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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.

CRM's 34% monthly rally is backed by stabilizing growth, surging Agentforce ARR and a valuation below major enterprise software rivals.

Salesforce (CRM -1.97%) is trying to turn Agentforce into billable digital labor rather than just another AI feature. If consumption revenue grows faster than software seats disappear and inference costs remain controlled, Agentforce could open a much larger growth market tied directly to corporate labor spending.

Stock prices used were the market prices of Aug. 19, 2026. The video was published on Sept. 6, 2026.

Rick Orford has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Salesforce. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Rick Orford is an affiliate of The Motley Fool and may be compensated for promoting its services. If you choose to subscribe through their link, they will earn some extra money that supports their channel. Their opinions remain their own and are unaffected by The Motley Fool.

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.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the world's #1 AI CRM, today announced that its board of directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.44 per share. The dividend is payable October 8, 2026 to shareholders of record on September 17, 2026. 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.c.

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.

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Salesforce Looks Overbought, But the Rally May Be Far From OverSalesforce NYSE: CRM said its artificial intelligence product adoption is expanding across its customer base, with management highlighting growing demand for agentic workflows, consumption-based offerings and industry-specific AI applications during its Q2 fiscal 2027 investor webinar.

Conor Marsden, Salesforce’s President of Sales and Chief Consumption Officer, said the company has restructured its platform around four elements needed for successful AI agents: trust, action, agency and interface. He said Salesforce combines a data and trust layer, its established applications and workflows, AI agents, and interfaces including Lightning, Slack, Microsoft Teams and the newly announced Claude-related offerings.

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AI Adoption and Customer Examples The SaaSpocalypse Trade Is Cracking, and These 5 Stocks Are Leading HigherMarsden said more than 10,000 customers are using at least one Salesforce AI product, while the number of customers with Salesforce AI products in production has roughly doubled since February. He said the company is increasingly seeing customers add second, third and fourth AI solutions after initial deployments.

Salesforce reported that Agentforce and data annual recurring revenue rose more than 200% to $3.9 billion, while Agentforce ARR increased 200% to $1.5 billion. The company also said agentic work units, or AWUs, rose 97% to $7 billion. Marsden characterized AWUs as a measure of work being conducted on the platform.

Salesforce Turns the Corner as AI Fears Start to FadeManagement cited several customer deployments as examples of adoption:

SharkNinja launched service and shopper agents and reported a 6% increase in conversion. Its custom “unboxing agent” for espresso machines achieved a 93% resolution rate, with 7% of interactions escalated to a human, according to Marsden. Dell uses Salesforce for supply-chain requests across 19,000 employees, saving roughly 30 hours per week per team, Marsden said. Live Nation deployed an agent for its BottleRock festival within 30 days, handling 37,000 guest interactions, with plans to expand the capability to additional festivals. Wyndham deployed a contact-center agent that produced a 25% decrease in average handle time, according to Salesforce. Marsden said Salesforce has approximately 600 “builders,” employees embedded with sales teams to help customers deploy AI products, and plans to more than double that investment by year-end. He said out-of-the-box agents can be deployed in 30 to 45 days, while AI coding tools have improved the speed of Salesforce environment configurations by 40%.

He also said a global retailer that had received an internal estimate of 35 weeks for a custom contact deployment instead went live with Salesforce in six weeks.

Pricing Shifts Toward Outcomes and Flexibility Bill Patterson, Salesforce’s President and Chief Commercial Officer, said the company is simplifying its AI pricing after iterating through multiple models. The company is emphasizing outcome-based pricing for certain agents, along with Flex Credits, pay-as-you-go options and broader enterprise agreements.

Under outcome-based pricing, Patterson said help agents such as Casey are priced based on resolutions delivered. “If they do not resolve the issue, you do not pay for the offering,” he said.

Patterson said Salesforce does not want customers focused on token consumption or AWUs. Instead, the company wants pricing to reflect business outcomes such as leads processed, orders managed or customer cases resolved. He said Salesforce expects to expand outcome-based pricing across sales, service and other areas of its platform.

The company is also packaging work capacity into “headless” add-ons, which are designed to provide users access to AI-powered workflows outside of the traditional full Salesforce application interface. Those add-ons can be included with higher-tier Agentforce, sales, service and industry offerings, according to Patterson.

Marsden said the pricing structure is intended to address customer concerns over unpredictable AI costs. Flex Credits can be used across data products and agents, while unlimited agreements can provide more predictable spending for organizations using multiple Salesforce products, he said.

Slack, Claude and Model Choice Salesforce executives described Slack as a key interface for AI adoption and said the company expects Slackbot to be monetized through Slack’s per-user subscription model. Patterson said users will receive included Slackbot capacity, with additional capacity available through Flex Credits for heavier usage.

Salesforce’s recently announced partnership with Anthropic and its Claudeforce initiative will not limit Slack’s revenue opportunity, Patterson said. Rather, he said, integrating external AI models and productivity systems into Slack should increase user engagement, retention and platform usage.

Valmik Desai, Salesforce’s senior director of investor relations, said Slack posted its strongest net-new annual contract value performance since Salesforce acquired the company during the second quarter. He also said upgrades have tripled since Slackbot became generally available.

On model selection, Patterson said customers can bring their own models to Agentforce and choose models for particular prompts or workflows. Salesforce plans to continue selecting what it considers the best initial models for use cases while allowing customers to override those choices, he said.

Marsden said Salesforce is working with frontier-model providers and open-source models, with the goal of abstracting model complexity for customers. The company’s focus is on using the appropriate model to achieve a desired outcome at the appropriate cost, he said.

