recent quarterly results in the Q2 FY27 8-K exhibit filed on August 26, 2026. The Q2 release described an accelerated share repurchase with an average price of $176 per share to date and an expectation to “repurchase at least 14% of shares outstanding through this program.”

Set Cramer’s 170s against where Salesforce trades now: $251.59 as of 1:34 p.m. ET on September 16, 2026. Readers can draw their own conclusion about the entry point.

A Complication Cramer’s Segment Doesn’t Address Today’s price action does not fully cooperate with the bullish framing. Salesforce is down 1.59% on the session from a previous close of $255.65, and the stock remains down 4.53% year to date. Those figures sit uneasily next to the “ailing is over” framing.

What supports Cramer is the recent run. Salesforce is up 28.22% over the past month, having traded at $196.21 on August 14, 2026. That rebound is the move that makes the repurchases in the 170s look like better and better business as the weeks pass, according to CNBC.

Cramer on the Keynote and “Slackforce” Cramer also flagged what he considered the most substantive part of Marc Benioff’s keynote presentation: a new AI product he chose to describe with his own shorthand. In his words, “Marc did talk about a new product. I want to call it slack force because that I felt was the most serious part, according to CNBC. So many companies have slack now. It gives the ability for a company to unlock trapped, trapped value.” To be clear, “Slackforce” is Cramer’s coinage. It is not a product name Salesforce announced.

For context on the Slack piece of that thesis, Salesforce management said on the Q2 call that Slackbot reached one million active users five months after launch, up 150% quarter to quarter, and that Q2 Slack Net New AOV was the fastest quarterly growth since acquisition.

Cramer also described the atmosphere around Benioff: “I’ve not seen marc like this in a long time. I mean, jensen is walking by and jensen starts talking about his product with marc, according to CNBC. Google doing things with marc.” That is Cramer’s account of what he saw in the room, and it is anecdotal by nature. No partnership or commercial agreement was announced in what he described.

What to Watch Next Salesforce has an Investor Day scheduled for September 16, 2026, and the final settlement of the accelerated share repurchase is expected in October 2026. Investors weighing Cramer’s take against today’s price action have two clear checkpoints ahead: the long-term financial framework management lays out this week, and the final share count once the ASR settles.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Key Takeaways Salesforce's Slackbot users rose more than 150% sequentially in Q2'27.CRM said premium Slack upgrades tripled after Slackbot launched, while AI bookings more than doubled.Salesforce's Q2 revenues rose 11% to $11.35B, helped by continued strength in Slack and Agentforce. Salesforce, Inc. (CRM - Free Report) is seeing momentum from Slack, and rising Slackbot usage could become a growth driver. In the second quarter of fiscal 2027, Slackbot users increased more than 150% sequentially, while Slack delivered its fastest quarterly net new annual order value (NNAOV) growth since Salesforce acquired the platform.

The momentum matters because Salesforce has been working to reignite growth as its core business matures. Slack is becoming more than a collaboration tool as Salesforce adds artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that can automate tasks and connect employees with business data.

During its second-quarter earnings call, the company revealed that upgrades to premium Slack additions tripled after Slackbot launched. It also reported that bookings for Agentforce One Edition and Agentforce for Apps more than doubled quarter over quarter. These trends suggest customers are moving beyond AI trials toward higher-value offerings.

Slack’s stronger performance is already supporting Salesforce’s results. Second-quarter revenues rose 11% year over year to $11.35 billion, while subscription and support revenues increased 12% to $10.82 billion. The company cited continued strength in Slack and Agentforce as key contributors to the quarter.

Slack’s rising AI adoption gives Salesforce another path to expand customer spending. If Slackbot momentum continues, Slack could become an increasingly important catalyst for Salesforce’s growth and help support a broader acceleration in the company’s revenues over time. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2027 and 2028 revenues indicates year-over-year growth of 11.3% and 9.6%, respectively.

Salesforce’s Competitors Challenge Slack’s AI MomentumSalesforce faces strong competition from Microsoft Corporation (MSFT - Free Report) and Zoom Communications (ZM - Free Report) as Slack evolves into an AI-powered workplace platform. Both rivals are embedding generative AI into workplace collaboration platforms to increase customer engagement and drive higher software spending.

Microsoft has integrated Copilot across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365, giving users AI-powered meeting summaries, content creation and workflow automation. This strategy is helping expand the value of its productivity suite.

In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, Microsoft reported revenues of $90 billion, up 18% year over year, while Microsoft 365 Commercial cloud revenues increased 14%. The company also reported Azure revenue growth of 43%, providing a strong foundation for continued AI investments that compete directly with Salesforce's Slack ecosystem.

Zoom is also expanding beyond video conferencing by embedding Zoom AI Companion across meetings, chat and contact center offerings. In the second quarter of fiscal 2027, Zoom's enterprise revenues increased 7.8% year over year to about $787.5 million, while enterprise customers generating more than $100,000 in annual revenues grew 8.2% to nearly 4,625.

Zoom is using AI to encourage customers to adopt multiple products, similar to Salesforce's strategy of linking Slack with Agentforce and Data 360.

Salesforce’s Price Performance, Valuation and EstimatesSalesforce shares have declined 3.5% year to date, while the Zacks Internet – Software industry has risen 2.9%.

Salesforce YTD Price Return Performance
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

From a valuation standpoint, CRM trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 16.01, significantly below the industry’s average of 28.78.

Salesforce Forward 12-Month P/E Ratio
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Salesforce’s fiscal 2027 earnings implies a year-over-year increase of approximately 30.3%, while estimates for fiscal 2028 indicate a 3.4% decline. Estimates for fiscal 2027 and 2028 earnings have been revised upward in the past 30 days.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Salesforce currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

New models and interfaces must convert agent experimentation into recurring revenue without weakening margins. Summary

Dreamforce is shifting Salesforce’s AI story from product launches toward measurable customer spending.

