MW Did Salesforce finally prove the bears wrong? The stock is rising off an upbeat AI forecast.

By Christine Ji

Salesforce guided for $60 billion in revenue by fiscal 2030, igniting optimism about the company's AI-monetization strategy

Shares of Salesforce rose nearly 7% in premarket trading Thursday morning.

Salesforce Inc. has given investors what they had been looking for: numbers supporting a clear path to artificial-intelligence monetization.

During the company's Dreamforce analyst day Wednesday, Salesforce (CRM) said that it's projecting over $60 billion in revenue by fiscal 2030, largely driven by AI. For context, Salesforce generated nearly $38 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025.

The stock was up nearly 7% in Thursday's premarket action. The move suggests a notable shift in investor sentiment: Shares of Salesforce have been battered by concerns about slow AI adoption, falling 29% this year and last closing at $236.58.

The revenue projections imply an annual growth rate of more than 10% from fiscal 2026 to 2030, which Mizuho analyst Gregg Moskowitz said supported a "legitimate potential for re-acceleration." In a note on Thursday, Moskowitz gave Salesforce an outperform rating and a price target of $350.

It's been a year since Salesforce launched its Agentforce product, which provides users with an autonomous platform to build and deploy AI agents. Earlier this week, Salesforce introduced enhanced Agentforce features such as Agentforce Voice, an AI agent that can conduct phone calls. The company has also partnered with leading large language models: Earlier this week it announced new and expanded partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic to integrate their models into the Salesforce platform. Salesforce anticipates ending the calendar year with more than 20,000 paying customers for its Data Cloud and Agentforce products.

Read: Salesforce posts an earnings beat - but stock drop shows investors are still wary of AI adoption

While AI-agent adoption is still in the early stages, it's now clearer to investors that Agentforce could start ramping up over the next year or so, as opposed to over the course of three to five years, according to a Thursday note from Evercore ISI analyst Kirk Materne. Materne gives Salesforce an outperform rating and a price target of $360. He believes Salesforce is well positioned to maintain Agentforce momentum and sees "an opportunity for sentiment to turn more positive" coming out of fiscal 2026.

Additionally, Salesforce highlighted a significant opportunity to expand its annual recurring revenue with its existing customers as they evolve from basic cloud usage to becoming an "agentic enterprise," leading to a three or four times uplift in ARR.

However, the investor day wasn't enough to convince everyone. While Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci wrote on Thursday that the implied growth rate needed to achieve Salesforce's revenue target "doesn't seem insurmountable," he's still skeptical of the speed of agentic AI adoption. He believes the ARR uplift impact will fall short of a three to four times increase, "especially as core growth for the company has decelerated."

Additionally, DiFucci pointed out that Salesforce had set a $50 billion revenue target for fiscal 2026 back in 2020, but the company is currently guiding for around $41 billion of revenue for that same period now. Guggenheim gives Salesforce a neutral rating.

Read on: What's dragging down Salesforce's stock? It may be a bigger problem than AI.

-Christine Ji

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October 16, 2025 09:35 ET (13:35 GMT)

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