Industry Clouds and Sales Motion Management also pointed to opportunities in industry-specific products, particularly financial services, health care, consumer goods and life sciences. Patterson said Life Sciences Cloud, introduced less than a year ago, has become one of Salesforce’s fastest-growing industry clouds.

Marsden said Salesforce is seeing a major upgrade cycle in life sciences and described the market as largely greenfield for the company. He said Salesforce can offer data, workflow, agency and interface layers together rather than solely a standalone application.

Finally, Marsden said Salesforce is changing its sales approach by linking a portion of frontline seller compensation to consumption and deployment. The objective is to encourage customers to realize value from their initial purchases before expanding into additional applications and AI agents.

About Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)Salesforce, founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, is a global provider of cloud-based software focused on customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise applications. The company popularized the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for CRM and has built a broad portfolio of products designed to help organizations manage sales, service, marketing, commerce and analytics through a unified, cloud-first platform.

Core offerings include Sales Cloud for sales automation, Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing and engagement, and Commerce Cloud for e-commerce.

This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected].

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Salesforce just posted one of its best quarters ever, yet the stock sits down on the year and trades at a multiple reserved for slow-growth legacy vendors. Something in that gap has Wall Street scrambling to recalculate.

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) just delivered one of the best quarters in its history, and the market noticed. Shares ripped 22.39% in a single week after the Q2 FY27 report, dragging CRM back within reach of its 52-week high. Yet the stock is still down on the year.

CEO Marc Benioff called it “one of our best quarters ever”, with AI and data ARR “about to cross $4 billion.” Can Salesforce trade at $300 by early 2027?

Why Salesforce Was Stuck Before This Blowout Quarter Year to date, CRM is down 2.86%, which looks absurd given the fundamentals. The problem was sentiment. Software stocks got hammered in early 2026 when Anthropic’s Claude plugins ignited fears that AI would erode SaaS pricing power.

CRM bottomed at $164.55 in mid-June. A beta of 1.15 amplified every sector wobble. The one-year return is 1.44%, and five-year holders are down 2.26%. The post-earnings 35.9% one-month rip signals the market is reconsidering.

Wall Street Is Behind the Curve Wall Street’s consensus target sits at $244.02, already below today’s price of $256. Ratings break down to 5 Strong Buy, 35 Buy, 13 Hold, 0 Sell, and 2 Strong Sell. Our model disagrees. Base case is $350.76 (37% upside), optimistic $394.98, conservative $285.04, confidence 0.9.

With EPS growing 118.9% year over year, six consecutive EPS beats, and Agentforce ARR up 240% year over year, analysts must reset. Bullish analyst share is already 73% and climbing.

Path to $300 Per Share Reaching $300 from today’s price of $256 requires a gain of 17.2%. With forward EPS of $19.82, a price of $300 implies a forward P/E of 15x. Our base case of $350.76 already implies 15x, meaning $300 requires essentially zero multiple expansion. This is a delivery story with essentially no re-rating required.

The Q2 FY27 EPS beat of 80.36% forced management to hike FY27 EPS guidance to $16.67 to $16.71, up from $13.11 to $13.19. Agentforce ARR crossed $1.5 billion. The $25 billion accelerated share repurchase, settling in October 2026, will retire roughly 14% of shares outstanding at an average price of $176.

Add Contentful and FIN closings, plus Cloudforce going generally available in September, and the earnings step-up looks durable. Benioff was blunt: “AI is unlocking value across every part of our platform.” The primary risk is Informatica integration friction spilling into GAAP operating results.

Where Salesforce Actually Trades Today At $256 against forward EPS of $19.82, CRM trades at a forward P/E of roughly 13x. That is a mature-legacy-vendor multiple applied to a company with 34.1% non-GAAP operating margins and Agentforce and Data 360 ARR up over 210% year over year.

The 52-week range runs $146.32 to $267.75, so shares are pressed against the top after the earnings surge. The ten-year return is 226.32%. A 13x multiple on a business reaccelerating is the mispricing the bull case targets.

Is $300 Realistic? $300 is a stretch, but not a fantasy. The math needs a 17.2% gain and effectively no multiple expansion.

Three things must go right: Agentforce monetization compounds, Contentful and FIN close cleanly, and the buyback finishes shrinking the float without a macro shock. Informatica integration issues or a broader software spending pullback would derail it. Our base-case path reaches $304.91 by March 2, 2027. Returns at this level shouldn’t be expected every year, but we’ve outlined the blueprint for how Salesforce could reach $300 in 2027.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Apple just posted a record quarter and Salesforce blew past earnings expectations, but the headline numbers on both stocks hide something the market may be mispricing. One trades at a steep discount to the other, and the cheaper one might…

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) just delivered post-earnings reports that pull in opposite directions.

Apple posted a record June quarter built on iPhone and Mac demand. Salesforce leaned on Agentforce, Data 360, and Slack to sell an AI monetization story to a skeptical Street. Both beat expectations. The character of each beat could not look more different.

iPhone Records Meet an Agentforce Land Grab Apple’s Q3 FY26 revenue hit $109.42 billion, up 16.36% year over year, with iPhone at $54.3 billion, up 22% and Mac growing 29% despite supply constraints. Tim Cook called it “the most powerful and most popular iPhone lineup we’ve ever had.”

Services set another record at $30.7 billion, up 12%. The catch: tariff refunds added roughly 2 percentage points to gross margin and about $0.11 to EPS, so the underlying beat was smaller than the headline suggests.

