CRM
Salesforce, Inc.
stock NYSE

Just thinking about some of the companies that were heavily promoted on this Subreddit, some of the names that come to mind are: NVO, PYPL, ADBE, UNH, CRM, GOOGL, AMZN, and DUOL to name a few. Most of these have severely under performed the market, besides GOOGL. Is this a sign of good things to come (I.e. short term pain for long term gain?) All of these stocks were trading severely undervalued compared to their normal price to earnings ratios, yet they have still underperformed the market. What are your thoughts on this? Do we need to give these companies 3-5 years to play out?

!remindme 2 years. CRM is at $183.75 right now

well, AI and "vibe-coding" may mean that now, in-house development IS and option. Not the best. Not every edge case handled, but there now IS an option. This gives procurement teams negotiating power. What was once a "ok, we increase the price by 5%" standard playbook will be "we will offer you a 30% discount." Read the report by citrini research. Yes, not every SaaS company will se that, but CRM. Maybe?? But fuck it, if you are convinced, do it. Look at GOOG. People thought GOOG is done at 150$. This was not even a year ago. Things can change fast.

Would you say the biggest disruption risk is enterprises building their own CRM internally? Or the AI-natives attacking from within? Have you considered the risk of model distillation and continued improvement of open-source foundation models that offer a way for software incumbents to build proprietary, workflow-specific SLMs? What is your take on SLMs in general? Seems like they are a better avenue for optimizing price-performance over the long-term, instead of relying on some massive, power hungry generalist LLM.

PANW NOW CRM ADBE SHOP
Load up

What do folks see as the “iPhone” that will disrupt Salesforce? Bret Taylor’s AI support agents at Sierra is interesting, but I see that integrating with rather than displacing CRM. AFAICT CRM still owns the system of record, which is very hard to displace. Sure, if they closed their eyes and ignored AI altogether that could happen, but the actual existential threat hasn’t emerged yet. Or has it?

Can’t understand why this was downvoted. Classic Reddit reaction.
CRM job is data organisation and reporting. This is necessary today because we still need a human in the loop for reasons such as hallucinations, context windows, security issues etc. We’re already talking about unlimited context windows, armies of agents etc. The issues we see today will reduce, and it is accelerating/exponential decay. I’m speculating here but there might come a time when AI can digest unstructured data into an unlimited context window and just answer questions on demand. Maybe the need to have a CRM/ERP at all is eliminated.
As long as a CRM is needed, CRM (the stock) will be okay - but this is short term. 5/10 years down I’m beginning to have doubts.

Point is, CRM sees value in their shares at current price. Who knows it is right or wrong? But, I feel there is still value in CRM, because they too can adapt to AI and get better efficiencies and new area of revenue.

The issue is not that AI makes it easy for companies to create their own CRM, it's that AI makes it easier to switch to better, cheaper CRM options than Salesforce

No, your company will not build a CRM that’s better than Salesforce. But software startups that are partnering with OpenAI or Anthropic will. And in the fullness of time, these startups get swallowed by OAI and Anthropic as they build enterprise stacks horizontally and vertically. Your company will deploy some of the new apps as adjacencies in non-core environments. Then, their feature sets will grow and envelop core apps. Meanwhile, your users are interfacing with AI and they don’t care what tools are used to get the job done.

This. The people that use it effectively build a team who are SF experts. Kind of like how your accountants are pros at excel
Just expecting it to replace CRM as a function is foolish

CRM software fucking sucks. All of it. It turns salespeople into data entry workers.

I was looking for someone to post a CRM post today. I have been doing my work on this stock and today is pushing me over the edge to finally take a position. The stock is purely getting hit with the sentiment narrative of AI will destroy software or at least software margins. The HALO trade has been hot so far this year and business fundamentals are getting ignored for sentiment. I do not have a perfect track record, I have am in - Baba(99), PYPL (53), CELH (25), NVO (55), UNH (256), GOOGL (164), and GAMB (7.8). All at different weights of my portfolio, but to give you as an assessment of my style and entry points. You can quickly see where I’m “losing” and “winning” currently. With CRM, I feel like it will be my next big investment and the thesis is fairly simply - financial strength, stickiness with their customers (or switching costs), and that I think AI improvements will either benefit it greatly as we are seeing with the AWUs and agentics or AI won’t be that impactful overall and will not kill the business as expected. In other words I think the narrative will be a positive for CRM OR will not have much of a low term impact, safety net. Additionally, I have used the product and competitors, and CRM is pretty uniquely designed for each business use and case. I believe CRM will continue to leverage the changes in AI to drive more opportunities to build new in roads sales pipelines with other tools integrated into the suite.