Salesforce CRM, the cloud-based customer-management software provider, opened Dreamforce on Tuesday with AI taking center stage across its product roadmap. Shares traded at $256.65, down approximately 1.1%, as investors looked past the conference buzz toward Wednesday's longer-term financial targets. The message is clear: Wall Street now wants Salesforce to prove that its AI push can translate into faster, durable growth.

Investor's Business Daily reported that Salesforce is rolling out AIforce, an interface designed to connect corporate data and workflows with outside AI agents, alongside Koa, a model built with Nvidia's Nemotron technology and Salesforce CRM data. The company is also leaning further into consumption-based pricing as autonomous agents take on more work. That shift could reshape how customers pay for Salesforce products, tying revenue increasingly to actual AI usage rather than traditional software seats.

Agentforce and Data 360 annual recurring revenue reached nearly $3.9 billion last quarter, surging more than 210%. That represents roughly 8.4% of the midpoint of Salesforce's $46.25 billion annual revenue guidance, meaning AI is moving from experiment to material business line. The GuruFocus snapshot adds another wrinkle: at $256.65, Salesforce trades 24.75% below its GF Value estimate of $341.05. That valuation gap looks tempting, but Dreamforce still needs to convince investors that AI adoption can expand Salesforce's growth engine rather than simply redistribute spending across its existing software portfolio.

Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.

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When a hyperscaler doubles its capex, it is locking in land, power, and GPUs years before a single dollar of revenue arrives. The spending numbers from three cloud giants reveal exactly how different their bets look and which signals actually…

AI capital spending has become the single most important tell for where cloud demand is heading. When a hyperscaler doubles capex, it is contracting land, power, GPUs, and years of customer commitments long before revenue shows up. The three names below show what that looks like at very different scales. Two are hyperscalers building the physical layer of the AI economy. One is an application software company monetizing agents on top. Ranked by the size of the capex commitment, the growth of the cloud/AI revenue line, and the backlog signaling future demand, here is the countdown.

No. 3: Salesforce Is a Different Trade Entirely Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) sits third on this list because it is playing a different game. Capex in the most recent quarter was $171 million, a rounding error next to the hyperscalers. Salesforce is a SaaS company, so its AI investment shows up in software, M&A, and buybacks rather than data centers.

The AI monetization story is still real. Fiscal Q2 2027 revenue was $11.35 billion, up 10.8% year over year, with subscription and support up 12%. Agentforce and Data 360 combined ARR reached nearly $3.9 billion, up over 210% year over year, and Agentforce ARR alone crossed $1.5 billion, up over 240%. Current RPO of $33.5 billion, up 14%, is a real backlog, but it is a fraction of what the hyperscalers report.

CEO Marc Benioff framed the moment bluntly: “AI is delivering value across every layer of our platform. We’re seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products, with ARR about to cross $4 billion.” The stock trades at a P/E near 27x with a market cap around $203.8 billion. Year to date, CRM is down 6%, though it has ripped 28.14% over the past month as AI narrative caught up. Investors treating CRM as a hyperscaler proxy will get the risk profile wrong.

No. 2: Amazon Is Spending to Reserve the Next Decade of Compute Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) takes the second slot because the capex figure and the backlog are staggering. Q2 2026 capital expenditures were $54.21 billion, up 68.44% year over year, essentially all pointed at AWS and generative AI. That spending has flipped trailing free cash flow negative to -$7.6 billion. That is the tension: near-term FCF compression as a vote of confidence in multi-year demand.

AWS revenue hit $42.23 billion, up 37%, the fastest growth in 18 quarters, with a 39.4% operating margin. AI and chips businesses each cleared $25 billion annualized run rates, both growing triple digits. AWS backlog on the earnings call reached $496 billion, growing triple digits year over year, and management said the lion’s share of 2027 capacity is largely reserved with meaningful 2028 already booked. Anthropic and OpenAI have committed multi-gigawatt Trainium capacity.

CEO Andy Jassy said AWS could become “a trillion dollar annual revenue business for us in time.” AMZN trades at a P/E near 35x and is up 11.25% year to date. The capex is huge, but the demand signal behind it is larger.

No. 1: Microsoft’s $115.95 Billion Capex Year Sets the Ceiling Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) tops the list on all three criteria. Full-year FY26 capital expenditures reached $115.95 billion, up 79.62% year over year, with Q4 alone at $35.80 billion, up 109.63%. Free cash flow fell 6.46% for the year on the ramp. Management guided FY27 capex to grow again, with the finance-lease shift adjusting the number to roughly $175 billion.

The demand behind that spend is documented. Azure and other cloud services grew 43%, Azure crossed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time, and Intelligent Cloud revenue was $39.31 billion, up 32%. The kicker is the backlog: commercial RPO surged 84% to $678 billion, with RPO recognized beyond the next 12 months up 112%. Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats. CFO Amy Hood told the call, “demand continues to exceed available supply” and that efficiency gains “are quickly monetized in quarter.”

CEO Satya Nadella captured the framing: “We are advancing the frontier on the cost-to-outcome curve, ensuring every customer can turn tokens into business results.” MSFT trades near a 27x P/E on a $3.68 trillion market cap. Year to date, shares are up 3.14%, a modest number relative to the operational scale being deployed.