Salesforce told a stranger story. Revenue reached $11.35 billion, up 10.83%, and non-GAAP EPS of $5.90 blew past the $3.27 consensus. That 80% beat is misleading. Roughly $2.53 per share came from strategic investment gains.

Strip that out and the operating story still looks strong: cRPO of $33.5 billion, up 14%, and Agentforce ARR crossing $1.5 billion, up over 240% year over year.

Business Driver Apple Salesforce Main Growth Engine iPhone and Mac cycle Agentforce, Data 360, Slack Revenue Growth (YoY) 16.36% 10.83% Main Margin Risk Memory costs and tariffs License volatility, mix shift Two Very Different Bets on What AI Actually Sells Apple treats AI as a device feature. Cook described on-device intelligence as “very strategic and sort of a competitive weapon”, backed by Private Cloud Compute and a new Siri AI unveiled at WWDC26.

Monetization is indirect: sell more iPhones, upsell iCloud storage, expand Services. Salesforce is charging directly for agents. Benioff said AI ARR is “about to cross $4 billion”, and customers drove 3.2 billion Agentic Work Units in Q2, up 97% quarter over quarter. Capital return philosophies also diverge. Apple returned $33 billion to shareholders in the quarter.

Salesforce is finishing a $25 billion accelerated repurchase that shrank the diluted share count from 962 million to 821 million. Valuation looks lopsided: AAPL trades at 33 forward earnings versus CRM at 19 forward.

What Could Reset the Comparison Fast Apple guided to 9% to 11% September quarter growth with supply constraints expected to worsen across iPhone, Mac, and iPad. Memory prices remain what Cook called “a 100-year flood”.

Salesforce’s next test is CloudForce, its Claude-integrated product going generally available in September, plus Dreamforce and the close of Contentful and Fin. I want to see whether AI ARR growth compounds off a bigger base or decelerates as the low-hanging pilots run out.

Why I Lean Toward Salesforce, With Caveats Personally, the setup favors CRM. The stock jumped 22.39% in a week and still trades cheaper than Apple on forward earnings. If you want durable brand strength, huge buybacks, and a 2.5 billion device installed base, Apple keeps working. It is up 37.98% over the past year, and the composite sentiment reads neutral at 49.97.

But I find the Salesforce risk/reward more interesting here. Agentforce is monetizing faster than the market expected, the share count is shrinking meaningfully, and sentiment has turned bullish at 67.86. If AI ARR growth cracks below triple digits, I would reconsider. Until then, CRM looks like the more asymmetric bet.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Key Takeaways Salesforce beat Q2 EPS estimates by 80.4% as revenues grew 11% to $11.35 billion. Salesforce raised fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to $46.1-$46.4 billion on strong AI and platform momentum. CLOD gives Salesforce its top holding at 6.05%, while other ETFs like IGV offer exposure. Shares of Salesforce (CRM - Free Report) jumped over 20% in the trading session following the release of strong second-quarter fiscal 2027 results. The enterprise cloud giant delivered a massive beat on Wall Street’s bottom-line estimates, while also edging past top-line projections with revenues growing 11% year over year to $11.35 billion.

A major catalyst behind its massive profit beat was a $2.6 billion mark-to-market gain on Salesforce’s strategic investment stake in AI startup Anthropic. Beyond the valuation boost from its Anthropic holding, the company’s aggressive investments in artificial intelligence (AI) bore operational fruit, highlighted by its Agentforce platform reaching more than $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR). Free cash flow also surged 81% year over year to $1.1 billion.

All these factors, along with management raising full-year fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to $46.1-$46.4 billion, significantly boosted investor sentiment and drove CRM’s post-earnings rally. This marked a sharp reversal from the stock’s prior choppiness surrounding enterprise software spending.

While the latest share rally might encourage investors to view Salesforce as a compelling momentum opportunity, some may remain cautious about buying at local highs. Broader macroeconomic uncertainties, shifting enterprise valuations and the extent to which non-operating investment gains boosted the bottom line could keep investors on the sidelines.

The company’s strengthening enterprise subscription base, along with its expanding partnership with Anthropic and significant gains from its Data 360 platforms, should continue to fuel its revenue growth over the long term.

Against this backdrop, investors who believe in Salesforce’s long-term growth prospects but want to avoid the risk and volatility of holding a single stock may find a middle ground in exchange-traded funds (ETFs). By selecting funds that feature Salesforce as a top-10 holding, investors can capture the upside of its growth while mitigating company-specific risks across a broader portfolio.

To determine if this post-earnings surge is a sustainable breakout or a temporary jump, it is essential to look beyond the headline figures. Thus, before exploring the best ETFs for gaining exposure to Salesforce, let us examine the company’s fiscal second-quarter performance across other key operational metrics.

A Brief Analysis of CRM’s Q2 ResultsCRM’s fiscal second-quarter earnings of $5.90 per share beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate by 80.4%, while revenues outpaced the consensus mark by 0.3%. 

Salesforce's help agent surpassed 5 million customer conversations with 64% resolved autonomously. Its Slackbot drove 8.1 million hours of annualized productivity gains for employees. 

As of July 2026, CRM had delivered 7 billion Agentic Work Units (“AWUs”) across its Agentforce and Slack platforms. Of this total, 3.2 billion AWUs were delivered in the fiscal second quarter, marking a 97% sequential increase.

Looking ahead, the company’s $300 million upward revision in revenue guidance reflects $100 million in organic outperformance driven by strong momentum across Agentforce, Data 360, and Slack. It also reflects a $200 million expected contribution from the impending closings of the Contentful and Fin acquisitions, with full-year revenue absorbing an updated $100 million foreign-exchange headwind. 

