Salesforce Bets on Agentic AI: Will It Lift Subscription Growth?

Salesforce, Inc. CRM is making a major push into agentic AI as it looks to strengthen subscription growth and expand its enterprise software leadership. The company believes AI agents that can complete tasks independently will become an important part of future customer workflows.Salesforce’s Agentforce platform is central to this strategy. The platform helps businesses automate sales, customer support and marketing tasks using AI-powered agents. The enterprise software maker is integrating these capabilities across its cloud offerings to increase platform adoption and customer spending.Salesforce’s Agentforce platform is gaining solid momentum. Agentforce’s annual recurring revenues (ARR) reached nearly $800 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, growing 169% year over year. The company also disclosed that Agentforce has surpassed 29,000 deals, showing rising demand from enterprise customers. Combined ARR from Agentforce and Data 360 platforms exceeded $2.9 billion, surging more than 200% year over year.AI products are also helping Salesforce deepen relationships with existing customers. More than 60% of AI-related bookings came from current clients, highlighting strong cross-selling opportunities across the company’s broad product portfolio. These strategies are reigniting growth momentum in Salesforce’s subscription and support segment revenues. The segment has registered double-digit revenue growth in each of the last three quarters of fiscal 2026, an impressive recovery from single-digit increases in earlier quarters.Overall, agentic AI is becoming an important growth driver for Salesforce. If AI adoption continues to rise and delivers measurable business value, the company could see stronger subscription growth over the long term. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the subscription and support segment’s fiscal 2027 revenues is pegged at $43.99 billion, indicating a year-over-year increase of approximately 12%.How Rivals Fare Against SalesforceMicrosoft Corporation MSFT and ServiceNow, Inc. NOW are also pushing AI automation in the enterprise market.Microsoft has integrated strong AI features into its Dynamics 365 platform through its Copilot tools, simplifying tasks such as writing emails, creating reports and summarizing meetings for users. Since many companies already use Microsoft products, integrating Copilot into their existing workflows is simple and cost-effective.ServiceNow’s Now Assist platform uses AI to automate IT service management, customer support and human resource management tasks. ServiceNow has been rolling out industry-specific AI tools, similar to what Salesforce is doing with Agentforce.Salesforce’s Price Performance, Valuation and EstimatesShares of Salesforce have plunged 36.5% over the past year, while the Zacks Internet – Software industry has fallen 12.9%.Salesforce One-Year Price Return PerformanceImage Source: Zacks Investment ResearchFrom a valuation standpoint, CRM trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 13.18, significantly below the industry’s average of 26.48.Salesforce Forward 12-Month P/E RatioImage Source: Zacks Investment ResearchThe Zacks Consensus Estimate for Salesforce’s fiscal 2027 and 2028 earnings implies a year-over-year increase of approximately 5% and 11.7%, respectively. Estimates for fiscal 2027 and 2028 have remained unchanged over the past 60 days.Image Source: Zacks Investment ResearchSalesforce currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.Radical New Technology Could Hand Investors Huge GainsQuantum Computing is the next technological revolution, and it could be even more advanced than AI.While some believed the technology was years away, it is already present and moving fast. Large hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and even Meta and Tesla, are scrambling to integrate quantum computing into their infrastructure.Senior Stock Strategist Kevin Cook reveals 7 carefully selected stocks poised to dominate the quantum computing landscape in his report, Beyond AI: The Quantum Leap in Computing Power.Kevin was among the early experts who recognized NVIDIA's enormous potential back in 2016. Now, he has keyed in on what could be "the next big thing" in quantum computing supremacy. Today, you have a rare chance to position your portfolio at the forefront of this opportunity.See Top Quantum Stocks Now >>This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).Zacks Investment ResearchWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Zacks Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Zacks