What the Spending Actually Reveals Capex is the cleanest read on where cloud demand is going. Microsoft’s $115.95 billion capex year, $678 billion RPO, and $100 billion Azure milestone say the company sees years of contracted AI workloads it must build ahead of. Amazon’s $54 billion single-quarter spend and $496 billion AWS backlog say the same story at a similar scale, with custom silicon as the differentiator. All of that concrete, power, and networking has to come from somebody, and we rounded up seven suppliers riding the same buildout in a free report on the picks-and-shovels side of the AI boom. Salesforce, by contrast, is monetizing agents on top of that infrastructure rather than paying to build it, which is why its $171 million capex line looks nothing like the other two. Investors should keep an eye on FY27 capex updates and Azure/AWS growth reports, because the gap between demand commitments and free cash flow is where the next chapter of this trade gets decided.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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Fin’s customer agent platform joins Salesforce, giving companies faster, more flexible ways to automate customer service and deliver measurable outcomes

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the world’s #1 AI CRM, today announced it has completed its acquisition of Fin, formerly Intercom, an industry-leading customer agent company. The close of the acquisition brings Fin’s customer agent platform and world-class technical AI team to Salesforce, along with an established global customer base of more than 30,000 companies.

Powered by the Fin model suite, the company’s proprietary AI models trained specifically for customer experience, Fin’s AI customer agent resolves complex queries end-to-end across every channel, including live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, voice, and Slack - achieving an industry-leading average resolution rate of 76%.

“The #1 customer agent meets the #1 CRM,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce. “The future of customer service is autonomous, intelligent, and built on trust. Fin brings proven agent technology and an extraordinary AI team to Salesforce, making Agentforce even more powerful for customer service. Together, we’re giving companies of every size the ability to deploy trusted AI agents from day one—accelerating time to value and delivering measurable outcomes at scale.”

Expanding Customer Choice and Accelerating Time to Value

Fin’s fast-to-deploy AI agent works seamlessly with the help desks and systems companies already use across the entire customer experience. Alongside Agentforce’s deeply customizable platform, Fin broadens Salesforce’s customer service AI portfolio and gives organizations more choice in how they adopt autonomous service – ranging from rapid deployment on existing systems to deeply tailored, enterprise-scale transformation.

“I don’t think there’s a technology quite like Fin in the customer space,” said Eoghan McCabe, CEO and Co-Founder of Fin. “The big strategic benefit of our decision to join Salesforce is magnitudes more businesses and their customers that we can bring it to. Everyone wins when businesses can perfectly serve their customers.”

As part of Salesforce’s AI Labs, Fin will continue to serve its customers, advance its AI agent capabilities, and build market-defining AI models and technology.

About Salesforce

Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation. Visit www.salesforce.com for more information.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 regarding the acquisition of Fin by Salesforce. Forward-looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in Salesforce’s filings with the SEC, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. Salesforce assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

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Wednesday's stabilization leaves investors debating whether contracted revenue can protect Salesforce from increasingly capable general-purpose agents. Summary

Salesforce’s backlog offers a cushion, but its dedicated AI business remains comparatively small.

Salesforce CRM, the customer-relationship-management software leader, fell approximately 4% Tuesday as GPT-6 Astra reignited Wall Street's fear that general-purpose AI could swallow functions now handled by specialized software. The stock steadied Wednesday, trading nearly flat at $248.84.

The latest quarterly results still give the bulls real ammunition. Current remaining performance obligations reached $33.5 billion, while quarterly revenue hit $11.3 billion. Agentforce annual recurring revenue topped $1.5 billion after more than tripling year over year, but that emerging business represents only about 3.2% of Salesforce's $46.25 billion full-year revenue-guidance midpoint.

Contracted obligations equal roughly 72% of annual guidance, giving Salesforce a sturdy near-term cushion while customers test newer AI models. Yet contracts cannot permanently shield seat growth, pricing or renewals if independent agents become capable substitutes. The chart sharpens the valuation debate: Salesforce trades 26.97% below its $340.76 GF Value estimate, suggesting investors have already priced in a meaningful slice of the disruption risk.

Disclosures I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and have no plans to buy any new positions in the stocks mentioned within the next 72 hours.

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Salesforce bulls are pointing to an AI monetization curve that is bending sharply upward, but the bears have real ammunition too, and with Dreamforce and Investor Day arriving next week, the stock sits at a crossroads where the next few…

At $249.12, Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) screens attractively. The stock looks fully priced on trailing numbers, yet the AI monetization curve underneath it is bending sharply upward, and the setup into Dreamforce and the September 16, 2026 Investor Day gives bulls a near-term catalyst the market has not fully absorbed.

Salesforce is the world’s largest customer relationship management software company, and it has spent the past year retooling itself around agentic AI. Fiscal 2026 revenue reached $41.53 billion, and management is guiding fiscal 2027 to $46.10 billion to $46.40 billion, with a stated $63 billion FY30 target. The stock, however, has lagged. Shares are down 5.47% year to date even after a 29.25% one-month surge tied to the Q2 report.

Why the Agentforce Ramp Changes the Math The bull argument starts with AI traction that is no longer theoretical. Agentforce ARR crossed $1.5 billion, up over 240% year over year, and combined Agentforce plus Data 360 ARR reached roughly $3.9 billion, up more than 210%. Q2 delivered revenue of $11.35 billion, up 10.83%, and a sixth straight EPS beat.

Valuation looks reasonable against that growth. Shares trade at roughly 27x trailing earnings with a 7.02% free cash flow yield. The $25 billion accelerated buyback took diluted shares to 821 million from 962 million, and cRPO grew 14% to $33.5 billion, a leading indicator that the second-half reacceleration is real.

Where the Bear Thesis Has Real Teeth Skeptics can point to genuine cracks. Q2 non-GAAP EPS of $5.90 was flattered by $2.53 per share in strategic investment gains, and operating income fell 0.04% year over year despite double-digit revenue growth. Free cash flow guidance of only 4% to 5% growth undercuts the AI hyper-growth story.

The balance sheet has changed too. Noncurrent debt jumped to $39.3 billion from $10.4 billion to fund the ASR, total liabilities rose 96.56%, and shareholders’ equity fell 37.42%. Bears argue the buyback is manufacturing EPS while operating leverage stalls.