For the fiscal third quarter, Salesforce expects current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) growth of approximately 14% year over year in constant currency, notably excluding any pending contributions from Contentful and Fin before the deals close. 

With respect to shareholder activity, CRM aims to repurchase at least 14% of shares outstanding at an average price of $176 per share. 

CRM-Heavy ETFs to BuyiShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV - Free Report)

This fund, with net assets worth $15.43 billion, offers exposure to 106 software, cloud and digital media companies. Palantir Technologies (PLTR - Free Report) holds the first spot in this fund, with 10.35% weight, while CRM holds the fifth spot with 6.61% weight. 

IGV has risen 3.7% year to date and charges 38 basis points (bps) as fees.

First Trust Dow Jones Internet ETF (FDN - Free Report)

This fund, with net assets worth $5.45 billion, offers exposure to 41 U.S. companies in the Internet industry. Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) holds the first spot in this fund, with 10.02% weight, while Salesforce holds the fourth spot with 6.04% weight. 

FDN has rallied 9.4% year to date and charges 49 bps as fees.

FT Vest Dow Jones Internet & Target Income ETF (FDND - Free Report)

This fund, with net assets worth $10.35 million, offers exposure to 42 securities, seeking to provide investors with current income with a secondary objective of providing capital appreciation. Amazon holds the first spot in this fund, with 10.01% weight, while Salesforce holds the fourth spot with 6.03% weight. 

FDND has risen 2.2% year to date and charges 75 bps as fees.

Themes Cloud Computing ETF (CLOD - Free Report)

This fund offers exposure to 52 companies that have business operations in the field of cloud computing. Salesforce holds the first spot in this fund, with 6.05% weight. 

CLOD has soared 10.4% year to date and charges 35 bps as fees. 

Have you evaluated the performance of Salesforce's (CRM - Free Report) international operations for the quarter ending July 2026? Given the extensive global presence of this customer-management software developer, analyzing the patterns in international revenues is crucial for understanding its financial strength and potential for growth.

In today's increasingly interconnected global economy, a company's ability to tap into international markets can be a pivotal factor in shaping its overall financial health and growth trajectory. For investors, understanding a company's reliance on overseas markets has become increasingly crucial, as it offers insights into the company's sustainability of earnings, ability to tap into diverse economic cycles and overall growth potential.

Being present in international markets serves as a counterbalance to domestic economic challenges while offering chances to engage with more rapidly evolving economies. However, this kind of diversification introduces challenges like currency fluctuations, geopolitical uncertainties and varying market trends.

While analyzing CRM's performance for the last quarter, we found some intriguing trends in revenues from its overseas segments that Wall Street analysts commonly model and monitor.

The recent quarter saw the company's total revenue reaching $11.35 billion, marking an improvement of 10.8% from the prior-year quarter. Next, we'll examine the breakdown of CRM's revenue from abroad to comprehend the significance of its international presence.

A Look into CRM's International Revenue StreamsEurope accounted for 24.4% of the company's total revenue during the quarter, translating to $2.76 billion. Revenues from this region represented a surprise of +32.08%, with Wall Street analysts collectively expecting $2.09 billion. When compared to the preceding quarter and the same quarter in the previous year, Europe contributed $2.75 billion (24.7%) and $2.43 billion (23.7%) to the total revenue, respectively.

Of the total revenue, $1.17 billion came from Asia Pacific during the last fiscal quarter, accounting for 10.3%. This represented a surprise of +4.18% as analysts had expected the region to contribute $1.12 billion to the total revenue. In comparison, the region contributed $1.15 billion, or 10.3%, and $1.07 billion, or 10.5%, to total revenue in the previous and year-ago quarters, respectively.

Revenue Projections for Overseas MarketsWall Street analysts expect Salesforce to report $11.45 billion in total revenue for the current fiscal quarter, indicating an increase of 11.6% from the year-ago quarter. Europe and Asia Pacific are expected to contribute 18.5% (translating to $2.12 billion), and 9.9% ($1.13 billion) to the total revenue, respectively.

For the full year, the company is projected to achieve a total revenue of $46.16 billion, which signifies a rise of 11.2% from the last year. The share of this revenue from various regions is expected to be: Europe at 20% ($9.22 billion), and Asia Pacific at 10% ($4.61 billion).

Final ThoughtsRelying on global markets for revenues presents both prospects and challenges for Salesforce. Therefore, scrutinizing its international revenue trends is key to effectively forecasting the company's future outlook.

In an environment where global interconnections and geopolitical skirmishes are intensifying, Wall Street analysts keep a keen eye on these trends, particularly for firms with overseas operations, to adjust their earnings predictions. Moreover, a range of other aspects, including how a company fares in its home country, significantly affects these projections.

Emphasizing a company's shifting earnings prospects is a key aspect of our approach at Zacks, especially since research has proven its substantial influence on a stock's price in the short run. This correlation is positively aligned, meaning that improved earnings projections tend to boost the stock's price.

The Zacks Rank, our proprietary stock rating tool, comes with an externally validated impressive track record. It effectively utilizes shifts in earnings projections to act as a dependable barometer for forecasting short-term stock price trends.

Salesforce, bearing a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), is expected to mirror the broader market's movements in the near term. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stocks here >>>> .

Assessing Salesforce's Stock Price Movement in Recent TimesOver the preceding four weeks, the stock's value has appreciated by 39.1%, against an upturn of 3.9% in the Zacks S&P 500 composite. In parallel, the Zacks Computer and Technology sector, which counts Salesforce among its entities, has appreciated by 7.5%. Over the past three months, the company's shares have seen an increase of 37.9% versus the S&P 500's 2.2% increase. The sector overall has witnessed a decline of 2.9% over the same period.

