New York, January 15, 2026, 11:27 EST — Regular session
- Salesforce shares slid about 1.6% in late morning trade, underperforming a firmer broader market.
- Wolfe Research reiterated an Outperform rating and a $350 price target after Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour in Boston.
- Salesforce is pushing new AI products in Slack and touting fresh customer adoption in life sciences.
Salesforce (CRM) shares were down 1.6% at $235.78 in late morning trade on Thursday, lagging a rise in major U.S. stock ETFs that track the Nasdaq and S&P 500.
The pullback matters because investors have turned jumpy on big software names, pressing for signs that new “AI agents” — systems that can take actions, not just answer questions — will lift revenue fast enough to justify years of spending.
Salesforce is in the middle of that argument. It has been rolling out Agentforce, its AI agent platform, and tying it more tightly to Slack, where it wants employees to ask questions, pull data and trigger tasks without leaving chat.
Wolfe Research reiterated an Outperform rating and a $350 price target after attending Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour stop in Boston, saying Agentforce is becoming more embedded across the user interface and early deployments are centered on practical internal and customer service use cases. 1
Still, the stock has taken hits this week. Salesforce fell 6.5% on Tuesday in its worst session since May 2024 as worries grew that AI could chip away at demand for traditional software, with investors rotating out of software and toward semiconductors, MarketWatch reported. 2
Salesforce is also trying to show visible progress on product. The company said this week that a redesigned, AI-powered Slackbot is now generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, calling it a way to bring “permissioned” workplace context — and Salesforce data — into the flow of work. “Slackbot isn’t just another copilot or AI assistant. It’s the front door to the Agentic Enterprise, powered by Salesforce,” Slack CTO and Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris said in the release. 3
On Thursday, Salesforce highlighted a new customer win in health care software, saying Spain’s Adamed Laboratorios selected Agentforce Life Sciences for Customer Engagement as it looks to unify commercial processes and build a broader view of customers. “The selection of Agentforce Life Sciences for Customer Engagement by Adamed is a powerful validation of our unified platform strategy,” said Frank Defesche, SVP and GM at Agentforce Life Sciences.
Outside the company, the question is whether the tools move from demos to habit. Futurum research director Keith Kirkpatrick wrote that Slackbot’s move to general availability “shifts attention from product ambition to real-world usage,” and flagged ROI as the ultimate test — not time saved in isolation. 4
But the downside case hasn’t gone away. If customers decide AI reduces the need for pricey “seat” licenses — or if adoption stays stuck in pilots while costs rise — software stocks can re-rate quickly, even when product headlines look good.
Salesforce last lifted its full-year forecast in December after quarterly results, as it pitched growing demand for its newer AI and data products — a backdrop that has made this week’s selling harder for bulls to shrug off. 5
What investors are watching next is less about the slogans and more about usage: whether Agentforce becomes part of day-to-day workflows, and whether Slackbot’s rollout through January and February translates into measurable adoption. A near-term marker is February 10, when enterprise admins’ initial window to set Slackbot access permissions is due to expire.
