We recently compiled a list of the 12 AI Stocks Making Headlines: Latest News and Ratings. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stands against the other AI stocks.
Mark Mahaney, Senior Managing Director at Evercore ISI, discussed how AI is reshaping the tech industry with Bloomberg’s Alix Steel and Paul Sweeney at the Bloomberg Invest conference in New York City. Amid a market downturn, with the Nasdaq 100 now trading below its 200-day moving average, Mahaney cited two reasons for the tech part of the sell-off.
First, he said the tech sector has witnessed phenomenal outperformance in the last two and a half years. Therefore, a mean reversion scenario implies that stocks that have significantly outperformed will eventually face downward adjustments. The second reason that he quoted is the tariff issues upending businesses, depending on how well-hedged they are.
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“Equity valuations have been very elevated and there’s been yellow flags all over the horizon given moves to cut government spending. Now on top of that, we have all this rhetoric around tariffs.”
-Ben McMillan, chief investment officer at IDX Insights in Tampa, Florida.
It’s not only the tech stocks that are going to be affected by the tariffs issue. According to McMillan, Wall Street is really concerned. “The likelihood of tariffs will lead to higher prices and therefore lower spending.”
“The fear here is that it’s going to slow (economic) growth. And when you have a slowdown in economic conditions, it’s a situation where banks specifically make less money because fewer goods and services are traveling through the economy.”
-Adam Sarhan, CEO of 50 Park Investments in New York.
Market volatility and tariff concerns may be shaping the tech sector, but another key factor has been influencing investor sentiment. When asked about a misconception in the AI world, Mahaney pointed to DeepSeek, stating that there was a misapprehension that the innovation would be highly disruptive for the hyperscalers.
He believes that the opposite has happened and that infrastructure has become a lot cheaper, with investors likely to get the money they have spent on capital expenditure, as well as a better return.
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. The hedge fund data is as of Q4 2024.
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).
A customer service team in an office setting using the company’s Customer 360 platform to communicate with customers.
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 162
Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) is a cloud-based CRM company that has gained popularity after it unveiled its AI-powered platform called Agentforce. On March 4th, the company announced the launch of AgentExchange, the trusted marketplace and community for Agentforce. This new marketplace and community, integrated directly into its AI CRM platform, empowers partners, developers, and the Agentblazer community to build and monetize agentic AI components.
It comprises more than 200 initial partners and hundreds of ready-made actions, topics, and templates that have gone through rigorous security and customer reviews to enable organizations to create and deploy AI agents to improve productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Last week, Salesforce AI executive Alice Steinglass said that “This is going to be the last generation of managers who manage a wholly human workforce. According to her, the launch of AgentForce has meant tremendous growth and success with 3,000 deals already.
“Customers want this new form of digital labor.” While Agentforce is a digital labor platform for Salesforce, AgentExchange is the marketplace on top of Agentforce that developers can use to create and sell AI agents, or businesses can even look through, test, and buy pre-built AI actions, templates, and agent solutions.
“When we launched AppExchange in 2005, it helped our customers get even more value from our platform with prebuilt apps, workflows, and integrations. It also gave our partners an opportunity to participate in the emerging cloud economy and build thriving businesses. With AgentExchange, we’re doing much the same — opening up Agentforce for partners, startups, and Agentblazers to participate in the digital labor market and build agentic AI on Salesforce.”
-Brian Landsman, EVP & GM, Global Business Development & Partnerships at Salesforce.
Overall CRM ranks 3rd on our list of the AI stocks that are making headlines. 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 time frame. 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.
READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stock To Buy Now and Complete List of All AI Companies Under $2 Billion Market Cap.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