Salesforce (CRM +1.57%) just had its second-biggest day in the stock market ever. Shares soared nearly 23% on Thursday, reaching about $252 as of this writing, after the software giant reported results for its fiscal second quarter of 2027 (the period ended July 31, 2026) on Wednesday afternoon.

The headline number was hard to miss. Non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share came in at $5.90, up 103% year over year. But one line in the release deserves as much attention as that figure. Gains on strategic investments contributed $2.53 of the $5.90. They also contributed $2.43 of the $4.29 the company earned per share under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).

Put another way, more than 40% of the quarter's reported profit didn't come from selling software. So what did the software business itself deliver? I'd call it a solid quarter -- just not a doubled one.

Image source: Getty Images.

The gain mostly traces to AnthropicThe earnings release didn't name the source of the $2.6 billion in net investment gains recorded during the fiscal second quarter. The quarterly filing that followed on Thursday did.

Salesforce's strategic investment portfolio (more than 450 companies with a combined carrying value of $11.3 billion) includes a stake in artificial intelligence (AI) model developer Anthropic worth about $5.1 billion. The quarter's unrealized gains included $2.7 billion related to that one investment, and no other private holding accounts for even a tenth of the portfolio.

The stake's rise has been fast. Anthropic represented about 22% of the portfolio at the end of January and about 45% by the end of July. There's a marker behind that jump, too. Anthropic said in May it had raised funding that valued the company at $965 billion.

Notably, the two companies also announced a partnership alongside the results: an effort called Claudeforce, launching with a plug-in that puts Salesforce's data and workflows inside Anthropic's Claude chatbot so sellers can review deals and pipelines and update records from there.

The software business grew about 16%Set the gain aside, and the math is simple. Adjusted earnings per share of $5.90, minus the $2.53 the investments contributed, leaves about $3.37, against $2.91 in the year-ago fiscal quarter. That works out to growth of about 16% per share. In total dollars, it was flatter than that. Diluted shares fell about 15% year over year, and the buyback is doing much of the work.

The rest of fiscal Q2 fits that pace. Revenue rose 11% year over year to $11.3 billion, with subscription and support revenue up 12%. Non-GAAP operating margin came in at 34.1%, and operating cash flow rose 71% to $1.3 billion. Adjusted operating income grew about 10% on low-double-digit revenue growth, a good quarter for a software company this size. It just isn't a doubling.

The GAAP picture is less flattering. Excluding the gain, GAAP earnings per share of about $1.86 came in below the year-ago quarter's $1.96. Operating income was flat at $2.3 billion, and interest expense climbed to $473 million from $67 million a year earlier.

The forward-looking numbersThe demand signals held up, too. Current remaining performance obligation (contracted revenue the company expects to recognize over the next 12 months) ended fiscal Q2 at $33.5 billion, up 14% in constant currency.

The AI products kept climbing. Agentforce and Data 360 generated nearly $3.9 billion in combined annual recurring revenue (ARR), up more than 210% year over year and up from $3.4 billion just one quarter earlier. Agentforce ARR passed $1.5 billion, growing more than 240%.

Salesforce also raised its full-year outlook. It now expects fiscal 2027 revenue of $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, which implies growth of 11% to 12% for the year, with fiscal third-quarter revenue guided to as much as $11.5 billion.

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Sure, Thursday's surge had more behind it than the investment gain. The software business grew adjusted profit at a mid-teens rate once the gain is set aside, the AI products roughly tripled, and the stock went into Wednesday's report trading about 24% below its 52-week high after a long sell-off.

Even after the jump, shares cost about 16 times the earnings analysts expect for next year -- arguably a reasonable price for growth like this with an accelerating AI business attached.

Of course, a valuation mark on a private stake can move in either direction, and it says little about demand for Salesforce's products. I think the number worth carrying out of this quarter is $3.37, not $5.90. That's what Salesforce earned per share once the investment gain is set aside. And probably even more important for the Salesforce investment case is the collaboration with Anthropic. A partnership with a leading AI company helps soothe concerns that AI is a threat to Salesforce's business. Perhaps it's more of an opportunity than it is a threat.

Salesforce just staged one of its biggest single-session rallies in years, but the real question is whether that move already priced in everything the AI story has to offer or left something on the table for investors willing to be…

At $252.05, Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) screens as an attractive setup for value-growth investors willing to average in after a violent post-earnings repricing. The stock just jumped 22.58% in a single session on a blowout print, forcing a real decision on whether the AI story is finally catching up to the fundamentals.

Salesforce is the world’s largest CRM software vendor, wrapping Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, Data 360, and the newer Agentforce agentic layer around a subscription core. After two years of margin repair and share retirement, the company is now trying to prove that generative AI expands wallet share rather than cannibalizing seat-based licensing. Q2 FY27 delivered $11.35 billion in revenue, up 10.8% year over year, alongside non-GAAP EPS of $5.90 versus a $3.27 consensus, though roughly $2.53 of that came from strategic investment gains.

Why AI Monetization and Buybacks Justify Chasing the Rally The bull case starts with cash generation. Free cash flow grew 81% year over year to $1.098 billion in the quarter, and management guides to a 34.3% non-GAAP operating margin for the year. The $25 billion accelerated repurchase has pulled diluted share count from 962 million to 821 million in twelve months.