Why Some Investors Are Still Waiting The Hold case rests on ambiguity. Revenue growth is guided at just 11% to 12%, which is not obviously worth a premium multiple. Informatica integration, FX, and $94 million in Q2 restructuring charges add noise. Some investors may look to Q3 for confirmation that Agentforce is converting bookings into GAAP operating leverage.

What the Numbers Say Right Now Shares currently trade at $249.12 against an analyst consensus target of $272.13, implying roughly 9% upside. Sentiment is constructive: 6 Strong Buy, 34 Buy, 14 Hold, 0 Sell, and 2 Strong Sell across 56 analysts, with 36 upward EPS revisions for FY27 in the trailing 30 days and zero cuts.

Performance tells a mixed story. CRM is down 5.47% year to date and roughly flat over one year at -0.4%, while the S&P 500 has returned 12.32% YTD and 18.05% over one year. Targets are one input among many, and the gap between fundamentals and price action is unusually wide here.

Why $249 Screens Attractively At $249.12, the setup for Salesforce looks constructive. Here is why.

The path to appreciation is specific. Agentforce ARR has moved from $500 million to $800 million to $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion in four quarters, and management said ARR is about to cross $4 billion across AI and data. If the second-half reacceleration lands, FY28 EPS estimates near $16.00 understate the operating leverage that Contentful, Fin, and ClaudeForce can unlock.

The catalyst window is short. Dreamforce and Investor Day arrive next week, the ASR settles in October 2026, and Q3 guidance of $11.42 billion to $11.50 billion looks beatable given 14% cRPO growth.

What invalidates the thesis: a Q3 miss on subscription revenue, Agentforce ARR growth slowing below 100% year over year, or GAAP operating margin compressing further. Watch cRPO and net-new AOV quarter by quarter. Underperformance versus the S&P 500 has compressed the risk into an entry price where the AI ramp is nearly free.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

The first half of 2026 was a tough time for software stock investors. The sector experienced a massive sell-off, with top names, including Salesforce (CRM +2.92%), dropping sharply as fears of AI displacing enterprise software led many investors to reevaluate the segment's top stocks.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told investors this isn't the first so-called "SaaSpocalypse" he's seen in his tenure as head of the leading enterprise software company. He called it "a great buying opportunity" during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call in February and thanked the board for authorizing a $50 billion share repurchase program, including a $25 billion accelerated repurchase. He executed within weeks, issuing debt and buying back the stock in a massive bet on the company.

And now it's paying off. Salesforce's share price is up 38% since the end of March, getting another leg up with the company's second-quarter earnings report in late August. Investors wondering if they missed the opportunity to buy the SaaS stock could be in luck. It still looks like an incredible opportunity, given several key announcements in the company's earnings report.

Image source: Getty Images.

Did Salesforce just put the AI fears to bed? Salesforce reported solid earnings for the second quarter, but investors will need to dig a little deeper to understand what drove the market to push the stock price up more than 20% after the news.

First, the company reported revenue at the top end of its guidance and saw remaining performance obligations grow at 11%. Current remaining performance obligations climbed 14%, giving credence to management's standing projection that it'll experience revenue acceleration in the back half of 2026. That's further supported by management's guidance, which included a raise in its full-year revenue outlook.

More encouraging is that the revenue growth is being driven by artificial intelligence (AI). "We're seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products, with [annual recurring revenue] about to cross $4 billion," Benioff said in the press release. That's a 210% increase in AI-related revenue year over year.

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Building on that, it announced a partnership with Anthropic and introduced Claudeforce. The first set of products in Claudeforce will enable users to take actions right from a Claude chatbot window. It allows a Claude agent to access data within Salesforce and enables users to create apps and uncover answers buried in company data without any user interface constraints. It's also integrating Claude deeper into Agentforce and Slack.

The partnership reinforces Benioff's assertion that Salesforce's integration with businesses and its ability to collect and store enterprise data are essential, and the company's software will serve as an important layer that large language models can work on top of.

Salesforce is spending heavily on developing and marketing its AI efforts, though. That resulted in operating margin compression and a slight downward revision in full-year operating margin. Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) operating margin is now expected to come in at 20.1% for the full year, but non-GAAP operating margin remains unchanged at 34.3% for the year.

Despite the big jump in the stock price, Salesforce stock still looks cheap relative to its growth potential. Management may provide another update to its long-term growth targets later this month, but last year, it suggested it could grow revenue at a double-digit rate through the end of the decade while expanding the adjusted operating margin to about 40%.

The most recent earnings results should put some doubts about its potential growth to rest, but the market still fears that management is overly optimistic. That's why shares trade for just 16 times earnings expectations.

But even if management proves somewhat overly optimistic, the stock can still climb higher from here. As AI-related revenue becomes a bigger part of the business, it strikes more deals like Claudeforce, and revenue continues to compound at a double-digit rate, it should see some operating leverage as it scales its AI efforts. That should support strong organic earnings growth.

Meanwhile, the company is generating billions in free cash flow every year. That cash is used for additional acquisitions to bolster growth, with the rest going toward share repurchases. There's still about $23 billion of its $50 billion repurchase authorization remaining. That should push earnings-per-share growth even higher.

With a solid business that's proving to be a beneficiary of AI more than a victim of it, investors may still be undervaluing Salesforce right now.

Last week, Salesforce (CRM -1.37%) reported strong second-quarter results, but the bigger story was a deal that makes Anthropic's Claude the default reasoning engine inside Salesforce's products. Claude runs in Agentforce, Slack, and Slack's coding product, so Salesforce customers get a frontier model without ever leaving its ecosystem. The stock had its best day since 2020, jumping nearly 23% on the news.

In short, it seems the bearish thesis that large language models would erode Salesforce's competitive moat is beginning to fade. CEO Marc Benioff addressed it, stating, "This is not the SaaSpocalypse."

Image source: The Motley Fool.

