The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock That Could Redefine Its Industry by the End of 2026

Investors have been increasingly thinking about which software companies will benefit as artificial intelligence (AI) moves from experimentation to real-world deployments. One company that could emerge as a major beneficiary is Salesforce (NYSE: CRM). This technology giant is already well positioned to capitalize on the AI-driven transition in the customer relationship management (CRM) industry.

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Salesforce reported solid financial numbers in fiscal 2026 (ending Jan. 31, 2026). Revenues were up 10% year over year to $41.5 billion. The company's remaining performance obligations (RPO, a measure of future project pipeline) was $72 billion. Of this, the current RPO or the contracted revenue expected to be recognized within the next 12 months rose 16% year over year to $35.1 billion. Hence, it is evident that customers are making long-term commitments to Salesforce.

AI agents see rising adoption

Salesforce's AI strategy is primarily based on Agentforce, its platform for building, managing, and deploying AI agents that can automate tasks across various business workflows. Agentforce reached an annual revenue run rate of around $800 million at the end of fiscal 2026, up 169% year over year. Salesforce also closed around 29,000 Agentforce deals in the first 15 months since launch.

Salesforce's agentic AI technology is being adopted alongside its core services. More than 75% of Salesforce's top 100 deals in the fourth quarter included both Agentforce and Data 360. Data 360 is Salesforce's platform that unifies customer data across multiple enterprise systems so AI models and applications can understand and act on it. Salesforce also recently acquired Informatica, adding cloud management tools that help clean, organize, and connect enterprise data so AI agents can use it more effectively. Agentforce and Data 360, which also includes Informatica, reached annual recurring revenue of over $2.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2026, up more than 200% year over year.

Hence, Salesforce is not just adding AI features to CRM software. Instead, it is building an integrated and secure platform that connects enterprise data, business applications, and AI agents into a single system.

Exceptional execution capabilities

Customer deployments demonstrate the commercial success of these tools. Wyndham Hotels has already rolled out more than 5,000 Agentforce deployments across over 8,300 hotels. The hotel saw a 200-basis points (two percentage) increase in direct bookings from AI voice agents. SharkNinja also claimed that its Salesforce agents handled nearly 250,000 customer interactions shortly after deployment in the fourth quarter of 2025.

The Salesforce platform has already processed more than 19 trillion tokens, highlighting the scale of operation of AI systems. Tokens are the basic units of text that large language models use to process prompts and generate responses. Salesforce has also introduced a new metric Agentic Work Units, to measure the actual work performed by AI agents rather than just model activity. The company said it had completed 2.4 billion Agentic Work Units as of the fourth-quarter earnings date, including 771 million in the fourth quarter alone.

Salesforce also differentiates itself from the competition with 26 years of customer data, making the company's data asset far more valuable and difficult for competitors to replicate. AI agents are only effective when the underlying data is relevant.

Hence, Salesforce seems well positioned not only to benefit from AI, but also to transform how CRM software works by the end of 2026.

Manali Pradhan, CFA has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Salesforce and SharkNinja. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.