AI monetization is no longer a slide-deck promise. Agentforce ARR crossed $1.5 billion, up over 240% year over year, and combined Agentforce and Data 360 ARR reached nearly $3.9 billion. On 15x forward earnings, that is a rare pairing of double-digit growth and defensive cash flow.

Where the Post-Earnings Surge Has Stretched the Setup The bear case is that the easy repricing already happened. CRM ripped 38.87% in a single month, blowing through the $244.02 analyst consensus target. The EPS beat was optically enormous, but $2.61 billion in strategic investment gains did most of the heavy lifting, and GAAP operating income was essentially flat at negative 0.04% year over year.

Structural risks remain. Restructuring charges hit $94 million versus $4 million a year ago, shareholders’ equity fell 37.42%, and total liabilities nearly doubled to fund the ASR. Bears will also note that operating and free cash flow are only guided to grow 4% to 5% this year.

Case for Waiting Out the Post-Earnings Euphoria The hold argument is timing. The business is executing, but the stock is pricing in flawless AI conversion. In 4 of the last 7 beats, CRM posted negative day-of reactions, and this quarter’s move is a three-sigma outlier against that pattern.

Patient investors can wait for Dreamforce Investor Day on September 16, 2026, the closings of Contentful and FEN, and the October 2026 final ASR settlement before adding aggressively. A retest of the $200.19 200-day moving average would offer a cleaner entry.

What Ratings, Targets, and Recent Returns Reveal CRM trades at $252.05 against an average analyst target of $244.02, modestly above the consensus target. The Street breakdown across 55 analysts looks like this:

Strong Buy: 5 Buy: 35 Hold: 13 Sell: 0 Strong Sell: 2 Targets are only one input, and most were set before the latest surge. CRM is down 4.36% year to date and up 1.62% over one year, badly trailing the S&P 500’s roughly double-digit YTD advance. Valuation screens reasonably at 15x forward earnings and a 0.85 PEG, with an EV/EBITDA of 15.

Verdict on Salesforce at $252 At $252.05, the setup for Salesforce skews constructive.

The path to appreciation runs through three catalysts: ClaudeForce general availability in September 2026, incremental revenue from Contentful and FEN closings, and continued Agentforce booking momentum that more than doubled quarter over quarter. With current RPO at $33.5 billion growing 14%, the revenue floor for FY27 and FY28 is well protected.

Risk/reward at 15x forward with a free-cash-flow machine profile and aggressive share retirement is asymmetric to the upside. Invalidation triggers: Agentforce ARR growth decelerating below 100% year over year, cRPO growth slipping into single digits, or operating margin guidance rolling back below 33%.

Scaling in incrementally looks more defensible than chasing the gap. Margin expansion, buyback support, and valuation multiple safety make CRM one of the cleanest AI-adjacent compounders for long-term portfolios, even after this move.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Technology stocks are leading Wall Street on Thursday after Nvidia, Salesforce and others reported even fatter profits for the spring than analysts expected.

The S&P 500 added 0.7% and pulled closer to its all-time high set earlier this month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 172 points, or 0.3%, as of 12:32 p.m. ET, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.4% higher.

Nvidia was the strongest force pulling the market higher, even though more stocks fell within the S&P 500 than rose. The chip giant climbed 9% after once again delivering much stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. More importantly for Wall Street, it also gave forecasts for upcoming revenue growth that topped analysts’ estimates, suggesting demand remains strong for chips to power artificial intelligence projects.

“AI has reached its inflection point,” Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang said. “It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable.”

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That helped calm some of the worries that have built around AI stocks, which have been under pressure recently. After rocketing higher for years in the frenzy around AI, stocks in the industry are confronting skepticism that they shot too high and that booming demand for AI chips may fade if the AI revolution does not produce as much profit as promised.

Another big tech company, Salesforce, jumped 20.9% after it said that AI helped it deliver one of its best quarters in history. It reported stronger profit than analysts expected, and the CEO, Marc Benioff, said it’s “seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products” and is “turning AI into customer success at unprecedented scale.”

Salesforce, which helps companies manage their customer data, also raised its forecast for revenue over the full year and announced an expanded partnership to pair Anthropic’s Claude chatbot with its platform. It’s notable because Salesforce’s stock struggled earlier on worries that competitors powered by AI could ultimately steal away customers from Salesforce and other software companies. Salesforce’s stock is potentially heading for its best day in six years.

Explore TopicsArtificial Intelligencenvidiasalesforcestock market

Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) shares are moving higher Friday. They rallied more than 22% after reporting earnings.

The shares may be closing in on a possible resistance level. This is why Salesforce is the Stock of the Day.

• What are CRM shares doing today?

As you can see on the chart, Salesforce hit resistance in December and January at around $265. It sold off and headed lower after.

When this happened, many of the investors and traders who bought shares came to think their decision was a mistake. A number of them decided to hold onto their losing positions.

Some also decided that if they could eventually do so, they would sell their shares at the same price they paid for them. This way they can exit the position without losing any money.

This means that if the stock reaches $265, they will be placing sell orders. If there is a large enough quantity of these orders, it will create resistance at the level again.

Sometimes shares sell off after reaching resistance. This is what happened with Salesforce in January.

Stocks sell off resistance when some of the investors and traders who created the resistance with their sell orders become anxious and impatient. They are concerned someone else will be willing to sell their shares at a lower price.

They know this is where the buyers will go. They don’t want to miss the trade, so they reduce their offering prices. Other anxious sellers see this and do the same thing.

This can result in a snowball effect that forces the shares lower.

Many newer traders think that moves in the stock market are the result of some type of fundamental news. Sometimes this is the case.