The upgrade path The deal with Anthropic does two things for Salesforce. First, it removes a near-term risk by bringing a potential rival into the fold. "We're huge Salesforce customers," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei confirmed. "We're not interested in destroying anyone."

Second, it strengthens the company's primary path to monetizing AI. Salesforce's premium editions cost 60% to 80% more per seat, and the new AI features are only available with premium subscriptions.

Given that just 5% of its sales and service users are currently on premium tiers, this deal provides Salesforce with a powerful new opportunity to upsell its customers and fuel further revenue growth. Importantly, it doesn't lock Salesforce's clients into using only Claude.

Its second-quarter results were solid, with revenue up 11% and earnings per share up 16% after excluding gains related to the company's stake in Anthropic. Annualized revenue for Agentforce, its AI product line, climbed 240% to $1.5 billion. And current remaining performance obligations (the value of signed contracts due within a year) grew 14%, up modestly from last quarter's 13%.

Aiding clients with AI I think this partnership is a smart move by Benioff. It puts the top large language model inside Salesforce's product, out of the box, and users can swap models if they prefer.

The best way for Salesforce to encourage AI adoption is to help its clients use AI to improve efficiency while protecting their data. The company is moving in that direction, but it still faces an uphill battle with seat-based pricing. Benioff admits Salesforce is "still trapped in some ways in old per-user pricing models."

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After the stock's recent run, shares trade at a reasonable 17.5 times forward earnings. The overhang of disruption-related fears is lifting, which should reinforce investor confidence in Salesforce's long-term value. Moving forward, the company can focus on driving growth.

Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff inside Highspot’s longtime offices in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop) Highspot’s branding is still everywhere inside its longtime headquarters at World Trade Center East, overlooking the Seattle waterfront. But outside the corner office that once belonged to the sales software company’s co-founder and CEO, “Seismic” is scribbled on the whiteboard.

That’s how fresh the merger is. Two weeks after San Diego-based Seismic took over its Seattle-based rival, Seismic CEO Rob Tarkoff is in town this week for the first board meeting since the combination was completed, and the inaugural gathering of the combined company’s senior leadership team.

Highspot and Seismic sell sales enablement software: systems that manage the pitch decks, case studies and training materials salespeople use, and track which ones help close deals.

Founded in 2011 by Robert Wahbe and two former Microsoft colleagues, Highspot raised $650 million and held the top spot on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the region’s privately held tech companies, prior to the merger. Wahbe, its CEO until the deal closed, is now on Seismic’s board.

Highspot co-founder Robert Wahbe, who led the company until the merger closed and now serves on Seismic’s board. (Highspot Photo) Tarkoff, a lawyer by training who spent much of his career in corporate development and M&A, became Seismic’s CEO in October 2025, succeeding co-founder Doug Winter. He had previously spent seven years running Oracle’s customer experience business.

The Highspot deal was announced in February, four months into his tenure.

Tarkoff addressed a wide range of questions from GeekWire in an interview Monday afternoon in Wahbe’s former office, which now serves as an ad hoc meeting room.

Here are the main takeaways from the interview:

A $600 million company: Tarkoff disclosed the combined company’s annual recurring revenue for the first time, putting it at about $600 million, with about $200 million of that coming from Highspot.

That makes the combined business three times the size Highspot was on its own and 50% bigger than Seismic. Tarkoff said the larger size will be an adjustment for people across both companies as they come together. “We’re getting closer to being a billion dollar company,” he said.

The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, and Tarkoff declined to say whether the transaction put Highspot above or below the $3.5 billion valuation it reached in 2022.

Tim Porter, managing director at Madrona, which led Highspot’s Series A in 2014, called it a “multi-billion-dollar merger” in a post after the deal closed. Porter, who serves as a board observer at Seismic following the combination, wrote that Madrona hopes to help build the combined company into “a truly iconic AI software company, through a potential IPO and beyond.”

Permira, the private equity firm that has backed Seismic since 2020, remains the controlling shareholder of the combined company.

Impact on jobs: Seismic said when the deal closed that Highspot had more than 700 employees and that the combined company would have about 1,700 total. Tarkoff said in a statement at the time that the companies were “carefully evaluating our organizations to identify areas of overlap,” and that “any decisions will be communicated directly and proactively to employees.”

Since then, word of initial job cuts has started to emerge on LinkedIn and other online forums, but the company has not provided specifics or disclosed any numbers.

Asked for an update on job reductions this week, Tarkoff said, “We did our best to try to find roles for everybody that we could, but there’s always some level of overlap where you don’t need two people doing a task that requires one.”

Tarkoff did not provide numbers or address the question of whether more job cuts are coming. He said the company feels “really good about where we are from a go-forward staff perspective,” while adding: “We will continue to push performance and push growth and acceleration.”

Seismic’s future in Seattle: Tarkoff said Seismic will keep Highspot’s Seattle offices at World Trade Center East, where the company has a long-term lease. He called Seattle “one of the top centers of excellence for tech talent,” citing the ability to recruit from Amazon, Microsoft and others.

There will be no designated Seattle site leader, he said, describing the office as one of the company’s major centers rather than a headquarters.

However, several senior leaders of the combined company are based in Seattle, including Kurt Berglund, who led engineering at Highspot and is now Seismic’s senior vice president of AI.

Others include chief human resources officer Kimberly Schultz, who joined Seismic in June after 11 years at Amazon, where she led the team responsible for integrating acquisitions and divestitures, and Lucas Welch, VP of brand and communications, who spent nearly eight years at Highspot.

Tarkoff said a number of the company’s top engineers are based in Seattle as well.

Seismic’s other major locations include San Diego, Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, B.C., London and Hyderabad, India, where Tarkoff said the company has more than doubled its presence. Gurpreet Singh Pall, who was Highspot India’s chief operating officer, now leads Seismic’s India operations.

