Software company Salesforce (CRM) is making big changes by using artificial intelligence to handle a large portion of its daily work. In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Marc Benioff stated that AI is now handling 30% to 50% of the company’s work, including tasks such as customer service and software development. This shift has helped Salesforce reduce the need to hire new employees for certain roles, while giving current staff the chance to focus on more valuable and creative work. “All of us have to get our head around this idea that AI can do things that before we were doing,” Benioff said. “We can move on to do higher-value work.”
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Along with using AI internally, Salesforce is also selling AI-powered tools to its customers. One of these products, called Agentforce, is designed to handle customer service tasks with about 93% accuracy. While the company laid off around 1,000 employees earlier this year, it has also been hiring people to focus on AI-related products. These efforts are starting to pay off, as Agentforce now has over 4,000 paying customers, and Salesforce’s AI services have reached more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, up 120% from last year.
Salesforce isn’t the only company using AI to improve how it works. ServiceNow (NOW), one of its competitors, is also relying on AI to increase productivity. In an interview with Seeking Alpha, CFO Gina Mastantuono explained that ServiceNow uses AI tools internally, which helps it better understand what works before offering these tools to customers. As a result, the company has seen major improvements with a 16x increase in how often sales leads turn into actual deals, a 42% drop in how long it takes to prepare for meetings, and 86% of IT support tasks being handled automatically.
Which AI Stock Is the Better Buy?
Turning to Wall Street, out of the two stocks mentioned above, analysts think that CRM stock has more room to run than NOW. In fact, CRM’s price target of $347.93 per share implies 29.6% upside versus NOW’s 6.3% gain.