But most market moves are the result of emotions and psychology. This can be seen on the chart of Salesforce.

Buyer’s remorse can form resistance. Anxious and impatient sellers can drive markets lower. If a new trader understands how important market psychology is, it will lead to success.

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Bears spent months building a case that AI would hollow out Salesforce and eventually topple Nvidia, and then a single earnings night arrived and put both arguments on trial at once.

Jim Cramer opened Mad Money this week arguing that the bearish case on Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) had been dismantled in a single evening of earnings. “For months, these stocks have been held back by the bears. The short sellers who argued that Salesforce’s enterprise software couldn’t survive in a world of AI competition, and Nvidia would soon be overcome by hyperscalers that are desperate to develop their own chips,” he said.

The Salesforce argument is more interesting because it hinged on a structural claim that the seat-based software business itself would erode as AI agents replaced the humans who used to log in. Salesforce reported $11.35 billion in revenue and non-GAAP EPS of $5.90 against a $3.2712 consensus, and the stock closed the week at $251.96, up 22.69% over five sessions.

Bear Case That Just Broke Overnight The short thesis on Salesforce was straightforward: if AI agents do the work that human employees used to do, a company that charges per human seat should lose revenue as customers need fewer seats. That is the argument Cramer described as the “SaaS pocalypse drumbeat” that grew louder through the spring, reflected in Reddit’s r/stockmarket, which in July featured a thread titled “Salesforce down 30% in 14 straight red days at 10.5x forward earnings” that drew hundreds of comments.

Marc Benioff addressed the thesis directly on the call. “This nonsense of this SaaSpocalypse, I think it’s time for it to stop,” he said, adding that “AI isn’t replacing Salesforce. It’s unlocking more value across all four layers of our platform.”

What Salesforce Actually Reported “They delivered their strongest net new annual order value growth in four years, all seats grew year over year. Pricing was strong. Attrition was near its lowest level ever,” he said, arguing the quarter refuted the thesis on its own terms.

Those three data points matter because they are the exact variables the bear thesis predicted would break. Seats growing, pricing holding, and attrition at record lows directly counter the story that customers need less of the product.

Agentforce and Data 360 combined annualized recurring revenue was nearly $3.9 billion, up over 210% year-over-year, with Agentforce alone above $1.5 billion and growing more than 240%. Free cash flow was $1.098 billion, up 81.49%. The company raised full-year FY27 revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion, with details in the Q2 FY27 8-K exhibit.

One caveat: one quarter does not settle a multi-year structural question. The bear case may prove early rather than wrong. But near-term evidence favors the bulls on precisely the metrics that were supposed to fail first.

NVIDIA’s Version of the Same Story NVIDIA reported the same evening with a supply-constrained version of the same demand story. Q2 revenue was $96.22 billion, up 105.85% year-over-year, and Q3 guidance came in at $108 billion, plus or minus 2%.

Cramer’s number to remember is the forward one. “Nvidia projects that they can put up 70% revenue growth in the next fiscal year. The street was only looking for 45%,” he said. Shares closed at $227.98, up 8.74% in the session. Guidance that far above consensus is the kind of early signal we studied across past monster winners in a free Next NVIDIA playbook.

Jensen Huang framed the demand as a step-change in usefulness. “AI has reached its inflection point. It’s doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now, compute is revenue,” he said.

What to Watch Next “Now if you just own Nvidia and Salesforce, instead of trying to trade them or game the earnings, what can I say? You did the right thing and you had a phenomenal day,” he said, turning to investor behavior.

A narrative can suppress a stock for a long time without being tested, because the test only arrives on a scheduled earnings date. Investors who sold into the story had to be right twice: once about the thesis and once about when to come back.

The specific number to watch next is Salesforce’s net new annual order value trend and seat count when the company reports Q3 in the fall, alongside the Investor Day on September 16, 2026, at Dreamforce. If seats stop growing or attrition ticks up while Agentforce ARR climbs, the bear thesis is postponed rather than dead. If both keep moving together, the argument that agents cannibalize seats will need a new date on the calendar.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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.

Image: Shutterstock

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Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) rallied 24% this week, marking its strongest weekly gain since August 2020.

The software giant also topped the S&P 500’s top-performing leaderboard for the week.

The rally followed Wednesday’s blockbuster second-quarter print: adjusted EPS of $5.90 crushed the $3.27 consensus, an 80% beat.

• Salesforce stock is gaining positive traction. Why is CRM stock trading higher?

Revenue of $11.35 billion grew 11% year-over-year. Management lifted fiscal-year 2027 adjusted EPS guidance to $16.67-$16.71, well above the $14.16 Street estimate.

Salesforce unveiled “Claudeforce,” a deepened Anthropic partnership making Claude the default AI model across Slack and core Salesforce products.

The company also booked a $2.6 billion mark-to-market gain on its Anthropic stake.

Shares jumped 22.6% Thursday alone, as the print quieted concerns that AI agents would erode Salesforce’s seat-based licensing model.

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Analysts and pundits in finance have an endless supply of clever, simplistic explanations for complex market movements. Over the years, culprits have ranged from El Niño and climate change to the World Trade Organization, rock 'n' roll music and the fluoridation of water. Many of these explanations proved wrong, yet commentators continue to reach for overly simple narratives to explain market moves. The latest example is the sell-off in software stocks.

For the past year, markets have vaporized roughly $2 trillion in software value by asking the wrong question about AI. The question behind the so-called "SaaSpocalypse" — can an AI agent do what this software does? — is misguided because it treats a software company as nothing more than a bundle of tasks waiting to be automated away.