Product plans: The current Highspot and Seismic platforms both will continue to be sold and supported for the time being, Tarkoff said. He declined to set a timetable for eventually consolidating them, saying customers will move to a new platform when one is ready.

Now that the companies are able to work directly together, he said they’ve come to see that the two products are closer than he understood before the deal closed. Seismic has focused on complex enterprise workflows and regulated industries, financial services in particular, while Highspot built for a broader market of upper mid-market and lower enterprise customers.

With two teams no longer building the same things, he said, engineering can move to new work — more AI agents, additional content governance features, and deeper industry-specific workflows such as archiving and records retention.

Rivals are making the opposite case. Ali Akhtar, CEO of Letter AI, wrote in a LinkedIn post last week that mergers in the category turn companies inward for quarters or years, predicting “stalled innovation, layoffs, and distractions from delivering customer value,” and a period of reduced support for customers on legacy platforms. Akhtar is offering to buy out their contracts.

Pricing: Tarkoff said seat-based subscriptions aren’t going away, because enterprises want predictable costs. He said he’s skeptical of the usage-based pricing some AI vendors have adopted, pointing to high-profile examples of companies blowing past their budgets.

“Token-maxing is not really a good model long term, because it’s just going to force enterprises to use less,” he said.

He said Seismic is working toward pricing tied to outcomes rather than usage.

The Salesforce question: A week after the Seismic-Highspot merger closed, Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claudeforce, making Claude the default model across Slack and parts of Salesforce’s Agentforce platform.

Salesforce is both a channel and a rival for Seismic. Seismic’s software sells through the Salesforce AppExchange, and its Aura AI runs inside Agentforce, Salesforce’s agent platform. At the same time, Salesforce’s Sales Cloud includes its own sales enablement tools. And Agentforce agents increasingly do work that enablement platforms have owned.

Asked whether the partnership makes Salesforce a tougher competitor, Tarkoff said no.

As sellers start working inside Claude rather than inside individual applications, he said, the assistant will call each company separately — Salesforce for customer records, Seismic for approved content and sales materials. That makes Seismic a peer of Salesforce inside Claude, rather than an add-on inside Salesforce’s own product.

“It actually puts us more on an even playing field with Salesforce,” he said.

But Salesforce is considerably further along. Claudeforce launched with a Salesforce plugin carrying 37 prebuilt sales skills, in pilot now and due in open beta this month.

Much of the early analysis of the Salesforce-Anthropic partnership saw it as evidence that enterprise AI is consolidating around a few deep platform alliances rather than opening up.

Seismic’s next fiscal year begins Feb. 1. Tarkoff said he expects to spend much of the intervening months on the road with customers and employees. Seismic plans to give the first detailed look at its new product roadmap at its Shift conference, Oct. 12-15 in Carlsbad, Calif.

After a gloomy first half to the year, shares of Salesforce Inc. NYSE: CRM have been enjoying quite the recovery of late. Since June, the stock has surged more than 70%, and last week's earnings poured fresh fuel on the fire.

Salesforce Today

$259.25 +1.71 (+0.67%)

As of 11:02 AM Eastern

This is a fair market value price provided by Massive. Learn more.

$146.32▼

$269.110.68%

23.81

$262.13

It’s been a powerful run, and one that has gone a long way towards quieting fears that the rise of AI might be tolling the bell for traditional software platforms.

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That fear had weighed on Salesforce for months, resting on the theory that businesses might ditch expensive software contracts in favor of home-grown AI-powered alternatives.

However, recent earnings results told a very different story, and investors have piled in as a result.

The one obvious catch is that the shares now look stretched.

The blistering pace of Salesforce’s rally has pushed a closely watched momentum gauge, the relative strength index (RSI), up above 80, a level that screams overbought.

For those of us on the sidelines, that leaves one simple question: were the results good enough to justify further gains even with the RSI this stretched, or does buying in now risk being the last one holding the bag when the stock takes a well-earned breather?

Why the Stock Jumped Last WeekThe latest spark to this multi-month rally was a set of results that gave investors plenty to cheer about. Salesforce’s revenue grew at a solid 11% year on year, while contracted future revenue accelerated, and customer churn fell to near-record lows.

Those signals matter because they counter one of the great fears hanging over the software industry: that AI might tempt companies to abandon expensive software platforms. Instead, Salesforce's customers are staying put and spending more, suggesting those fears may have been overdone.

On the back of that strength, management also raised its guidance for the year, which helps explain why shares jumped nearly 25% from their pre-earnings level.

Salesforce Inc. (CRM) Price Chart for Tuesday, September, 1, 2026

The AI Engine Behind the NumbersIf the results lit the fuse, the company's progress in AI provided the charge. Salesforce’s flagship suite of AI tools, known as Agentforce, has been growing at a blistering pace, with the recurring revenue it generates more than tripling over the past year.

That is the crucial point for the bulls, especially when the red-hot RSI makes the stock look so overbought. The earnings report was proof that Salesforce is using AI to its advantage, rather than being disrupted by it. Considering shares had spent the first half of the year losing more than 40% of their value amid fears of the latter scenario, that’s a lot of downside to reverse.

The cherry on top was the announcement of Salesforce’s partnership with AI giant Anthropic, which will see Salesforce integrate Anthropic’s Claude model directly into its platform. It is in many ways an ironic turn of events—the very kind of AI once seen as a threat to Salesforce's future has now been brought inside the tent as a partner, turning a potential disruptor into a key selling point.

What the Analysts Are SayingSalesforce Stock Forecast Today12-Month Stock Price Forecast:
$262.13
1.47% Upside

Moderate Buy
Based on 48 Analyst Ratings

Current Price$258.33High Forecast$400.00Average Forecast$262.13Low Forecast$160.00Salesforce Stock Forecast Details

Wall Street, unsurprisingly, has responded with a string of analyst updates, almost universally bullish, in the wake of the report.

