Salesforce has 'leverage' for AI, margin growth: Analyst

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Salesforce (CRM) shares are gaining Wednesday morning coming off of its mixed third quarter results, initially up by over 11% in pre-market trading but later holding onto 9% gains in the regular trading session at the time of this video's posting. While the cloud company fell short of earnings expectations, it topped revenue estimates and posted $9.44 billion for its last quarter, driven by enthusiasm for its Agentforce AI tool released in October.

"Overall you have a balance of a company that should accelerate revenue growth into AI and margins that are still well below that of their peers. So their margins are going to go from low 30s to high 30s. Still big leverage. So you have leverage on the top line with accelerating growth, you also have leverage in margin," Jefferies Senior Analyst Brent Thill tells Yahoo Finance.

"And you have now signs again that that they've actually given organic innovation to the story. And that's like we just haven't seen that Salesforce for a long, long, long, long time."

Thill explains to Seana Smith and Brad Smith that Salesforce's AI business model could be "additive in the short term" and expresses concerns about the deployment of AI agents:

"All these AI agents are Minions [from Despicable Me]. No one really knows how to manage them. What they're going to do, are they going to are they going to behave, or are they going to are they going to put their elbows on the table at dinner? Right now it's really difficult. And so I think right now we're in a early test phase."

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.