For decades, it seemed like the sky was the limit for Salesforce (CRM), the cloud-based business software and customer relationship management platform.
The company was founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, who built their platform in a small apartment on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill (a closet served as a server), proving that they could innovate from the beginning.
Salesforce made its product accessible to businesses of all sizes by offering its CRM as an Internet-based subscription service (SaaS) rather than expensive locally installed software, which was more common at the time.
As a result, companies were finally able to integrate their sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics to get a “360-degree” view of their customers, and Salesforce took off.
Since its IPO on June 23, 2004, CRM shares have soared almost 2,000%.
According to Benzinga, if an investor had purchased $1,000 worth of CRM stock 20 years ago, those shares would be worth $20,797.11 in March 2026.
But Salesforce’s skies have recently darkened due to its difficulties in proving that its AI investments are generating a tangible return on investment.
In fact, reports have emerged that the company’s experts don’t even understand how to use its new technology, let alone explain it to customers.
Let’s go back to last year, when the turbulence began. On February 26, 2025, Salesforce reported $37.9 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025, which was a 9% increase from the previous fiscal year.
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However, its revenue growth estimates slowed to 8.5%, down from 11% a year earlier.
Additionally, Salesforce’s margins fell to 27.2% from 29.4% in 2024. This suggested that the company’s AI investments had added significant costs to the company, without increasing its bottom line.
As a result, CRM stock sold off and has yet to recover: Salesforce ended the year down 20% in 2025.
Salesforce’s upheaval stems from its company-wide shift toward “agent AI.” Through its Agentforce platform, launched on September 12, 2024, AI agents can take on tasks that were previously delegated to people. These agents are considered more intuitive than chatbots and also require less human supervision.
Immediately after its launch, Salesforce posted strong quarterly results. CNBC reported that the company had secured 200 deals for the product and thousands more in the pipeline. CRM stock closed at an all-time high of $365.07 on December 4, 2024.
Everyone, it seemed, was on board the Agentic bandwagon.
But the machine’s efficiency came at a very human cost.
In January 2025, Benioff told Bloomberg that Salesforce’s AI agents were already doing 50% of the company’s work.
That fall, Benioff went on the Logan Bartlett show and said, “I need fewer heads.”
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Salesforce repositioned 4,000 customer service jobs that month and laid off an additional 1,000 marketing employees in early 2026.
But while losing a job seems insurmountable on a personal level, for companies like Salesforce, reducing administrative costs increases the return on investment from AI.
And it’s not just about Salesforce either; CEOs across the board have felt the pressure to prove that their AI investments work, Fortune said.
In a January 2026 survey of 3,700 business executives, 61% of CEOs said they were under “increasing pressure” to demonstrate performance on their AI investments.
But Salesforce may have already redeemed itself with its latest earnings report, released on February 26, 2026, which touted $800 million in annual recurring revenue for its Agentforce system and 2.4 billion Agentic work units to date, all of which is evidence of enterprise adoption.
CEO Marc Benioff added that Agentic AI “is a tailwind for our business.”
So is CRM’s long-term growth story likely to continue?
Salesforce certainly thinks so. The fact is, Salesforce remains one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, a niche it basically created, and boasted $38 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025., an increase of $3 billion from the previous year.
The company has big plans for the future, and Benioff’s dynamic leadership could well make its vision of $60 billion in revenue by 2030 a reality.
“We are leading the next great transformation in business, the era of the agent enterprise, where AI elevates human potential and accelerates growth,” Benioff said, counting Dell, FedEx, Pandora, PepsiCo and Williams-Sonoma, Inc. among its users.
In September 2025, the company launched the newest version of its AI enterprise, Agentforce 360, which promises even deeper platform integration. At the same time, Salesforce committed to investing $15 billion in AI initiatives in San Francisco.
This money will help establish an AI incubation center and add to workforce development programs.
Additionally, on March 16, 2026, Salesforce announced a massive $50 billion share buyback program, half of which is financed by debt, another bullish sign for the company.
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Analyst consensus estimates compiled by MarketBeat were that this move now makes the stock a “Moderate Buy.”
And with shares trading around 14.7 times forward earnings, many even believe the stock is not overvalued but rather undervalued.
Only time will tell, but Salesforce’s transition to an AI-centric platform may also have changed its business model from a high-flying growth story to a profitable, cash-generating company that appeals to those who can wait patiently for artificial intelligence to prove its worth in dollars and cents.
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This story was originally published by TheStreet on March 20, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investments section. Add TheStreet as a preferred source by clicking here.
