We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks on Investors’ Radar In January 2025. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) stands against other AI stocks on investors’ radar in January 2025.
Drew Pettit, U.S. equity strategist at Citi Research, said in a latest program on CNBC that he believes the AI growth story is still intact moving ahead in 2025. However, the analyst believes a lot of positive news is already “priced in.” He also mentioned the key areas that can benefit this year.
“I think the fundamental stories, at least for the pick-and-shovels names, continue. But where we think the trade is actually going to broaden out, and honestly, it has since mid-year, is into some of the users of AI. So, think about car companies that do autonomous driving or software companies putting that into their programs themselves, and even to some of the more cyclical names that, on the back end, can get some more productivity gains. So yes, the picks-and-shovels, the enablers of the trade, were attractive for the most part in 2024. We think AI continues to broaden out.”
The analyst said he has done some “reverse DCF work” and believes there are many companies that are mispriced and many that have the good news around them already priced in.
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For this article, we picked 10 AI stocks that analysts are talking about this month. With each company, 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 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
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Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 116
Ray Wang, Constellation Research principal analyst, recently explained on CNBC why he is bullish on Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) for 2025:
“We’re big on AI, but the question is, what are the AI derivatives? So, what are the second-order and third-order derivatives of AI? The second-order ones are looking at software companies that are taking advantage of AI because most customers can’t build it on their own. They’re going to want to consume it.”
Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“In the third quarter, we purchased new positions in Apple and Oracle and eliminated our small positions in Nike and Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM). We exited our position in Salesforce to fund better opportunities in Shopify and MSCI. Salesforce is seeing slower revenue growth than we would have expected, given the weakening macroeconomic environment. Furthermore, since its core end markets in customer relationship management (“CRM”) and Service are fairly mature, a lower growth level versus our expectations could persist for some time.”
Overall, CRM ranks 5th on our list of AI stocks on investors’ radar in January 2025. While we acknowledge the potential of CRM, 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 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.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
