CRM
Salesforce, Inc.
stock NYSE

I am not an expert in software stocks, but let me give it a try.
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Even if there's no AI, Adobe is in a severe business **crisis**:
**Canva** almost killed InDesign and Illustrator, 4B ARR, **+46%** YoY. Blackmagic Design
(**DaVinci Resolve** \+ Hardwares) took away a portion of PR/AE's professional user share, 0.6B Sales, **\~+15%** YoY.
**Figma** completely killed XD, 1.4B Sales, **+35%** YoY.
**CapCut** (ByteDance) took away PR/AE's low-to-mid-end user share, 0.8B Sales, **+31%** YoY. (BTW, Bytedance has 30B CapEx + R&D, Adobe has 4.5B.)
**Affinity** took away a portion of Photoshop's share, 100M Sales, one-time purchase.
**CSP** took away a portion of Photoshop's share, 40M ARR, **+26%** YoY.
BTW, there is **Krita** which is FOSS. (Think about what Blender and Godot did to the industry.)
**Procreate** almost killed Fresco, 30M Sales, **\~+12%** YoY.
Lightroom has no obvious single competitor, but in reality, it's being carved up, and it's basically non-existent on mobile.
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If we talk about AI:
Firstly, all of Adobe's tools are **NOT agent-friendly**. Figma and Krita are the best interm of agent-friendly. Canva is a disaster. Express is better than Canva and has the potential. But the problem is, Adobe was afraid that Express would hurt their traditional tools. So they deliberately withholded core functions.
The Firefly image model has been destroyed by **GPT Image, Google Nano Banana, Bytedance Seedream, Alibaba Wan/Qwen-Image/Z-Image/Ovis-Image, Flux**... **Copyright compliance** (which is firefly's only advantage) looks like a moat, but it's **not**. **R&D capability** is the real key. If a model provider can make a good copyright non-compliant, they can make a copyright compliance one too, the reverse is not true.
The video model (Rephrase.ai) has been destroyed by **Google Veo, ByteDance Seedance, Kuaishou Kling, Alibaba Wan**.
The key here is, who has the **DATA**. (Alibaba might look weird, but they have Youku and Alibaba Pictures.) In principle, Meta, Sony, Tencent, Netflix also have high-quality video data, and might also enter the game.
Adobe obviously has **NOTHING**, and it's physically impossible to compete.
Firefly now had no choice but to integrates most of the US models above, but first, **the model providers siphon off the core profits**, and second, Canva integrates the **exact SAME models,** so Firefly has no moat.
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Talking about Adobe:
**Creative Cloud**, 14.2B, +12%
The total revenue of the competitors mentioned above exceeds 7B, and creative tools have had a massive amount of **market share taken away**.
Note a very serious thing: Creative overall is constantly **raising prices**, roughly estimated to have increased by 8%\~14% in '25, which means Creative Cloud's **organic growth is between -3.7%\~1.8%**.
>e.g. Creative Cloud All Apps ($59.99) -> Creative Cloud Pro ($69.99)
Document Cloud, 3.5B, **+15%**
This is good news, Adobe PDF is eating away DocuSign's (NASDAQ: DOCU) share, which only has an +8% growth rate.
Experience Cloud, 5.8B, +9.3%
Competing heavily with Salesforce and Google. CRM is also considered the SaaS industry most easily replaced by AI.
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Then again, as long as the price is right, even if growth is 0%, it can be considered.
At this price, there are two ways we can bet on this:
1. **Kill itself**: Develop modern web-based applications from scratch—agent-friendly, high performance, modern features that meet current needs, completely backward incompatible, with a user experience no worse than Canva and CapCut—and compete directly with its own old products, including Pr and AE. If so, there might be a **massive valuation repair**. Because growth fixes DCFs.
2. Accept reality and **give up the struggle**. As long as management gives up the struggle, cuts expansionary spending (half of R&D, half of marketing, a quarter of G&A), and starts epic buybacks + dividend payouts, you will not only get these **shareholder returns** but also a **valuation boost**.
To give two examples: **Philip Morris (MO)** and **Sage Group (LON:SGE)**. After the former started with 0% growth in 2018, its dividend-adjusted CAGR is 18%, and the latter is 16%. But the premise here is proving that it is truly **NOT IN DECLINE** but zero-growth (so that the DCF model will not give a result of **ZERO** ). Although the latter is a "tech stock," its **business model** is very solid.
But this is not 100% guaranteed. For **Check Point (CHKP)**, the company's net profit growth from 2014 to 2024 was 4.5%, the share cancellation rate was 4.25%, and the company's dividend-adjusted stock price CAGR was indeed roughly 10% — meaning almost no valuation expansion. If counted from 2014 to present, the CAGR is 5.4%.
The worst examples are the vast majority of SaaS stocks that dropped 80%, because hardly any SaaS companies that failed to compete can manage to stay flat without declining; 99% of the time, a **sudden death** would happen.
Personally, I don't think it's worth it. **High growth + low valuation** = a lot of margin for error. **Low growth + low valuation** = opening a mystery box. Unless the business model is so solid that it doesn't even look like SaaS (like Sage Group/RELX Plc, but they're not cheap at all).

I’m with you brother bulk in IGV, plus ADBE, CRM, FIG, INTU, META, MSFT, NOW, PATH.

