The S&P 500 has roared back since the early April sell-off. In fact, the 20% bounce-back means the benchmark index is now in positive territory for the year (+1.7%). This seemed unlikely not long ago.
One downside of this, though, is that many US tech shares look very pricey again. Palantir‘s price-to-sales ratio, for example, is an eye-watering 111!
However, down 22% in 2025, I think Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) stock offers growth at a reasonable price. So I recently added it to my Stocks and Shares ISA.
If it’s opportunity in artificial intelligence (AI) pays off over the next decade, the stock could generate very solid returns.
Software giant
Salesforce is a cloud-based software company best known for helping businesses manage their relationships with customers. It has 11 distinct clouds (sales, marketing, analytics, etc).
For example, a business might use just Sales Cloud to manage leads and pipelines. Large enterprises may end up with five or more clouds integrated across their teams. PepsiCo uses all 11 of them!
Between FY2019 and FY2024, Salesforce grew its revenue from $13.3bn to $34.9bn, at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 21%. Along the way, the firm has been improving profitability, especially on a free cash flow basis.
However, top-line growth has noticeably slowed over the past couple of years. In FY2025, which ended in January, revenue grew 8.7% to $37.9bn. This year (FY2026), sales are expected to increase by a similar amount, to about $41.2bn.
Consequently, the share price has underperformed the S&P 500 over the past five years. It’s up just 39% while the index has nearly doubled.
Enter AI agents
Arguably then, the firm needs a catalyst to kickstart growth. And AI agents could provide just that over the next decade.
AI agents can autonomously handle tasks across customer service, sales, and marketing, with little or no human prompts. Think: ‘Book the meeting’, ’email the client’, ‘close the deal’.
These automated tasks are boosting productivity for clients and opening up a huge digital labour opportunity for Salesforce. Its recently launched Agentforce solution enables users to build and deploy autonomous AI agents.
In fiscal Q1, it already had over 8,000 Agentforce deals in place, with half of those paid for. Some early adopters include PepsiCo, Finnair, and Volkswagen.
AI agents need accurate data, otherwise you’ll just end up with dumb chatbots pretending to be helpful. Through its Data Cloud, which helps customers unify their data from diverse sources, Salesforce has the customer-specific data to make AI agents work. And a vast global base of customers to sell them to.
In Q1, Data Cloud and AI combined had already reached annual recurring revenue of more than $1bn, making these the fastest-growing products in the firm’s history.
Salesforce also soon plans to bring AI agents to drive efficiency in the public sector, which is a huge long-term opportunity.
Happy addition
One near-term risk here is a global recession, which could hurt customer adoption of Salesforce’s various clouds. Competition in AI agents from Microsoft and ServiceNow is also fierce.
However, looking out across the next decade, I think Agentforce has tremendous growth potential. With Salesforce stock trading at a reasonable 23 times forward earnings, I was happy to snap it up for my ISA.
