Artificial Intelligence / News

The Bull and The Bear Case for Agentforce: Is Salesforce Really the Future of AI? 

By Henry Martin

There’s an argument to be made that it’s a good time to be “bullish” on Salesforce – but not everyone agrees.  

If we compare the cloud giant’s stock (CRM) over the last year, we see a rise from $260.87 on January 8, 2024, all the way up to $324.93 on January 7, 2025 – an impressive increase of nearly 25%. 

The Bear 

Despite this, Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci appears to have a different view. On Monday, January 6, 2025, he downgraded Salesforce from “Neutral” to “Sell” over apparent difficulties in monetizing AI, according to MarketWatch

He gave the stock a target of $247 – a 26% drop from its previous Friday closing price of $334.02. 

DiFucci wrote in a note to clients: “We do not believe that CRM will meaningfully monetize Agentforce unless it acquires several assets that have been doing, over the past decade, what Agentforce aspires to do.”

He added that the cloud giant’s status as a “system of record” gives it staying power, but this did not give it “any advantage in providing AI solutions that require dynamic data with rich context versus the static data that CRM houses.”

His view appears to not be popular among the 55 analysts covering Salesforce who were surveyed by FactSet

Of those, 42 analysts rate the stock as “Buy”, 11 rank it as a “Hold”, and just two say it’s one to “Sell”. 

The point on rich data against static data is an interesting one, and it points to an idea that may prove to be an uncomfortable one for Salesforce – that being early in the market might not translate to winning the AI race in the long run. 

It is worth noting that Salesforce still had Data Cloud, which holds significant amounts of multi-model data (which might be considered “rich”). 

Marc Benioff rarely misses an opportunity to swipe at tech sector giant (and AI rival) Microsoft. When the CEO unveiled Agentforce 2.0 in December last year, he commented that Salesforce’s own AI product, Agentforce, was currently live on the company’s help portal, help.salesforce.com, while Microsoft appeared to not be using their own Copilot service on their website. 

He was much more positive about Google’s AI voice assistant Gemini, saying in an X post in November that he was “absolutely blown away” by it.

But while Salesforce may be “eating its own dogfood” for now, the quality of the product in the long run might come down to how much data (and the quality of that data) is available to the tech giant behind the AI. 

Meta, for instance, appears to be in an excellent position in this respect, with their flagship product, Facebook, believed to have more than 3 billion active monthly users, along with 2.7 billion on WhatsApp – which is now being used by companies to chat with customers – and 2 billion on Instagram.

While this obviously includes overlap, with one person able to use all three services, this still means that an enormous amount of training data could be available for any AI projects Meta wants to launch – including one that challenges Salesforce’s baby, Agentforce

While Microsoft’s AI efforts fall short in Marc Benioff’s opinion, the company still has a considerable well of data to draw from, including LinkedIn – with around 310 million monthly active users – along with ActivisionBlizzard, Skype, GitHub, and a minority stake in OpenAI.

So while Agentforce is front-and-center at the moment in terms of agentic AI, will it always be so? 

The Bull

Principal Architect and Salesforce MVP Robert Sösemann, who owns stock in Salesforce, was critical of John DiFucci’s reasoning – particularly his mention of “static data”. 

He told Salesforce Ben: “Data is static. Calling something static to bash it is a common pattern, mostly by those who don’t know much about the topic they are talking about.

“The data AI learns from and makes sense and reasons about is the boring relational data and boring relational databases.” 

He added: “I really believe that Salesforce is actually saving their future by doing this because I think all the things they have built with Apex and low code and Flow, people will not want to use it anymore in half a year or so.”

Robert is not the only one with a more bullish stance on CRM, and there may be good reasons for this.

Salesforce has been ravenously acquiring companies. Data management provider Zoomin, AI startup Tenyx, and even SaaS data giant Own Company were snapped up in 2024 alone.

At Dreamforce, Salesforce’s flagship AI product Agentforce was shown to the world, sending a jolt of enthusiasm through the ecosystem about what the future might hold for the cloud giant – and this was reflected in rising stock prices in the following months. 

Towards the end of 2024, CEO Marc Benioff revealed that 1,000 paid Agentforce deals had been closed, painting a rosy picture for Salesforce as they pivot focus toward the world of Agents. 

It is worth bearing in mind that Marc Benioff previously took responsibility for “hiring too many people” through the coronavirus pandemic, and Salesforce Ben reported in January 2024 that the ‘mothership’ was laying off 700 workers – which came one year after they let go of 7,000 people. 

More recently however, the CEO said the cloud giant would “probably add another 1,000 to 2,000 salespeople in the short term” in order to explain “the value that we can achieve with AI”, perhaps indicating confidence from Salesforce – who likely would not want to be seen laying off even more people, following a wave of fresh hires. 

Retail investor Magnus Ofstad wrote in a Substack post on January 12 that Salesforce was the “canary in the AI coal mine”, as its customers are those at the “bleeding edge” of customer engagement, so if they do not adopt agents, it would beg the question of who actually will. 

He wrote: “Watch Salesforce’s bottom line like a hawk in 2025. No customer success stories or sales surge? Brace for a stock market reality check on AI’s promise. As CRM goes in 2025, so will the stock market.”

But he added that a number of Salesforce success stories indicated that the “canary” was “happy and content”. 

Indeed, the Q3 earnings report from early December showed revenue had grown 8% year over year in the third quarter, and fiscal fourth quarter sales were expected to be between $9.9B and $10.10B – which was within analysts’ projections of $10.05B.

The company’s net income was $1.5B – a 25% increase from the previous year’s $1.2B.

Speaking about what the future holds for the Salesforce ecosystem, Robert Sösemann said: “I think [AI] will transform everything… Every developer and consultant in the Salesforce space will have to think, ‘What if the stuff that I do or build needs to be transformed to be agentic AI?’ Not because Marc Benioff wants it, because the world wants it.” 

Source: Medium.com 

Final Thoughts 

The above image of a Salesforce fighter jet shooting down the redundant biplane of “software” – complete with a young Marc Benioff sitting proudly beside it – has become somewhat iconic in the ecosystem.

It could perhaps be seen as a representation of the ethos of the tech sector more generally: The new replacing the old; the sleek defeating the clunky; the inevitable march of progress and the constant threat of your product becoming redundant. 

Whether bullish or bearish, all those quoted in this article appear to agree on the idea that Agentforce is the future of Salesforce. 

Marc Benioff has confirmed as much himself, recently saying: “Everything needs to become about Agentforce at Salesforce – this is the only thing that really matters today.”

From this, it seems apparent that the CEO believes Agentforce to be the modern incarnation of the fighter jet, and he once more sits proudly beside it, ready to revolutionize the way the world does business. 

We can’t know the future, but the so-called “canary in the AI coalmine” seems very much alive – at least for now. 

The Author

Henry Martin

Henry is a Tech Reporter at Salesforce Ben.

Comments:

    Ian
    January 24, 2025 9:15 pm
    "Data is static". I disagree. Many types of data are constantly changing, in real time. Real-time weather updates. Stock prices or cryptocurrency rates. Social media feeds or live chat messages. iOT sensor readings. Etc, etc. Healthy debate is good. Trivializing another person and their POV which you disagree with as "Calling something static to bash it is a common pattern, mostly by those who don’t know much about the topic they are talking about" reeks of eco-chamber egoism. Robert is a talented professional and I respect his POV, but disagree in a blanket statement that data is static and most that make such statements don't know what they are talking about. It just so happens the person making this statement isn't in love with CRM ATM (unless they continue their typical inorganic M&A innovation strategy). I also own CRM and have since 2007 ;).

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