Salesforce stock chosen as top 2025 pick by two Wall Street firms

Salesforce stock is favored by Bank of America and Needham.
Dow Jones recovers in afternoon session on Tuesday.
Needham is impressed by Salesforce racking up sales from AI product.
Bank of America called Salesforce the "leading" play in Agentic AI market.

Clay Webster FXStreet

Salesforce (CRM) stock is receiving the love on Tuesday after two venerable Wall Street firms added the maker of customer management software to their lists of top stock picks for the present year.

After falling during the morning session, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) recovered to gain about half a percentage point by the late afternoon. As one of the best performers in the Dow Jones, the index greatly benefited from CRM’s greater than 2% rise.

Salesforce stock news

Both Needham and Bank of America Securities have named Salesforce as a top stock for the year. While the technology sector has gotten off to a rotten start this year, owing to worries about the incoming Trump administration’s tariffs and expectations that the Federal Reserve (Fed) might steer clear of further interest rate cuts, both firms’ research departments view Salesforce as likely to outperform its sector.

Needham slapped the company with a $400 price target, about $75 above the current share price, due to CEO Marc Benioff’s focus on artificial intelligence. Salesforce developed and released the Agentforce product in the latter half of 2024, which allows businesses to customize an AI bot that retrieves information or solve issues for customers like a human customer representative.

“Our bullish thesis is highly leveraged to CRM's ability to execute and monetize its new Agentforce strategy,” Needham wrote in its research note.

Salesforce closed 200 paid deals for Agentforce in the third quarter and said the total would reach 1,000 by the end of last year.

In his third-quarter earnings call, Benioff claimed that Salesforce was using Agentforce itself to resolve 83% of customer queries.

Bank of America is also focused on software companies likely to benefit from AI products.

"The US software sector is not inexpensive after rallying 59% in 2023 and 23% in 2024," Bank of America analysts wrote in their research. "However, revenue multiples and growth expectations remain below [five]-year median and pre-covid levels, indicating that upside from the unfolding Agentic AI wave, inflecting enterprise IT spending and sustained migration to the cloud is unlikely to be fully priced in."

Bank of America added that some Agentic AI plays offered "PhD-level intelligence on some tasks and could displace workers as early as 2H25."

Salesforce stock forecast

Salesforce stock has been in an uptrend since December 2022, and that long stretch doesn't seem like it's at its end. Shares recently hit an all-time high of $369 in early December and are poised for further gains.

CRM then retreated from that level but discovered support near November's earlier foundation near $316. While the four-week Simple Moving Average (SMA) looks poised to overtake the 13-week counterpart, Q4 earnings and further headlines about Agentforce a sure to excite the market.

Expect CRM stock to reverse course soon and make its way back toward Needham's target of $400 sometime later this year. In the meantime, CRM could find support near the 52-week SMA near $287.

CRM weekly stock chart

Author

Clay Webster

FXStreet

Clay Webster grew up in the US outside Buffalo, New York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He began investing after college following the 2008 financial crisis.

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