11. Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holdings in Q1 2026: 101
Customer relationship management software provider Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM)’s shares are down by 37% over the past year and by 35.6% year-to-date. Guggenheim discussed the firm on July 1st. It bumped the rating to Buy from Neutral and kept a $228 share price target. Guggenheim outlined that Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was being excessively impacted by concerns that artificial intelligence could impact the firm’s business model. More recently, Keybanc’s analyst Andrew Jackson downgraded the stock to Hold from Buy due to worries that the firm’s Agentforce AI platform was struggling in the market. Keybanc based its coverage of Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) on channel checks and chief investment officer surveys. Cramer discussed Keybanc’s coverage in detail:
“This is what’s going on, when you see a move like we’re seeing in Sandisk and Micron, there’s often a common one which is against the software companies. They’re hardware this is software. This decline in software is being aided Jackson going from difficult to find evidence of future upside, downgrading it, taking it from a Buy to Hold. Now what bothers me David, is this guy does more channel checks than anybody. And he says why gather the evidence if we’re not going to use it. He sees slowing. . .adoption in Agentforce. That was going to be the future. Now one of the problems here is that we have to deal with the price to earnings multiple. The stock is cheap but he’s just saying, given the slow adoption, it can get even cheaper. . .this is the kind of thing that says, you know, Agentforce proof of concept, just not happening.
“It’s all about the budget, and the people who make the budget say, listen, let’s see if we can, not spend as much money on Salesforce which they think is expensive. Let’s see what we can come up with, for Anthropic, say, dashboard versus Tableu. Or let’s try to implement Agentforce, but let’s not go too fast because we may not get it right. It’s hard to implement. Salesforce itself is hard to implement if anyone’s tried. . .there will come a time when people say, you know what, it’s down so much, we should buy it.
“Now look I just get push back from Marc Benioff, saying listen this is just, what I just said, it’s not jiving at all with the facts. That there are a hundred reference about how Agentforce is doing, it’s just much much better than the analyst indicates, what I went over with Key. . . that’s just a bad call. And I think that’s important to say. The CEO says it’s a bad call. Well you gotta put it out there. . .but Marc, I have respect for the CEO. And the CEO is saying, that piece is wrong, and I think when a CEO comes out and says that piece is wrong, it is worth pointing out immediately, so that people can say, wait a second, I do not want to sell this thing. And I don’t know, I mean look, he’s got the references, he’s got sticking by the longer term view, and it’s Benioff deserves some benefit of the doubt. I’d say he deserves a lot of it, but because the stock’s down 40% I don’t know I wanna sell.”
In a tweet, Cramer commented on how hard it was to determine the firm’s growth:
“Nothing harder than trying to figure out the multiple to put on the growth of Salesforce.com”
Diamond Hill Capital Select Strategy discussed Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its Q1 2026 investor letter:
“Shares of Salesforce declined amid concerns around generative AI competition, with revenue and profit growth trending below expectations. Despite a more prolonged slowdown than initially anticipated, growth appears poised to reaccelerate in 2026, and if management’s longer-term guidance proves accurate, revenue growth and profitability should trend higher over time.”
