We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks Investors Are Monitoring After Tariff Shock. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) stands against other AI stocks investors are monitoring after tariff shock.
The tariff wars and a potential slowdown in AI spending threw water on investors’ AI trade plans and outlook. However, many analysts believe the broader outlook of the industry is still strong.
Ben Bajarin, Creative Strategies CEO, in a latest program on CNBC explained why he is still bullish on the Jensen Huang-led AI giant:
“I think when you look at the technology roadmap … in terms of what they’re doing with Grace Blackwell and Blackwell systems going forward, it’s going to be very, very hard for others to compete. I think they were extremely bullish about how much of the industry—not just the traditional, you know, cloud servers but AI factories and this entirely new infrastructure—and how it is being kind of redeveloped for the AI era. Like, it’s not being built on other things. And so I think when you look at the ecosystem that’s grown around them, they’re deeply entrenched. It doesn’t have any sign of that changing.”
Bajarin said that he sensed “frustration” in Jensen Huang’s tone as the executive feels Wall Street is not modeling the growth potential his company’s AI products truely have.
“And he seems to think that nobody is modeling that in or really understands it. So there’s the—we kind of have a sense of what they’ll sell just product-wise here in 2025, which is where I agree with you. Hard to surprise to the upside to move the stock, but I think he is signaling people don’t understand the magnitude of this opportunity. And I think that’s worth unpacking because there is a lot of growth ahead.”
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For this article, we picked 10 technology stocks Wall Street is closely watching these days. With each stock, we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 116
Steve Koenig from Macquarie said in a recent Schwab Network program that Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) Agentic AI technology has started to be applied to several use cases, but it’s a couple of years until we see mass deployment and monetization of this technology.
“To get it deployed among customers and to get the mass market adoption that Salesforce is looking for, there are a lot of hurdles, and one of them is trust among customers. Things like personally identifiable information not being surfaced to the major LLM companies are key concerns.
There are also factors like budget and aligning executives at large companies. Lastly, there are technical issues, such as these agents surfacing blind spots in the data. For example, a customer might be inquiring about an order, but the agent doesn’t have access to a legacy order management system that sits on-premise or at a data center the customer manages.
All these things are issues that have to be resolved when agentic AI rolls out. These companies are working on it and making progress, but it’s going to take more like two years, not two quarters, before we see significant monetization.”
Parnassus Growth Equity Fund stated the following regarding Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its Q4 2024 investor letter:
“Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) reported third-quarter results that exceeded analysts’ expectations, as the integration of AI technology across the customer relationship management software company’s product offerings has driven robust growth in new deals.”
Overall, CRM ranks 6th on our list of AI stocks investors are monitoring after tariff shock. While we acknowledge the potential of CRM as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CRM but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
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