Salesforce stock edged down Thursday, heading for its third straight weekly loss, despite launching an updated version of its enterprise AI tool.
The software giant launched Agentforce 2dx on Wednesday, saying the tool "will accelerate the deployment of AI agents with ready-to-use partner and community-built actions and agents."
Salesforce rallied on the news Wednesday, but the stock retreated again amid growing worries about AI and the impact of the trade war.
The tech giant had launched Agentforce in September last year, quickly rolling out Agentforce 2.0 in December, which highlighted the growing battle over AI agents in the enterprise tech market.
Agentforce 2dx is geared mainly toward developers, to enable them to "create agents and put them to work," a Salesforce spokesperson told Investor's Business Daily.
Salesforce Stock: Battle Over AI Agents
The rise of AI has led to intense competition among tech giants now scrambling to offer the technology in tools that could actually help boost productivity and improve operations at big companies and organizations.
Other tech behemoths, led by Alphabet and Microsoft, have rolled out their own versions of the AI agent, as the tool geared to enterprises is called.
Salesforce's latest version got some upbeat reviews from BNP Paribas Exane.
"Agentforce has potential to be transformational, and not just incremental, for Salesforce," analyst Stefan Slowinski said in a client note. "We see Agentic AI not being simply enhancing Salesforce's existing product suite but potentially enabling Salesforce to extend beyond CRM (customer relationship management) into areas such as Employee, IT and Finance."
But AI stocks have taken a hit amid growing worries about the trend and broader economic worries. This was underscored this week with the crash in Credo stock as data-center infrastructure stocks also tumbled.
In a client note, Mizuho Securities trading desk analyst Jordan Klein called the slump "the busted AI trade." But Klein also argued that AI remains a strong trend, telling clients: "It will come back strong in 2H25 is my prediction. Mark it down."
Meanwhile, Salesforce stock has struggled. It has shed roughly 12% year to date, and is down about 2% this week. The stock's Relative Strength Rating has fallen to 47 from 65 last week and 91 a year ago, according to IBD MarketSurge.
