Barclays Raises Salesforce Inc (CRM) Price Target to $415 on Strong Q4 Outlook and Agentforce AI Momentum

We recently compiled a list of the 15 AI News Making Waves Right Now. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) stands against the other AI stocks that are making waves right now.

With Donald Trump having won the elections, it seems Elon Musk is going to be a powerful force in the administration.  After all, X CEO has played an outsized role in his comeback, contributing millions to his campaign, serving as policy advisor, and even using his social media platform as a Make America Great Again (MAGA) advocacy platform.

Now that his efforts have come to fruition Max Tegmark, a leading scientist, who has previously worked with the world’s richest person says Musk’s influence could lead to tougher safety standards for artificial intelligence, as reported by The Guardian.

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Tegmark says Musk’s backing of a failed AI bill demonstrated that Musk is still worried about the repercussions of uncontrolled AI development. The SB 1047 bill in California required companies to stress-test large AI models before releasing them.

Having frequently warned that such an unrestrained development can be catastrophic for humanity, Musk was one of the 30,000 others who had signed a letter calling for a pause on the development of advanced AI technology last year.

According to Tegmark, Musk could convince Trump to introduce standards that prevent the growth of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term used for AI systems that match or surpass human levels of intelligence.

“I do think that if Elon manages to get Trump’s ear on AI issues we’re more likely to get some form of safety standards, something that prevents AGI. He might help Trump understand that an AGI race is a suicide race.”

– Tegmark, a professor specializing in AI at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Before Trump won the elections, Musk had predicted the development of artificial intelligence that would be smarter than the smartest human being by next year or by 2026.

“If you define AGI (artificial general intelligence) as smarter than the smartest human, I think it’s probably next year, within two years”.

– Elon Musk when asked about the timeline for the development of AGI.

For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.

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 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

A customer service team in an office setting using the company’s Customer 360 platform to communicate with customers.

Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM)

Market Capitalization: $308.07 billion

Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) is an American cloud-based CRM software company. The stock has gained significant attention after the launch of Agentforce, its AI-powered platform.

On November 15, Barclays raised the firm’s price target on Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) to $415 from $305 and kept an “Overweight” rating on the shares. The rating update comes amid an earnings preview note for the off-cycle software names, citing the recent rally in the software sector. According to the analyst, Salesforce shows “improving” data, and a “stronger than normal” outlook for Q4. Additionally, the analyst affirms that the current remaining performance obligations guidance will be a “closely watched metric in the quarter” due to bookings for Salesforce’s Agentforce AI product.

Overall CRM ranks 2nd on our list of the AI stocks that are making waves right now. While we acknowledge the potential of CRM as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. 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.