In September they called it “what ai should be.”
And in October they said it had arrived.
“They” are Salesforce (CRM) and “it” is Agentforce, the customer relationship management software giant's platform designed to allow “enterprises to create, customize and deploy ai agents to independently perform tasks.”
Related: Analyst Renews Salesforce Stock Price Target After Annual Conference
On October 29, Salesforce announced the general availability of Agentforce, which the company says “goes beyond chatbots and co-pilots, using advanced reasoning capabilities to make decisions and take action, such as resolving customer cases, qualifying leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns”.
Saks, OpenTable and Wiley are among the organizations using Agentforce, according to the San Francisco company.
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“Agentforce does not depend on human commitment to get the job done,” Salesforce said in a statement. “These agents can be triggered by changes to data, business rules, pre-built automations, or signals via (application programming interface) calls from other systems.”
Saleforce had also announced ai-Agent-Innovation/default.aspx”>a collaboration with ai chip titan Nvidia (NVDA) to develop Agentforce.
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Salesforce CEO: 'new era of ai abundance'
Marc Benioff, co-founder, president and CEO of Salesforce, said Agentforce was “redefining what is possible in business and beyond” and was “ushering in a new era of ai abundance and limitless workforces.”
Benioff's company has reportedly faced a challenge from Shopify. (TRADE) that according to Bloomberg claims to have attracted hundreds of Salesforce customers.
Related: Analysts Reset Salesforce Stock Price Targets After Earnings
The e-commerce platform said it was encouraging other businesses to join the “mass migration”, citing the lower costs of its services as a key selling point.
“Anything is cheaper if you limit the use case to one thing and say, 'Oh, we're cheaper for this one thing,'” Luke Ball, Salesforce's senior vice president of product management, told Bloomberg.
Salesforce said it had attracted hundreds of Shopify customers, a claim the Ottawa company has denied.
Benioff caught the media's attention recently when CNBC reported that it was in talks with Greek media company Antenna Group to sell Time, which it bought from Meredith Corp. in 2018 for $190 million.
A Time spokesperson told CNBC there was no agreement to sell the media outlet.
The news followed reports from the tech billionaire and amazon. (AMZN) Founder Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, who sparked controversy (and lost many subscribers) when he decided that the newspaper that revealed the Watergate scandal would not endorse a presidential candidate.
And biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, saw a series of resignations at the paper when he refused to allow the editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
Salesforce analysts issue reports
Salesforce will report earnings in the coming weeks and the company's stock is up nearly 43% from a year ago.
Investment firms have recently published research reports on Salesforce, including Evercore ISI, which raised its price target on Nov. 4 to $400 from $300 and maintained an Outperform rating on the stock, according to The Fly.
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The firm said Agentforce could help drive a modest revenue reacceleration in calendar years 2025 and 2026, even if investors make “conservative assumptions regarding adoption,” and this could lead to further share appreciation.
Evercore, which changed its valuation to calendar 2026 estimates, says any boost from Agentforce coupled with continued cost discipline could boost Wall Street's free cash flow estimates and help expand multiples for the stock, the stock says. analyst to investors.
Analyst: “there are still many things we don't know”
Last month, analysts at Stifel expressed cautious optimism for Agentforce, as they raised the firm's Salesforce investment target price to $350 from $320 and maintained a Buy rating on the stock.
After taking a deeper look at what Salesforce's agent-based ai opportunity could mean for the company's revenue, the investment firm said “there's still a lot we don't know.” So it will hold off on updating its model until it hears more from the company, early adopters, and more partners.
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However, Stifel said its calculations suggest that “Agentforce Service Agent alone could be a multibillion-dollar opportunity for Salesforce,” and Salesforce's current multiple discounts discount the potential durability of revenue growth through the new agent model.
Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz raised his price target on Salesforce to $330 from $300 and maintained an Outperform rating on the stock.
Schwartz made his decision after surveying 33 customers to assess IT spending outlook for Q4 and 2025, software investment priorities, the state of generative ai, and implications for AgentForce and the Data monetization opportunity. Cloud.
Schwartz's interpretation of this year's survey and controls points to mixed trends for Salesforce.
The analyst said the drivers to revive revenue growth appear further away for Salesforce.
But he also said the combination of a typical fourth-quarter IT budget flow, AgentForce and Data Cloud product cycles, lower interest rates and weathering the U.S. election should stabilize the company's sales productivity and support greater consistency. in future Salesforce quarterly reports.
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In early October, Piper Sandler analyst Brent Bracelin said that after the investment firm upgraded Salesforce to overweight, the stock clearly remained a contrarian idea, with several growth investors squarely in the skeptical camp.
The analyst recommends investors revisit Salesforce as a “lagging leader” large-cap stock that is still in the middle stage of a multi-year margin expansion story. That could double the power of free cash flow to $20 to $25 per share, even if revenue growth remains muted.
Bracelin listed a number of reasons to buy the stock, including the belief that it can likely sustain double-digit free cash flow growth even if revenue slows further.
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