Unlikely.  Software is going to be a commodity within the next year, the current state of tools are mind blowing.
Furthermore, the capabilities that UIPath is creating are likely to be directly cannibalized by agentic models owned by the AI companies.
UIPath is one of the least likely survivors IMO.  A company like CRM at least provides a source of truth record for a company that can't be directly cannibalized or replicated at scale, per company.

We can't get rid of it. Used for quality systems. Investment in an alternative isn't worth it to my company.
I hate using CRM, as do my coworkers, but corporate doesn't care. They don't want the expense of switching to something else.

I work for a large financial services company that has many instances of SF. Do people think that a corp like mine is going to type "Build me a CRM" in \*name your AI platform\* and BAM - drop SF for some AI created whatever? There is zero chance in hell of that ever happening. There are many things to be said about SF and Saas in general. AI replacement is not one of them.

Yes software is becoming easier to produce and yes we should expect companies to face more competition going forward. But software was never the source of these companies' moats. It is usually data/vendor lock-in. Once your companies becomes dependent on some vendor (CRM) and that vendor maintains all your critical sales/customer data, you are really really unlikely to want to mess with that system or move away from it.
Migrating away from any critical SaaS service has always been difficult, usually requiring consulting firms to handle bespoke migration. There *is* a risk that agentic software will make that migration work easier and therefor erode that moat, but the I think barrier is more psychological than technological.
Some concern is warranted and customer churn rate is the thing to monitor here I think.
A truly catastrophic scenario would be if every moderately sized company decided to roll their own CRM stack. I'm not sure how realistic that is right now, but probably also not entirely impossible.

I bought 2,000 shares of CRM after earnings, this is a steal.

People selling CRM after those results "because AI" are out their goddamn minds

Posting this here because the dominant narrative right now is:
**“AI is disrupting SaaS. CRM is next.”**
I disagree.
Here is the value case for why **Salesforce** is *not* structurally broken.
# 1. 7–8% Organic Growth ≠ Disruption
Yes, FY27 guide implies \~7–8% organic growth excluding Informatica.
That is deceleration.
It is not disruption.
Disruption looks like:
* Revenue declining
* Customers churning
* Gross margins collapsing
* Pricing power evaporating
None of that is happening.
This is a $45B revenue base comping against massive prior growth. Law of large numbers matters.
# 2. AI Is Expanding the Stack, Not Replacing It
Bear case: AI agents reduce seat counts → CRM revenue falls.
Reality:
* Agentforce ARR: $800M (+169% YoY)
* Agentforce + Data 360 ARR: >$2.9B (+200% YoY)
AI is being layered **on top of** the platform.
If AI truly replaced Salesforce, backlog (cRPO) would be collapsing.
Instead, cRPO is still growing double digits.
That is not what disruption looks like.
# 3. Backlog Still Growing Double Digits
Q4 cRPO: +16%
Q1 guide: \~14%
Call that deceleration.
But 14% forward demand growth for a company of this size is not “SaaSpocalypse.”
It is normalization.
# 4. Capital Returns Signal Confidence
$50B buyback authorization.
Dividend raised.
A company being disrupted does not:
* Commit to massive repurchases
* Maintain strong margins
* Generate durable free cash flow
The market is calling this a “low-quality beat.”
I see:
* Durable FCF
* Slower but stable growth
* AI monetization ramping
* Multiple compression creating entry points
# The Real Question
Is CRM a 20% grower again? Probably not.
Is it a declining legacy SaaS business being eaten alive by AI?
The numbers do not support that.
To me this looks like:
• A high-single-digit grower
• With expanding AI attach
• Trading as if growth is about to break
That is not disruption.
That is sentiment.
Curious how others here are modeling steady-state growth and terminal margins.