In September they called it "what AI was meant to be."
And in October, they said it had arrived.
"They" is Salesforce (CRM) and "it" is Agentforce, the customer-relations-management-software giant's platform designed to allow "businesses to create, customize, and deploy AI agents to perform tasks independently."
Related: Analyst revamps Salesforce stock price target after annual conference
On Oct. 29 Salesforce announced the general availability of Agentforce, which the company said “goes beyond chatbots and copilots, using advanced reasoning abilities to make decisions and take action, like resolving customer cases, qualifying sales 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 doesn’t depend on human engagement to get work done," Salesforce said in a statement. "These agents can be triggered by changes in data, business rules, prebuilt automations, or signals via [application programming interface] calls from other systems."
Saleforce had also announced a collaboration with AI-chip titan Nvidia (NVDA) to develop Agentforce.
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Salesforce faces off against AI rivals
Marc Benioff, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Salesforce, said Agentforce was "redefining what’s possible in business and beyond” and was “ushering in a new era of AI abundance and limitless workforces.”
Benioff's company has been reportedly contending with a challenge from Shopify (SHOP) , which according to Bloomberg claims to have lured hundreds of Salesforce clients.
Related: Analysts reboot Salesforce stock price targets after earnings
The e-commerce platform said it was encouraging other companies to join the “mass migration,” citing lower costs for its services as a key selling point.
“Anything’s cheaper if you narrow 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 customers from Shopify, a claim the Ottawa company has denied.
Benioff got some media attention recently when CNBC reported that he was in talks with Greek media company Antenna Group to sell Time, which he bought from Meredith Corp. in 2018 for $190 million.
A spokesperson for Time told CNBC that there was no agreement to sell the media outlet.
The news followed reports of the tech billionaire and Amazon (AMZN) Founder Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, who stirred up controversy — and lost a lot of subscribers — when he decided the newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal would not endorse a candidate for president.
And biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who owns the Los Angeles Times, saw a series of resignations at the newspaper when he refused to allow the editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
Salesforce analysts update stock price targets
Salesforce will report earnings in the next few weeks, and the company's stock is up nearly 43% from a year ago.
Investment firms have recently issued research reports on Salesforce, including Evercore ISI, which raised its price target on Nov. 4 to $400 from $300 and kept an outperform rating on the shares, according to The Fly.
Related: Analysts reset ServiceNow stock price targets after earnings, AI update
The firm said Agentforce could help drive modest revenue reacceleration in calendar years 2025 and 2026, even if investors make "conservative assumptions regarding adoption," and this could lead to a bigger revaluation of the shares.
Evercore, which flipped its valuation to calendar 2026 estimates, says any Agentforce momentum coupled with continued cost discipline could boost Wall Street's free-cash-flow estimates and help expand the multiples on the stock, the analyst tells investors.
Analyst presses pause until AI dust settles
Last month, Stifel analysts expressed cautious optimism for Agentforce as they raised the investment firm's price target on Salesforce to $350 from $320 and maintained a buy rating on the shares.
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 is still much we don't know.”
So, it is refraining from updating its model until it hears more from the company, early users, and more partners.
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However, Stifel said its math suggests “Agentforce Service Agent alone could be a multibillion-dollar opportunity for Salesforce,” and Salesforce's current multiple discounts the potential durability of revenue growth through the new agent model.
Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz boosted his price target on Salesforce to $330 from $300 and maintained an outperform rating on the shares.
Schwartz made his decision after surveying 33 customers to assess the Q4 and 2025 IT spending outlooks, software investment priorities, the state of generative AI and implications for AgentForce, and Data Cloud's monetization opportunity.
Schwartz's interpretation of this year's survey and checks points to mixed trends for Salesforce.
The analyst said that drivers to reaccelerate revenue growth look further out for Salesforce.
But he also said the combination of a typical Q4 IT budget flush, the AgentForce and Data Cloud product cycles, lower interest rates, and moving past the U.S. elections should stabilize the company's sales productivity and support more consistency in Salesforce's future quarterly reports.
Related: Amazon's big tech plans pay off for customers (and its pockets)
Earlier in 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 large-cap “laggard to leader” stock that is still in the middle innings of a multiyear margin-expansion story. That could double free cash flow power to $20 to $25 a share even if revenue growth remains subdued.
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.
Related: Veteran fund manager sees world of pain coming for stocks