NOW CRM

SaaS is back baby.
MSFT, SHOP, NOW, CRM

MSFT, TEAM, CRM, NOW, UBER and RDDT (I know its not saas but this MF behaves like saas recently if saas goes down it goes down and wise versa)

SAP, WKL,ORCL are excellent ERP and CRM based companies that aren't going anywhere, most companies in the SP500 report using it

How about $now or $CRM?

Over the last few months, all of Software stocks took a beating across all domains. Some of those were discussed and mentioned frequently in this forum - CRM, NOW, IT and the most frequently mentioned ADBE. While there are still questions on the business model surrounding the per-seat model in the agentic world, we now have one group of software companies that have been re-rated as beneficiaries of agentic AI movement, the cyber security group.
DDOG's blockbuster May 7th earnings report, where revenue blew past $1 billion and surged 32%, explicitly proved this. Their CEO stated that AI observability has become a structural growth engine. Why? Because *AI agents must be monitored just like human employees.* When an enterprise runs thousands of agent workflows, it must pay platforms like DDOG to monitor their API latency, tokens, and errors. For cyber security, AI is a threat multiplier and completly decoupled from headcount business model obsolesce.
Full disclosure: I am long FTNT, PANW. Looking to find an attractive entry in DDOG and CRWD over the coming days.
What are your thoughts

Most of the major CRM customers are so locked in to their multi-cloud platforms that it would cost them a lot more just to get out.

I think one issue with this narrative is that even before ai there was apps that was easy to clone. Think tinder, youtube, facebook. Their moat is the community.
Companies won’t change CRM for some startup’s version. Especially since the canvas hack companies will value even more large companies that invest in security audits.
Also I’m pretty sure most SaaS companies have adopted AI assisted coding. The gains are maybe 2-4x at top engineering firms. It’s more likely that SaaS companies will reduce headcount or increase velocity. I don’t see how a startup would compete.
I also don’t think companies would build their own tools in house. They would still need to pay engineers to maintain it and have to face security issues or potential bugs. I think mature codebases benefits from a bunch of patches.

CRM has roughly $14B in FCF less SBC which brings owners earnings to $10B relative to net income of $7B. The difference is amortized intangibles, but no cash actually left the company. In terms of price to owners earnings, it’s already at 14x today. IMO it’s already a good price for a starter position with the forward growth being solid. I feel like AI is a tailwind for CRM from reading its 10k and seeing how involved they are jn trying to help customers build agents for sales

Disclaimer: I am long, Adobe and CRM. 
I don't think it's as simple as SaaS getting killed by agentic AI it's two things: 
- lower barrier to entry means more competition in the SAS space which compresses margins 
- higher per customer incremental serving costs from AI features reduces margins 

TWLO, NET, CRM, PLTR, SNOW, ZM, CFLT, PATH, GTM

Claiming CRM and NOW are easy to replace shows you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.

IDK much about CRM, but ADBE isn't all about deep integration, a large part of their customer base is SMBs etc, they have a suite of like 50-100 pretty standalone softwares rather than a singular massive enterprise solution. It seems like their growth isn't from actually getting more users, but by raising the prices on existing users. That's not a viable plan long term.
If you look at spaces for Adobe users, not investors, they all f\*cking hate them and they're all complaining about the constant price hikes, also not a good sign. A sentence you see more and more is basically "I fucking hate them, but unfortunately I have no other option". And that's the switching moat you're talking about, but a switching moat can only slow decline, not a viable strategy for growth.
And with AI, more and more of those softwares in their suite are gonna get replaced more easily, one by one.
One of the youtubers I watch recently mentioned their last Adobe product was some video collaboration platform only they have, so they basically vibecoded a replacement in two weeks and then open sourced it for free, and tons of other creators also hopped over.
And this was pretty much not possible 6 months ago, we are in the very early stages still.
I'm not bullish.

No because I think this sub is wrong on a lot of these names. Not that many won’t do well but people undercount SBC and they look at “50% off highs!” As a value signal when in reality lots of these had nosebleed valuations. I do legitimately think AI is reducing the switching cost between many of these SAAS companies so key is what actually has some type of moat. I own ADSK, passed on CRM and NOW after research because I think they are easily replaceable and that won’t kill them but will limit pricing power.

I think most of these SaaS companies deserved the massacre in market cap, but some got hit way more than they deserve. ADBE tops my list and CRM isn't far behind. Both are franchise quality businesses with deep moats that are unlikely to be significantly eroded by AI, if at all. Anyone in enterprise tech knows just how hard it is to displace these types of solutions and I haven't seen a single thing that makes me believe there will be major erosion on seat count, and I expect AI will become a tailwind for them rather than a headwind. I'll keep buying ADBE and CRM as they wallow and perhaps drop further. I'm more than happy to hold them for 10+ years.

Bought NOW but SAP is very well positioned along with CRM.
It doesn’t get much love thrown around here but as an CRM and more important than that ERP systems are the foundation to every business. Quite literally the heart of a business.
Companies have to move from on to cloud for SAP and I can understand fears of companies going with a competitor (very hard to do this due to how sticky the product is) or pushing off the capex to delay the migration BUT to think AI can come in and build an ERP? I will put my life on the line that companies will not take the chance.

CRM. I’m already heavy in NOW.

Obviously not expecting to catch lightning in a bottle TWICE but the “ChatGPT killed search” GOOG trade was like once in a lifetime event and this sub was THE ONLY PLACE on the internet that was consensus bullish back then
It also seems to naive to just frame this years as similarly untrue “Claude killed SaaS!” … but is that’s what’s happening?
What’s the move?
NOW CRM WDAY?