New York, Jan 15, 2026, 17:44 EST — After-hours.
Salesforce (CRM) shares fell 2.5% to $233.53 in after-hours trading on Thursday, keeping the cloud software maker in the crosshairs of a broader pullback in the sector. The selling has been tied this week to new worries that autonomous AI tools could start eating into some everyday workplace apps.
For Salesforce, the debate cuts both ways. The company has been pushing “AI agents” — software designed to take steps on a user’s behalf, not just answer questions — as a new product line, and investors want to see who captures the spend.
The timing is awkward: Salesforce has been rolling out a string of agent-focused announcements over the past two days. That puts attention on whether it can turn demos and pilots into paid rollouts while sentiment around software stays jumpy.
On Thursday, Salesforce said the World Economic Forum will use an Agentforce 360-powered concierge app called EVA to support more than 3,000 leaders at its annual meeting in Davos. “EVA … is far more than a chatbot,” Chair and CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement. WEF President and CEO Børge Brende said the group was “not just optimising agendas” as it builds the tool ahead of the Jan. 19-23 gathering. 1
A day earlier, Salesforce said it will add native support for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard meant to let consumer AI models connect to a merchant’s back-end systems for tasks like inventory checks and checkout. “AI is redefining how shoppers find products,” Salesforce’s Nitin Mangtani said, while Google’s Ashish Gupta said the protocol is meant to make it easier for retailers to adopt “agentic commerce”. Salesforce said it will share rollout timelines and merchant onboarding details once they are finalized. 2
Salesforce also said a new version of Slackbot is generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, pitching it as a personal “agent for work” inside Slack. The company said the tool is designed to respect permissions and pull context from conversations and files, a nod to enterprise concerns about data leakage. 3
On Thursday, Salesforce highlighted a customer win in life sciences, saying Spain’s Adamed Laboratorios selected its Agentforce Life Sciences for customer engagement. “Powerful validation of our unified platform strategy,” said Frank Defesche, an SVP and general manager at Agentforce Life Sciences. 4
Still, traders have been focused less on Salesforce’s own product cadence and more on the threat narrative coming from AI labs. Barron’s cited William Blair analyst Arjun Bhatia calling Anthropic’s new Cowork agent “the latest Boogeyman in software” and writing that the selloff “seems overdone.” The report said Salesforce shares have fallen 26% over the past 12 months, alongside steep drops in peers such as ServiceNow and Adobe. 5
Investors.com said the Cowork launch renewed worries that AI could automate tasks once handled by subscription software and squeeze license growth. RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria wrote that the “AI bear case weighing on software broadly may remain an overhang,” the report said. Some investors, it added, fear that higher productivity could eventually mean fewer software seats per company. 6
Salesforce’s last major update came in December, when it raised its fiscal 2026 revenue forecast to $41.45 billion to $41.55 billion and lifted adjusted earnings guidance to $11.75 to $11.77 a share. Benioff said at the time that Agentforce and Data 360 were running at nearly $1.4 billion in annual recurring revenue, up 114% from a year earlier, with Agentforce alone topping $500 million. The company has argued that AI agents can automate routine work inside sales, service and marketing teams rather than replace core systems. 7
But the market is still trying to price how quickly those agents get paid for — and whether new tools from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google end up as partners or direct competitors. If enterprises treat AI as a cost-cutting lever and trim headcount, the downside scenario is fewer seats, slower renewals and harder pricing discussions.
Next up, investors will look for any early read-through from the World Economic Forum meeting that starts Jan. 19 in Davos, and for clearer rollout plans on Salesforce’s new commerce plumbing with Google.