To name just a handful: Argus, TD Cowen, Deutsche Bank and Needham all reiterated their Buy or equivalent ratings, with some refreshed price targets as high as $400.

From where Salesforce is trading, even after the post-earnings pop, that’s still an impressive 55% in targeted upside.

Their bullish outlook is reflected across the wider analyst community's stance, which nets out to a MarketBeat consensus rating of Moderate Buy for the stock.

An Overbought Stock Still Worth OwningFor all the bullish momentum, there is no escaping the fact that the stock looks frothy in the short term. The RSI’s current reading near 80 is its highest level in nearly two years, and prints like that tend to precede a pullback at some point, even if it’s just some healthy profit taking.

For investors, the thing to watch is Salesforce’s price action over the coming days. If shares start to trickle lower this week rather than push on to fresh highs, that would be an early hint the rally is pausing for breath, and sellers are beginning to take some money off the table.

Why a Dip Would Be a GiftYet even that scenario would be no bad thing. A cooling-off period would give those on the sidelines something they don’t have right now: a more comfortable entry point into a stock with an awful lot going for it. Between accelerating demand, tangible AI revenue, and a wave of rising price targets, the longer-term case is compelling.

So while the overbought reading counsels a little patience, the bigger picture is clear. For investors looking to capture the AI revolution, Salesforce increasingly looks like a stock to own rather than avoid, whether they buy in now or wait for an inevitable bout of profit-taking.

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Jim Cramer suggested on Friday that the recent "SaaSpocalypse" selloff in software stocks may have been driven in part by short bets from Situational Awareness and said the worst could be over for Salesforce (NYSE:CRM).

Cramer said he is "beginning to wonder" how much of the episode was tied to the hedge fund betting against SaaS names, adding, "At the very least, the worst is over for Club name Salesforce."

Salesforce CEO Rejects Saaspocalypse Fears Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, dismissed concerns about a SaaSpocalypse as "nonsense" after the company reported a record second quarter. On Thursday, Benioff emphasized the strength of Salesforce’s performance, noting that bookings surged while attrition remained low. He urged an end to the negative narrative surrounding AI’s impact on enterprise software. Trending

Salesforce’s second-quarter revenue rose 11% year-over-year to $11.35 billion, and the company raised its full-year fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to a range of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion. The partnership with Anthropic on Claudeforce AI was highlighted as a key driver of this success. Salesforce Stock Surges on Anthropic Partnership Salesforce shares surged as much as 20% on Thursday following its fiscal second-quarter beat and raised outlook. The company attributed much of the profit surge to its investment in Anthropic, booking a $2.6 billion gain from the stake. The rally was further fueled by the expanded partnership with Anthropic, which introduced the Claudeforce tool. This integration allows sales staff to access Salesforce data directly within Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, enhancing operational efficiency. Technical AnalysisCurrently trading at $260.69, Salesforce is significantly outperforming its moving averages, trading 44.05% above its 50-day SMA and 30.12% above its 200-day SMA. The stock’s RSI(14) stands at 81.67, indicating an overbought condition.

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The upcoming report from Salesforce (CRM - Free Report) is expected to reveal quarterly earnings of $3.27 per share, indicating an increase of 12.4% compared to the year-ago period. Analysts forecast revenues of $11.3 billion, representing an increase of 10.4% year over year.

The consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has remained unchanged over the last 30 days. This represents how the covering analysts, as a whole, have reassessed their initial estimates during this timeframe.

Prior to a company's earnings release, it is of utmost importance to factor in any revisions made to the earnings projections. These revisions serve as a critical gauge for predicting potential investor behaviors with respect to the stock. Empirical studies consistently reveal a strong link between trends in earnings estimate revisions and the short-term price performance of a stock.

While investors typically use consensus earnings and revenue estimates as indicators of quarterly business performance, exploring analysts' projections for specific key metrics can offer valuable insights.

Bearing this in mind, let's now explore the average estimates of specific Salesforce metrics that are commonly monitored and projected by Wall Street analysts.

Analysts expect 'Revenues- Professional services and other' to come in at $525.15 million. The estimate indicates a change of -3.8% from the prior-year quarter.

The collective assessment of analysts points to an estimated 'Revenues- Subscription and support' of $10.78 billion. The estimate points to a change of +11.3% from the year-ago quarter.

Analysts forecast 'Revenues- Subscription and support- Agentforce Sales' to reach $7.17 billion. The estimate suggests a change of +216.1% year over year.

Analysts' assessment points toward 'Revenues- Subscription and support- Agentforce 360 Platform, Slack and Other' reaching $3.62 billion. The estimate indicates a year-over-year change of +73.9%.

Based on the collective assessment of analysts, 'Remaining performance obligation (RPO) - Current' should arrive at $33.31 billion. Compared to the current estimate, the company reported $29.40 billion in the same quarter of the previous year.

Analysts predict that the 'Remaining performance obligation (RPO) - Total' will reach $67.69 billion. The estimate compares to the year-ago value of $59.90 billion.

It is projected by analysts that the 'Remaining performance obligation (RPO) - Noncurrent' will reach $34.28 billion. Compared to the current estimate, the company reported $30.50 billion in the same quarter of the previous year.

View all Key Company Metrics for Salesforce here>>>

Over the past month, Salesforce shares have recorded returns of +30.9% versus the Zacks S&P 500 composite's +2.8% change. Based on its Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), CRM will likely exhibit a performance that aligns with the overall market in the upcoming period. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stocks here >>>> .

Salesforce (CRM -2.56%) made one of the biggest capital-allocation decisions in software this year, and it came in two parts.

In March, the company entered a $25 billion accelerated share repurchase -- the largest such deal in history, by its own description -- funded with a $25 billion debt issuance. Then, reporting fiscal first-quarter results in late May, it told investors that fiscal 2027 operating and free-cash-flow growth would come in around 4% to 5%, half the 9% to 10% it had guided to in February, specifically to reflect the cost of that debt.

