Salesforce, at the forefront of CRM for decades, is far likelier to build an even better product for the AI era than companies are to build their own CRM, making it the favorite SaaS name. The case examines what it would take for Salesforce to compound about 27% a year over the next five years. x.com  x.com  x.com 

Salesforce has serious tail upside from explosive growth in agentic AI use, while its 16x P/E prices in only decline, which justified its 20% rally. x.com 

Schrödinger is expensive against its sales, trading at 8x sales and 7x next year's while its industry usually gets about 2x. Fair value runs $11.50 to $14.64, roughly 2x next year's sales, leaving the $31.87 price 118% above the high end. This is a levels-only read based on reported earnings and revenue estimates, not fundamental work. x.com 

Salesforce at a 52-week low trades like a broken business at about 11x forward earnings, yet it is 95% subscription with 77%-plus gross margins and $72 billion of RPO, up 14%. Marc Benioff has repurchased $27.1 billion, cutting diluted shares 10%, and says AI makes Salesforce stronger and the latest quarter had a record volume of large deals. A roughly 1% Anthropic stake bought for about $330 million is now worth over $8 billion, value the market is giving away free. x.com 

Veeva Systems looks very interesting because its market-maturity and competition risks look more than priced in. The debate over those risks is unsettled, and Salesforce is going the wrong way, to Veeva's benefit. It is unclear AI is really a risk in a high-regulatory-barrier industry like Veeva's. It trades at 14.7x free cash flow burdened by $1.2B of stock-based compensation. "Risk more than priced in" is not a thesis that works in the short term. x.com  x.com 

Salesforce is no longer cheap enough given how much wallet share core CRM is losing. Organic growth only matches nominal GDP despite a massive increase in agentic spending, and large enterprises increasingly see Salesforce as a data pipe for their own custom agents, an ex-growth business that deserves a low multiple. The Informatica acquisition doubles down on that weak model. Salesforce was too cheap at 12x non-GAAP earnings, but near high-teens it is fair, and terminal risks have not abated. … Show more

Salesforce's $25 billion accelerated buyback leans on debt in a way that risks leveraging its future, as happened at Fiserv. Fiserv cut its share count 21.5% with debt-funded buybacks averaging $167 a share, and now trades under $60 as growth fell. Salesforce can afford this round with $14 billion of free cash flow, but growth is slowing to single digits, AI isn't yet transforming its ecosystem, and its goodwill-heavy book limits deals. The risk is that multiples compress and it doubles down. … Show more

Software stocks probably have a floor as results challenge fears that AI agents will displace them. Since the June 22 momentum unwind, IGV is up 25% and the SOX index down 22%. Atlassian and Salesforce jumped on solid results, plus an Anthropic deal for Salesforce, and possible Silver Lake interest lifted Workday. A new bullish twist says agents will use software tools 10-100x more than humans. Whether fundamentals back the rally is still open; a likely Fed hike and weak September are risks. … Show more

Salesforce faces real AI threats: more competition, margin headwinds from compute costs and disruption risk for businesses like Tableau and Service Cloud. Agentforce is showing some momentum, and the stock felt oversold earlier, but it is not attractive at current levels. x.com 

Salesforce looks vulnerable long term because users hate it and will happily switch to alternatives, while in the AI era users actually liking a product will be a key moat for SaaS stocks. Adobe showed this when users who hated it switched more easily to Figma. Present-day fundamentals look great across these companies, so the threat is still theoretical. x.com