Salesforce improved its revenue outlook. What's in store for its stock after a 25% drop?

Software vendor Salesforce has raised its long-term revenue expectations amid strong adoption of AI features in cloud services. The company forecasts organic sales growth of more than 10% per year over the next five years. Investors reacted to the improved forecast with optimism: Salesforce shares jumped by 6%. At the same time, they have fallen in price by almost a quarter since the beginning of the year.

Salesforce expects its revenue to exceed $60 billion in 2030 thanks to the adoption of AI features in cloud services. By comparison, the consensus forecast calls for that figure to reach only $58.37 billion, according to LSEG data cited by CNBC. In the fiscal year that ended in January 2025 Salesforce reported revenue of $37.9 billion. The company estimates that organic growth will now be more than 10% every fiscal year from 2026 through 2030

"We've had lower growth for a while," said Salesforce COO and CFO Robin Washington. - Now it's accelerating again." According to her, it will take about 12-18 months to reach the promised figures, Bloomberg writes .

The revenue forecast, moreover, does not take into account the impact of the pending acquisition of data management company Informatica, Salesforce explained. The $8 billion deal, announced in May, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 or the first quarter of 2027.

Salesforce shares jumped more than 6% after these reports.

Since the beginning of the year, the company's capitalization has fallen by almost 25%. Due to the slowdown in revenue growth, investors fear that customers are increasingly spending money on startups' AI tools rather than Salesforce's familiar products, Bloomberg notes .

Now its main bet for growth is tied to Agentforce , a tool that allows enterprise customers to use AI to automate parts of their work, such as customer service and initial sales. This week Salesforce also released Agentforce Voice, which lets you answer customer phone calls, and announced expanded partnerships with AI model developers Anthropic and OpenAI, integrating them into Agentforce.

However, back in early October, analysts at RBC Capital Markets warned that "investors continue to question why Agentforce adoption is slower than expected," CNBC reports.

D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria noted Thursday that Salesforce's new 2030 target looks "more like wishful thinking." "We recognize that the pace of innovation on the Salesforce platform has accelerated over the past year, but there is still a gap between how management describes the situation and what customers are actually experiencing," he wrote in a research note. - We've also heard from customers that Agentforce implementations have so far resulted in limited success at scale - due in part to technology bottlenecks at customers themselves and challenges in applying AI to achieve the right business outcomes." Luria gave Salesforce shares a Neutral rating and set a $225 target price on the stock, which implies a 4% decline from the last close.

This week, analysts at Northland dropped their recommendation to buy Salesforce shares, downgrading their rating from Outperform to Market Perform, and lowered their target price from $396 to $264, suggesting a potential upside of about 12%, according to Investing.com. Analysts attributed the decision to the fact that the forecast for revenue per user (ARPU) growth through the AgentForce platform has not yet materialized.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor