Salesforce Is Betting on the Era of the Agentic Enterprise. Is the Stock a Buy Now?

Shares of Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) moved higher this week after management used its annual Dreamforce conference to reset long-term expectations. The customer relationship management (CRM) specialist now targets at least $60 billion of revenue by fiscal 2030, excluding any contributions from its recent acquisition of Informatica. In addition, the company introduced a profitability yardstick that pairs growth and margins.

The broader theme in Salesforce's upbeat outlook is the agentic enterprise, where AI (artificial intelligence) agents handle work across sales, service, marketing, and data.

Salesforce is best known for CRM software, but its platform spans marketing automation, analytics, integration, collaboration, and data management. That breadth matters for AI because unified data and workflows make it easier to deploy agents that do real tasks. This helps explain why the company is seeing explosive growth in its data and AI offering, and why Salesforce expects enterprise adoption of agentic tools to help the company maintain double-digit organic revenue growth through the end of fiscal 2030.

Image source: Salesforce.

Big targets

Salesforce aims for at least $60 billion of revenue by fiscal 2030, which implies a 10% or higher organic compound growth rate between fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2030. Management also introduced a target it is calling "50 by FY30," in which the company expects the sum of its subscription and support constant-currency revenue growth rate and non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) operating margin to equal 50 by the end of fiscal 2030.

To help investors have confidence in Salesforce's ambitious expectations, management noted that its data and AI annual recurring revenue (ARR) reached about $1.2 billion in the second quarter and grew about 120% year over year. Management also disclosed about $440 million in agentic AI ARR and stated that more than 12,000 customers have already adopted Agentforce.

"We're leading the next great transformation in business -- the era of the Agentic Enterprise," CEO Marc Benioff said in a press release about the targets it disclosed at its Investor Day event at Dreamforce, calling Agentforce the company's "fastest-growing organic product ever."

Salesforce chief financial and operating officer Robin Washington said its Agentforce platform was built as a result of more than $10 billion of focused research and development since the start of fiscal 2024.

Building on strong momentum

In the meantime, Salesforce is already putting up good numbers. Revenue in its fiscal second quarter rose 10% year over year to about $10.2 billion, and subscription and support revenue grew 11%. Current remaining performance obligations (future revenue under contract expected to be recognized as revenue in the next 12 months) increased 11%.

Notably, the company also raised its full-year revenue guidance to between $41.1 billion and $41.3 billion (8% to 9% growth). Additionally, it raised its guidance for non-GAAP operating margin to 34.1%.

But is the stock too expensive? Trading at 36 times earnings as of this writing, shares certainly aren't cheap. But the valuation isn't extreme for a software platform with a non-GAAP operating margin in the mid-thirties and clear levers to lift growth as AI adoption broadens.

Salesforce's success depends on continued rapid customer adoption of AI agents while protecting its margins -- even as the company continues to invest aggressively in the technology needed to grow this business. Additionally, investors should keep an eye on the macroeconomic environment and how it impacts adoption. An uncertain environment could stretch sales cycles and slow customer expansion within the Salesforce ecosystem of software and services. Finally, the "50 by FY30" yardstick is simple and trackable (which is helpful), but it also raises the bar and ultimately will make any slippage obvious.

Ultimately, the stock looks interesting at its current price, but isn't a clear buy -- not because the company doesn't have a lot going for it, but because of its premium valuation. Still, for investors seeking exposure to enterprise AI, a very small position could make sense. Investors could always add to the position on any pullbacks in the stock, assuming the company is executing well.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Salesforce. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.