Borrowing $25 billion to buy your own stock is an aggressive move for any company. For Salesforce, which spent years funding buybacks comfortably out of its own cash flow, it marks a change in posture.

With the stock at about $196 as of this writing, roughly 27% below its 52-week high of $269.11, was the trade worth it?

Image source: Getty Images.

One enormous repurchase The buyback is part of a $50 billion authorization Salesforce's board approved in February. The accelerated structure means most of the share-count reduction landed immediately: The company received an upfront delivery of 103 million shares, about 80% of the total it expects to repurchase, with final settlement expected in the fiscal third quarter.

Add it up, and Salesforce returned $27.5 billion to shareholders in a single quarter ($27.1 billion of repurchases plus $365 million in dividends). For perspective, that's more than the company generated in free cash flow over the entire prior fiscal year. Its diluted share count is now down 10% from a year ago.

The price looks defensible, too. The upfront shares were delivered against Salesforce's roughly $194 close in mid-March, near where the stock trades today, and the final tally will be set by the stock's average price over the life of the deal. Salesforce didn't buy the top. It bought after the market had already knocked the stock down by a quarter.

Slower cash flow, on purpose The cost side is just as concrete. Salesforce generated $6.7 billion of operating cash flow in the fiscal first quarter, up only 3% year over year, and $6.6 billion of free cash flow, up 4%. The updated fiscal 2027 guidance reflects the interest burden the new debt layers onto that base.

That's a real bill. A company whose revenue is growing 11% is now guiding cash flow to grow at less than half that pace, and the gap is self-inflicted. Investors who prize steadily compounding free cash flow may not love what they see in fiscal 2027.

So, what did shareholders get for it? Diluted earnings per share rose 52% year over year to $2.42 in the fiscal first quarter -- though much of that jump came from a swing in gains on strategic investments rather than from operations. The longer-lasting effect is the share count. Every future dollar of profit is now spread across a tenth fewer shares.

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The business behind the buyback Of course, the buyback only matters if the business behind it holds up. So far, it is holding up.

Fiscal first-quarter revenue rose 13% year over year to $11.1 billion, helped by a $444 million contribution from the acquired Informatica business. Current remaining performance obligation (contracted revenue the company expects to recognize over the next 12 months) rose 14% to $33.6 billion. And management raised the midpoint of its fiscal 2027 revenue guidance, which now sits at $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion, about 11% growth.

That's a solid, unspectacular growth profile. It's also what the buyback case rests on. At about 23 times earnings, Salesforce is priced like a maturing software company, not like an AI winner. Retiring 10% of the share count at that kind of multiple is arguably a better use of money than the big acquisitions Salesforce pursued in earlier eras.

Sure, the debt spends flexibility the company used to have, and a year of 4% to 5% cash-flow growth is a cost shareholders have to live with. But the growth hit is front-loaded, and the benefit compounds -- the share count stays retired.

The market has been harsh on the stock, mostly over doubts about how fast Salesforce can grow in an AI-disrupted software industry. The buyback doesn't settle those doubts. What it does is make each remaining share a bigger claim on whatever growth Salesforce delivers, purchased at prices the company considered low. I think the arithmetic holds up. If the 11% growth does too, the trade will have been worth it.

Salesforce's (CRM -2.10%) stock price has fallen 46% from its previous high amid what CEO Marc Benioff calls the "SaaSpocalypse" -- the fear that artificial intelligence (AI) agents will pressure corporate spending on software-as-a-service (SaaS) products.

Benioff doesn't see that playing out. His company spent a record $27 billion in stock buybacks in the first quarter ending in April, signaling confidence in its growth trajectory. That's a massive capital return, equal to nearly 19% of Salesforce's market cap as of April 30.

Combined with continued revenue growth, the repurchase sends a clear message: Management believes the market price may be discounting the company's long-term earnings power.

Image source: Salesforce.

What the stock buyback means for investors Benioff signaled he's willing to accelerate repurchases when he sees a meaningful gap between the stock price and the company's long-term value.

The most immediate impact is a lower share count, which lifts earnings per share. Diluted shares outstanding fell 11% in the quarter, boosting non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) EPS by $0.23 and helping drive a 50% year-over-year increase in adjusted earnings. Without the buyback, adjusted earnings would have risen 41%.

The buybacks boosted earnings, but they also reinforce a broader point: Salesforce's AI strategy appears to be strengthening the business -- a direct counter to the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative weighing on the stock.

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The growth that underpins confidence in the future On the fiscal Q1 earnings call, Benioff acknowledged AI is reshaping software: "You've heard the narrative on the SaaSpocalypse ... that these AI apps are transforming software, which is definitely true." But he also indicated that Salesforce is benefiting from that shift, rather than being disrupted by it: "All of our products are just so much better because of it."

In fiscal Q1, Agentforce's annual recurring revenue reached $1.2 billion, up 205% year over year. Customers are also embedding these tools into daily workflows, as shown by a 152% quarter-over-quarter increase in tokens processed to 28.6 trillion, with an 111% increase in agentic work units delivered.

Some legacy areas showed weakness, including commercial cloud and Tableau. Still, total first-quarter revenue beat consensus, rising 13% year over year to $11 billion. Free cash flow was strong at $6.6 billion, providing the financial flexibility to fund buybacks at this scale.

What to watch AI agents are creating new competitive dynamics, adding uncertainty to the long-term software landscape. For Salesforce, the key is continued momentum in measurable adoption: agentic work units delivered, token volume processed, and Agentforce annual recurring revenue. Sustained strength in those metrics would signal that the company's value proposition and competitive position remain intact.

Even after the rebound, the stock remains well below its prior highs and trades at a modest forward price-to-earnings multiple of 14. Investors may see the pullback as an attractive entry point.