The enterprise software giant has been caught in a brutal "AI ghost trade" sell-off, but its analyst argues the market is missing what makes Salesforce structurally different from the SaaS names genuinely at risk
Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM, XETRA:FOO) reports its fourth-quarter results after the bell on Wednesday, and the timing could not be more charged. The stock has spent the better part of a year under sustained pressure from a narrative that artificial intelligence will hollow out the enterprise software market, rendering CRM platforms redundant. At $178.16, the shares sit less than half of Wedbush analyst Dan Ives's $375 price target, a gap that reflects just how deeply sceptical the market has become.
Ives is not persuaded. He maintains his 'Outperform' rating and keeps Salesforce on his AI 30 list, arguing that the sell-off has conflated a company with a genuine AI advantage with the broader category of software businesses that do face real disruption risk.
What the numbers need to show
Wall Street is expecting revenue of $11.19 billion and earnings per share of $3.05, alongside an operating margin of 34.1%. Ives characterizes all three as beatable, pointing to the company's current remaining performance obligation, the backlog metric that feeds future revenue recognition, as the key indicator of whether top-line growth is on track to reaccelerate toward double digits over the next 12 to 18 months.
Margin expansion and cash flow generation are the other variables. Salesforce has been investing across the business while absorbing the Informatica acquisition, and Ives believes the incremental synergies from that deal will add to the picture in coming quarters.
The ghost trade argument
The "AI ghost trade" framing is Ives's term for what he sees as indiscriminate selling of software stocks based on the assumption that AI agents will replace the applications enterprises currently pay for. His counter-argument rests on a specific claim about Salesforce's position that does not apply to most of its sector peers.
The core of that argument is data. Salesforce has spent decades accumulating structured, proprietary enterprise data across more than 150,000 customers, a pool that includes over 90% of the Fortune 500. That data is sticky, deeply embedded in customer workflows, and difficult to replicate.
Generic AI models, Ives argues, lack the deterministic context and business logic that enterprises require for real-world agent deployment. Salesforce's Agentforce product, combined with the Informatica acquisition and its Data 360 offering, is positioned to provide exactly that last mile of trusted context.
The implication is that AI is not the threat to Salesforce that the market has priced in. It is, in Ives's framing, the company's most significant monetization opportunity.
The caveat
Ives acknowledges that Agentforce monetization has been slower than expected across Salesforce's installed base, and that concern is real. The question for Wednesday's call is whether management can demonstrate that the pipeline is converting and that the revenue reacceleration story is on track rather than slipping further to the right.
With the stock at roughly half of Wedbush's target, the market has already priced in a great deal of failure. The question is whether Benioff can begin to change that on Wednesday evening.