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Guggenheim stated that it sees AI as a major risk and that Salesforce is likely to be negatively impacted by Agentic AI.
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Phillip Securities stated that, even though Salesforce has been resilient due to its ‘mission-critical’ nature and reliability, the company’s growth has slowed despite gaining a head start in AI.
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Acquisition of Fin should help Salesforce accelerate its AI adoption, Jefferies said.
Shares of Salesforce (CRM) rose over 2% premarket on Wednesday after Guggenheim upgraded the company stock and argued that the fatal AI bear case on software is a ‘hallucination.’
This upgrade comes weeks after CRM suffered a steep selloff, losing over 25% in June amid a growing debate over how quickly AI will reshape enterprise software. The brokerage believes that investors have taken the bearish narrative too far.
Guggenheim upgraded Salesforce to Buy from Neutral, with a price target of $228, implying an upside potential of nearly 46% from Tuesday’s closing price of the stock.
Guggenheim stated that while it sees AI as a major risk and views Salesforce as likely to be negatively impacted by Agentic AI, the ‘Armageddon’ situation priced into the stock does not align with reality, according to TheFly.
However, earlier this week, Philip Securities downgraded Salesforce to ‘Neutral’ from ‘Buy’ and cut its price target to $166 from $270. The firm stated that, even though Salesforce has been resilient due to its ‘mission-critical’ nature and reliability, the company’s growth has slowed despite getting a head start in AI.
Philip Securities also flagged that the company’s AI adoption, even though accelerating, has not contributed much to revenue, and it may remain immaterial to overall revenue for the next few years. As a result, the firm has not seen meaningful AI monetization from Salesforce, unlike peers of the company.
Earlier in June, Salesforce said it would acquire Fin for about $ 3.6 billion. The company said that Fin’s main offering, its AI agent that solves complex customer queries across every channel, which includes live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone, and Slack, will complement the company’s Agentforce platform with more deployment options for service organizations.According to Jefferies, the acquisition of Fin will help boost Salesforce’s AI adoption. The firm believes that Fin, with its own LLM and agentic AI capabilities, should benefit Salesforce’s portfolio.
