Salesforce’s stock has lost 10% of its value in the two months since I wrote about Agentforce – the company’s agentic artificial intelligence service. For example, such services could plan a vacation; choose the best flights, hotels, and restaurants, and pay to lock in those reservations, as I noted in my book, Brain Rush.
Since then, a gap has emerged between suppliers of agentic AI and the technology’s potential customers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
My recent interview with a Salesforce partner and customer reveal agentic AI’s compelling potential benefits and a significant amount of work that must be done to realize those benefits.
That tension – coupled with growing macroeconomic uncertainty – could impede the rapid adoption of Agentforce and cap the upside of Salesforce stock.
Salesforce’s Performance, Prospects And Agentforce Ambitions
Salesforce delivered an expectations-busting report on its performance and prospects last fall. Salesforce exceeded the Wall Street consensus for the quarter ending October 31 and raised growth guidance for the company’s fiscal fourth quarter which ended in January 2025, noted my December Forbes post.
The company touted Agentforce as a driver of growth. “Agentforce will be the number one supplier,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in an interview with Fast Company. “I think we’ll have more than a billion agents running from Salesforce within the next 12 months. Even at Dreamforce, I got 10,000 customers hands-on with Agentforce,” Benioff added.
One analyst expressed enthusiasm that made me wonder whether Agentforce could be a killer app for AI. “Intelligent agents in AI will change decision making and improve situational awareness in organizations through quicker data analysis and prediction intelligence,” wrote Tom Coshow, senior director with Gartner’s technical service providers division, in a Gartner report about intelligent agents in AI featured in Network World.
“While you’re sleeping, agentic AI could look at five of your company’s systems, analyze far more data than you ever could and decide the necessary actions,” Coshow added.
Another analyst provided a handy bullish forecast for the agentic AI opportunity. Specifically, the global market for such services was expected to end 2024 with $31 billion in revenue and to grow thereafter at a 32% annual rate for the next few years, noted Emergen Research.
Salesforce is betting on this opportunity. To turn demand for Agentforce into significant revenue, Salesforce said it was hiring more than 1,000 more people, noted CX Today. “Agentforce became available just two weeks ago and we’re already hearing incredible feedback from our customers,” Benioff said in a message released in November 2024, noted Bloomberg.
The Enthusiasm Gap Between Agentic AI Vendors And Customers
This month, Salesforce’s 2025 fiscal year began. While the company eliminated 1,000 jobs as it adds to its AI sales headcount, according to Bloomberg, there is evidence of a gap between the enthusiasm of agentic AI suppliers and the companies who are evaluating the technology.
Salesforce highlighted the business wisdom of such expense discipline. “Just because we have a hit new product doesn’t mean that we ignore the commitments we’ve made internally and externally as we think about scaling this business,” Salesforce Chief Operating Officer Brian Millham said at a December 2024 Barclays event, noted Bloomberg.
“We’re looking across the entire company to say, ‘Where can we get more efficiencies? How can we continue to get fuel for the work that we’re doing to go invest in scale going forward?”
One analyst expressed support for the strategy. The cuts speak “to the company’s focus on driving productivity and should help offset some of the incremental sales hiring that the company has already outlined,” wrote Evercore ISI analyst Kirk Materne in a report featured by Bloomberg.
Decades ago I was a member of the startup team for an AI company aiming to help personal financial planners work more efficiently with their customers. The venture ultimately failed because personal financial planners perceived the product’s price to exceed its value to them.
That is why my antennae perked up when reading about the enthusiasm gap between agentic AI suppliers and potential customers.
How so? Top information technology leaders attending The Wall Street Journal’s February 11 CIO Network Summit in Menlo Park, Calif. expressed skepticism of the technology, the Journal wrote. Due to a “lack of reliability,” while 61% of attendees are experimenting with AI agents, 21% said they’re not using them at all, a Journal poll found.
Vendors assured potential customers they should ignore agentic AI’s flaws or they would fall behind their rivals. “Accept that it is imperfect,” co-founder and CEO of agentic AI startup Sierra and chairman of OpenAI, Bret Taylor said at the summit, according to the Journal. “Rather than say, ‘Will AI do something wrong’, say, ‘When it does something wrong, what are the operational mitigations that we’ve put in place to deal with it?’”
My Interview With Salesforce Partner Bullhorn And Customer Adecco
One way for companies to implement Salesforce’s Agentforce service is to partner with independent software vendors with expertise in the company’s industry.
A case in point is Zurich, Switzerland-based Adecco, a $24 billion staffing firm – which is partnering with Bullhorn, a Boston-based staffing ISV – to implement Salesforce’s customer relationship management and Agentforce services. “Agentforce operates horizontally to coordinate AI agents but someone needs to do the recruitment vertical,” Bullhorn President and Chief Operating Officer Matt Fischer told me in a February 6 interview.
“We automate the top of the recruiting funnel to make sure candidates have a good experience. Many applicants fall into a black hole. People apply for a job and do not get a response. Agentforce has the potential to provide personalized communication and help match job opportunities” to each candidate, he added.
There remains much work to be done to realize this vision. “Agentforce is new, it’s early, you’ve got to experiment, you have to do the work,” Fischer told me. “The candidate experience is currently suboptimal – 90% of the talent is having a poor experience – they never hear back that it’s not a fit,” he added.
Bullhorn is working on an approach that could deliver personalized messages. “Retrieval augmented generation – training the AI based on your company’s proprietary content – can improve the” customer experience, he added.
Bullhorn sees potential business benefits of agentic AI. “It could deliver the ability for staffing firms to grow without limits,” he said. “A recruiter gets 100 candidates and makes two or three placements. Deploying AI to qualify and screen those candidates would enable the recruiter to interview the best candidates and free them up to get more job orders,” concluded Fischer.
Adecco sees the potential to realize this vision. “We are aiming to increase our fill rate and reduce our time to fill,” Adecco Chief Digital and Information Officer Caroline Basyn told me in a February 11 interview.
Bullhorn is helping Adecco to become more productive. “Bullhorn is integrating Salesforce services to help with search and match – filling orders at the maximum possible rate as fast as possible with the best quality candidates,” Basyn said.
“Our top 300 customers – out of 150,000 total – account for 50% of Adecco’s business. Of those top 300, we have a fill rate ranging from 40% to 99%. We have been focusing on putting the supply chain closer to our customers to improve our fill rate, which would increase revenue even as we reduce the time to fill the jobs,” she concluded.
Where Will Salesforce Stock Go Next?
Analysts see value in Salesforce stock. The 41 analysts who offered 12-month targets see 20% upside in the stock to reach the average target of $396.94, notes TipRanks.
It could be a year or more before Agentforce makes a difference to Salesforce’s revenue. “Agentforce has renewed customer engagement, but it likely won’t become a major revenue driver until fiscal 2027 (calendar year 2026),” Piper Sandler analysts led by Brent Bracelin wrote in an investor note featured by InsiderMonkey.
If AI agents help drive more cross-selling and increase average revenue per user, Salesforce’s subscription growth could rise “in the medium term,” added Bracelin.
With retail sales down 0.9% in January and a possible Trump recession looming, companies could decide to hold off on agentic AI spending as they trim costs. Were that to happen, Salesforce shares could fall.