Salesforce (CRM) remains a battleground stock for Wall Street after a quarter that could be viewed as wildly positive — or wildly mixed.
Shares of the Marc Benioff-led company surged 11% in Wednesday’s session as execs came out bullish on the early demand for its new Agentforce product and the company beat on a few quarterly metrics. Digital agents that complete tasks autonomously are seen by Benioff and other industry bigwigs as the future of work — and a major profit center.
“We have signed some incredible deals,” Benioff said on Yahoo Finance (video above), noting one recent $28 million deal he signed included $9 million related to Agentforce usage.
The company closed 200 Agentforce deals in the quarter and said the “pipeline is in the thousands” for additional Agentforce deals. FedEx (FDX), IBM (IBM), and Accenture (ACN) were name-dropped as new users of Agentforce. In total, Salesforce said it closed 2,000 AI-related deals in the quarter.
The Street has largely piled onto the bull narrative on Agentforce, sending the stock up more than 42% since Salesforce introduced new Agentforce solutions at its annual Dreamforce event in September.
“Ultimately, we think investors are pleased that the core business remains on-track and can rule out problematic demand issues or deal slippage in the tricky Q3 period, which clears the decks for the seasonally-stronger Q4 as Agentforce reinvigorates the narrative and repopulates the deal pipeline,” JPMorgan analyst Mark Murphy said.
Murphy maintained an Outperform rating on Salesforce shares.
Added Benioff on the demand backdrop post-election, “We are beyond the measured buying behaviors.”
But it wasn’t a perfect quarter for Salesforce, leading some analysts to question if the stock has run too far too fast.
The company missed consensus earnings estimates due to $200 million in investment losses. Fourth quarter revenue guidance was also a shade below estimates.
“While we think the results were ‘good enough,’ even with the run in the stock, we still have some skepticism around the durability/monetization of Salesforce’s Agentforce products given a rapidly evolving competitive landscape and limited data points on production usage,” Citi analyst Tyler Radke said.
Radke maintained a Neutral, or Hold equivalent, rating on the stock.
The monetization skepticism was echoed by Guggenheim analyst John Difucci, who also kept a Neutral rating on the stock.
“We can’t help but wonder whether those that scream the loudest about AI (including Salesforce) are those with the most to lose. We believe that AI will change the world and that traditional SaaS applications should leverage AI technologies (AI, GenAI, Agentic AI, PickYourNextBuzzword AI). But we don’t believe that this will be monetizable by these players for the most part (though new categories will emerge that exist because of AI and therefore will likely monetize AI),” Difucci said.