The right question, and the clearest test we know of for separating AI's winners from its roadkill, is different: Does this company own something AI agents cannot operate without?

Salesforce's recent blowout earnings show why the balance of power may be shifting away from frontier models and back toward software companies that investors had prematurely left for dead.

The 'SaaSpocalypse' narrative has been such nonsense.

Marc Benioff

Salesforce CEO

For months, analysts have assumed that frontier large language models will accrue an ever-greater share of the value created by AI, with the valuations of those companies soaring commensurately. But intelligence is precisely the thing being commoditized before our eyes: Frontier models now leapfrog one another every few months, growing ever more capable but also increasingly interchangeable.

AI may also be approaching RSI — recursive self-improvement — which could accelerate those improvement cycles even further, while the price of raw intelligence collapses amid heated competition from well-funded rivals and increasingly capable Chinese open-source models.

So in this new world, if LLMs are the commodity, where is the moat? The answer, we believe, is data. As analysts at Wells Fargo put it, "Lower cost of intelligence increases value of incumbent data." That is Economics 101: When an input becomes abundant and cheap, value migrates to its scarce complements. And for AI agents, the scarce complement is trusted proprietary data.

An agent closing a sale still needs somewhere to research the customer, log the interaction, store the contract and customize the terms. Without trusted proprietary data, AI agents are far less useful. As the old adage goes, "Junk in, junk out."

Salesforce is one of the largest repositories of enterprise customer data in the world, and far from being the beneficiary of a lucky earnings beat or one-time aberration, it may be positioned as a long-term structural winner from the commoditization of AI. Agents cannot work without data, so the data keeps flooding in: Salesforce's Data 360 ingested a staggering 104 trillion customer records this quarter, up 355% year over year. Meanwhile, AI agents themselves generate still more data, all of which has to land somewhere trusted. Salesforce delivered 3.2 billion units of agentic work this quarter, nearly double the prior quarter.

That flywheel — agents generate work, work generates data, data deepens the moat and makes each successive generation of AI agents more valuable — is why Salesforce's combined AI and data annual recurring revenue has reached $3.9 billion, more than tripling in a single year, as the accompanying chart shows. Agent force alone rocketed from $100 million to over $1.5 billion in ARR within 18 months of launch, up 240% year over year.

As Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on CNBC with Jim Cramer following the earnings report Wednesday, amid the stock soaring 20% and more, "The 'SaaSpocalypse' narrative has been such nonsense. ... Here you can see, net new AOV growth is the strongest in four years. Skeptics said seats would decline, and Agentforce sales and service and Slack all grew seats year over year. Skeptics said customers are going to leave, and attrition is near its lowest level ever, ... bookings more than doubled quarter over quarter and contract-length terms improved across all segments. ... Agents are using more Salesforce than ever."

Indeed, the numbers show why his argument deserves attention. Pricing power was supposed to evaporate and margins compress; instead, non-GAAP operating margins hit 34.1%, adjusted earnings of $5.90 per share nearly doubled and demolished consensus of roughly $3.27, revenue grew 11% to $11.35 billion, bookings grew even faster with current remaining performance obligation up 14%, and management raised full-year guidance to as much as $46.4 billion.

But the most decisive evidence came from the customers best positioned to know. If AI agents could truly run without Salesforce, the frontier AI labs would be disintermediating it. Instead, they are paying for it — 9 of the top 10 AI companies now run on Salesforce and Slack, with their combined spending up 435% year over year — and partnering with it, exemplified by the debut of Claudeforce: "The No. 1 AI in the world, Anthropic, and the No. 1 CRM, Salesforce, coming together," in Benioff's words.

The companies building the supposedly all-conquering models have concluded that those models, as Benioff put it, "depend on CRM ... They do not replace them." That is what he means when he says "Salesforce is first and foremost in the data business" — and why he is betting on that thesis with a $25 billion buyback, the largest in company history.

The test generalizes far beyond Salesforce, as we have argued. Not all software firms will flourish in this new world. Firms with proprietary data that is valuable to AI agents should be better positioned to prosper, while software companies that offer little beyond functionality — and have few other sources of customer stickiness — could struggle. Balance sheets will matter too: Companies with strong free cash flow and little leverage will have more room to reinvest in the AI transition, while heavily indebted firms may be forced to devote scarce cash to servicing debt instead.

Nevertheless, the direction of power in the AI economy is becoming clearer: away from companies whose primary advantage is manufacturing intelligence, which grows more abundant by the month, and toward companies that own the scarce assets that intelligence cannot function without. Increasingly, that means data.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is Lester Crown Professor in Leadership Practice at Yale School of Management and president and founder of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Steven Tian is research director of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and former quantitative analyst at Rockefeller Capital Management. Stephen Henriques is senior research fellow at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute and a former McKinsey consultant.

CFRA Senior Vice President and Equity Analyst Angelo Zino breaks down where he sees opportunity in AI, what could derail the trade and which stocks he likes best. Plus, he weighs in on Nvidia ($NVDA), Salesforce ($CRM) and Marvell ($MRVL) ahead of earnings, the outlook for software, and the AI stock he'd be most nervous owning.

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Analyst’s Disclosure: I/we have a beneficial long position in the shares of CRM either through stock ownership, options, or other derivatives. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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CRM heads into Q2 earnings with 10.6% revenue growth expected as AI cloud demand, acquisitions and disciplined spending support results.

Arista Networks dominates the high-speed networking market for cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Salesforce maintains its leadership in enterprise software through a massive subscription-based ecosystem and strategic acquisitions.