CRM Stock Is Struggling, But CEO Says 'No SaaS Company Is Doing More' — Agentforce's $1B Run-Rate Is His Evidence

• CRM shares dropped 1% in overnight trading, following the company's quarterly report.
• Salesforce’s Q1 sales and profit surpassed expectations, but Q2 forecasts were soft.
• Stocktwits sentiment for CRM flipped to ‘extremely bullish’ from ‘neutral.’

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Wednesday that the company’s Agentforce platform has surpassed a $1 billion annual revenue run-rate and is being deployed across Salesforce’s services, painting an upbeat picture of its AI software strategy while pushing back against negative sentiment surrounding the stock and the broader software sector’s recent underperformance.

“Well, you saw Agentforce revenues now over a billion dollars, Jim. That's incredible,” Benioff said in an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “And Agentforce is now on all of our products from sales to service, even inside our core applications.”

Agentforce enables companies to build and deploy autonomous AI agents to handle tasks such as customer support, sales assistance, workflow automation, and data analysis across business applications. It is one of the company’s main offerings.

CRM Results 

Salesforce, one of the largest enterprise software companies in the U.S., reported first-quarter sales and adjusted profit that topped Wall Street’s expectations. However, a softer-than-expected forecast for the current quarter raised concerns, triggering a 1% overnight drop in shares ahead of Thursday.

Salesforce’s results come amid pronounced weakness in software shares, driven by concerns that AI tools could reduce demand for niche software vendors. The debate remains fluid, however, as SaaS companies continue to add AI functionality to their products while also using AI-driven efficiencies to reduce headcount and operating costs.

Benioff Dismissed Stock Concerns, Pushes AI Narrative

Benioff dismissed those concerns, saying the business is in great shape and growing. “It's the SaaS apocalypse... We're all drinking SaaSparillas here. But yes (Salesforce’s) revenue is up very significantly as you can see. And we have just a fantastic quarter, up 14% year-over-year on revenue. It's our first $11 billion quarter, Jim. Isn't that amazing?” he said.

Benioff said Salesforce is heading for “a monster year” and would achieve more than $46 billion in revenue, adding that “there's no enterprise software company that's doing more than Salesforce is.”

In terms of AI integrations, he discussed the Slack-Anthropic integration, which powers the Slackbot in the enterprise communication platform, and enhanced AI capabilities in Tableau. 

Retail View On CRM Turns Bullish

On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment for CRM shifted to ‘extremely bullish’ early Thursday, from ‘neutral’ the previous day, with 24-hour message volume for the ticker jumping nearly 1,300%. 

A trader wrote: “$CRM Loaded up another 150 shares in AH under $172. My business uses CRM and since launch I have 2.5x my average yearly revenue consistently the last 4 years, cut my payroll in half and doubled my net. No way in hell I would ever switch to Ai only but Ai for sure has supplemented and will continued to be worked into my CRM.”

“People have no idea how important it is that this stock did not collapse despite all the preset algo-driven selling pressure hitting SaaS-related stocks recently. That alone says a lot about the strength underneath,” another trader said.

CRM shares are down 33% year to date, while the SaaS-sector benchmark, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), is down 12%.

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