Salesforce (CRM) has endured a rough year, with shares down about 30% year-to-date, and badly lagging the S&P 500’s (SPX) roughly 5% decline. However, I’m strongly bullish and view this recent sell-off as a compelling buying opportunity rather than a warning sign. The move reflects excessive market skepticism about decelerating growth and growing competition from artificial intelligence (AI).
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Yet it looks far more like a healthy reset in expectations than any permanent impairment to the business, especially given Salesforce’s enduring dominance in enterprise software across sales, service, marketing, data, and workflows. If Salesforce can deliver the growth reacceleration management is targeting in the second half of Fiscal 2027, powered by AI innovations like Agentforce, the current valuation will appear far too cheap.
The Market Is Pricing in Too Little Improvement
The key debate around Salesforce is not whether it is a high-quality company. It is whether growth can rebound higher again after a period of sluggishness in parts of the portfolio, especially Marketing, Commerce, and Tableau.
Management has been consistent in saying that revenue should reaccelerate in the back half of Fiscal 2027. That confidence appears to be based on better net-new annual order value (AOV) trends, improving backlog, and a larger base of ramped-up sales capacity. Salesforce recently expanded sales capacity with double-digit growth in ramped account executives — a key leading indicator, as capacity typically drives bookings growth before it flows through to reported revenue.
There are already hints in the numbers. In Q4 2026, Salesforce generated $11.2 billion in revenue, up 12% year-over-year, while current remaining performance obligations (RPO) grew 16%. Management also highlighted that net-new AOV growth outpaced total AOV growth in the second half of Fiscal 2026. That is exactly the kind of setup you would want to see if a reacceleration thesis is going to work.
Agentforce Is Becoming the Center of the Bull Case
The biggest reason I think the growth story can improve is Agentforce. Salesforce is trying to position itself as a picks-and-shovels provider for enterprise AI, and unlike some newer AI vendors, it already has the customer relationships, workflow data, and systems of record that enterprises actually use. That advantage matters.
Salesforce describes its moat as four connected systems: a system of context through its data and metadata, a system of work through its core applications, a system of agency through tools to build and observe agents, and a system of engagement through Slack, voice, and other interfaces. That is a more compelling stack than just offering a chatbot on top of a large-language model (LLM).
The Agentforce numbers are starting to look more meaningful as well. Agentforce’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached about $800 million in Q4, up 169% year-over-year, while Agentforce plus Data Cloud’s ARR exceeded $2.9 billion, up more than 200% year-over-year. Since launch, Salesforce has signed more than 29,000 Agentforce deals, up from 18,500 in the prior quarter, and production accounts grew nearly 50% quarter-over-quarter.
Importantly, this does not appear to be purely experimental demand. Around 60% of Agentforce and Data Cloud bookings came from existing customers expanding deployments, and 75% of the top 100 wins in the quarter included both Agentforce and Data Cloud. That suggests the technology is moving deeper into real enterprise workflows.
Why Salesforce May Have an AI Edge That Investors Are Underestimating
A lot of the fear around Salesforce comes from the idea that companies will simply build their own agents using frontier models, or that point solutions will replace traditional SaaS vendors. I think that risk is real in some software categories, but Salesforce may be better insulated than the market assumes.
Its advantage is not the raw model. It is the business logic and workflow layer on top of enterprise data. Salesforce argues that many customers who try to build a do-it-yourself (DIY) agent eventually come back because scaling agents with governance, observability, determinism, and security is much harder than it first appears. That “agentic boomerang” idea is plausible, especially for large companies already deeply tied into Salesforce as a system of record.
I also think Slack is underappreciated here. Salesforce is turning Slackbot into a context-aware assistant embedded directly in workplace collaboration, and the company believes new “hero agents” could eventually be priced by outcomes, like leads generated or workflows completed, rather than just seats or token consumption. That kind of pricing could make the return on investment (ROI) story much easier for customers to understand.
Valuation Leaves Room for Upside
This is where the bull case gets more interesting. Salesforce is no longer priced like a premium growth software name. The stock trades at about 24x forward P/E, below the sector median of around 34x, and at just 11.6x price-to-operating cash flow, versus roughly 18x for the sector.
My valuation work also supports upside. Using 14 valuation models, including price-to-sales, EV/EBITDA, and a 10-year discounted cash flow (DCF) revenue exit, I arrived at a fair value of about $310 per share, implying roughly 63% upside from the current price.
Wall Street’s View
According to TipRanks, Salesforce has a Moderate Buy consensus rating, with 28 Buy, eight Hold, and one Sell ratings. Based on 37 Wall Street analysts, the average 12-month price target is $261.45, implying about 37.75% upside from the reference price of $189.80.
Conclusion
I’m bullish on Salesforce because I think the market is underestimating the odds of a growth reacceleration. The stock has been punished as if Salesforce is a mature software company with limited innovation and fading relevance. I think that framing misses what is happening with Agentforce, Data Cloud, Slack, and the company’s broader AI strategy.
This is still one of the most deeply embedded enterprise software platforms in the world. If booking trends keep improving, if Agentforce continues to scale, and if revenue does reaccelerate in the second half of Fiscal 2027, then today’s valuation could look far too low in hindsight. That is why I see CRM as an undervalued AI-enabled software name with meaningful upside from current levels.