Salesforce and UiPath Lead the Charge in Agentic AI Revolution

2 Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stocks to Consider Buying | The Motley Fool

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has been the first big usage of AI. However, the next major wave may be agentic AI. Generative AI uses generative software models to create text, image, video, or audio content in response to a user prompt. An example would be asking ChatGPT a question and getting a text response. With agentic AI, meanwhile, automated AI agents will go out and complete assigned tasks autonomously without constant human supervision. Let's look at two stocks looking to benefit from agentic AI. UiPath (PATH 0.19%) started out as a robotic automation company that helped customers build out tools whereby software robot agents could complete mundane tasks, such as data entry. Its platform also provided low-code development tools and tools to process documents, and its platform performed quality assurance testing. Notably, robotic automation is done with structured data across rules-based tasks where the robot agents can automate repetitive work. This is different from agentic AI where the AI agents can work with unstructured data and make autonomous decisions on how best to complete a task. At its user conference in October, the company laid out its roadmap for agentic automation. Among the tools it plans to launch are Agent Builder, which will allow customers to build agents that work in tandem with its software robots. The AI agents can be created from scratch, with help from its low-code platform or from pre-built templates that it will have available. Customers will be able to use third-party robots in their workflow as well. In addition, the company will launch Agentic Orchestration, which will let humans, robots, and AI agents work together with Agentic Orchestration as the conductor. UiPath said this solution will allow customers to design, implement, monitor, operate, and optimize complex business processes. In the end, it is looking for this solution to be able to make AI actionable and applicable to the real world. UiPath said its big advantage will be serving as the Switzerland of agentic AI, allowing organizations to use AI agents from any vendor, while its Agentic Orchestration platform will help them all work together. UiPath has gone through a rough patch as it looks to move from a robotic automation company to an agentic AI company, but its founder has returned as CEO to lead it down its new path. The company is also still growing, with revenue growth of 9% last quarter and annual recurring revenue (ARR) rising 17%. Existing customers, meanwhile, continue to spend more with the company, with its net dollar retention of 113%. UiPath needs to add more new customers, and along those lines, it has partnered with SAP, Microsoft, Deloitte, and Ernst & Young to help accomplish this. Trading at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 4.8 times fiscal 2026 analyst estimates, the stock is not very expensive and could be a good rebound candidate later this year after the launches of its new agentic AI solutions. Another software company turning to agentic AI is Salesforce (CRM 0.11%). Salesforce has always been a software innovator and is one of the first software companies to build a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform from scratch. Today, the company is the clear leader in customer relationship management (CRM) software in which its platform acts as a centralized hub to store customer information in one place. More recently, the company has moved into the areas of automation, analytics, and employee communication through its acquisitions of Mulesoft, Tableau, and Slack. Moving forward, Salesforce is betting heavily on agentic AI with the introduction of its Agentforce solution. The platform will let customers build and customize their own autonomous AI agents. Agentforce includes out-of-the-box agents that can easily be customizable through its no-code and low-code tools. The company said these agents can be used in numerous industries to help with various tasks. Some of the examples it has given include using its agents within the healthcare field as patient-services agents that can help answer questions and schedule the best doctor based on a patient's need. Agents can also be used in the public sector as a department of motor vehicle (DMV) agent to answer questions about vehicle registration, licenses, and appointments. After introducing Agentforce in October, the company said on its early December earnings call that it had closed 200 Agentforce deals and had thousands of potential deals in its pipeline. In mid-December, the company released Agentforce 2.0 with new reasoning, integration, and customization features. It also announced that it had closed another 1,000 Agentforce deals. That's a lot of closed deals in a short period of time, showing the huge potential of agentic AI. Agentforce is a usage-based product that costs $2 per conversation. The company, meanwhile, is looking to have 1 billion Agentforce AI agents deployed by the end of fiscal 2026 (ending January 2026). Trading at a forward P/S ratio of 7.6 times fiscal 2026 analyst estimates, the stock is fairly reasonably priced given the massive agentic AI opportunity in front of it.

This Tech Stock Could Dominate the Market for Agentic AI. Here's Why. | The Motley Fool

2025 is shaping up to be the year of artificial intelligence (AI) software. Over the last two years, the AI boom has focused on semiconductor stocks like Nvidia, but after building out data centers to perform generative AI computing scale, software companies now seem next up to capitalize on the new tech boom. Tech analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush recently said, "The time has come for the broader software space to get in on the AI Party as we believe the use cases are exploding." Agentic AI is rapidly becoming a buzzword in the industry as using AI via autonomous agents seems to be one of the most immediate applications of generative AI beyond chatbots. Through agentic AI, AI technology can autonomously solve difficult problems using sophisticated reasoning and multistep planning. Companies are rapidly building their agentic AI tools, but one that looks poised to be a leader in the new technology is Salesforce's (CRM -0.71%) Agentforce. Salesforce is one of the oldest pure-play cloud software stocks, and it's long led the market for customer relationship management (CRM) software, so the company figures to be a favorite in Agentic AI. Like Nvidia and other AI leaders, Salesforce is building on years of work and data with its new AI product, Agentforce. The company introduced Agentforce at its Dreamforce conference in September. Agentforce allows users to build and customize autonomous AI agents that can serve employees and customers 24/7. Salesforce says that Agentforce resolves 83% of visitor requests on its help site, and its usage spans Salesforce's product suite from CRM to Slack to Tableau. Those touchpoints and Salesforce's 25-year history give it deeper customer relationships than most of its competitors, and CEO Marc Benioff explained on the company's recent earnings call that agentic AI and Agentforce have significantly expanded the company's total addressable market (TAM), saying, "We've really created a whole new market, a new TAM, a TAM that is so much bigger and so much more exciting than the data management market, it's hard to get our head completely around." Salesforce has already signed 200 deals with Agentforce, and Benioff described the pipeline as "incredible." Part of the reason stocks have soared on AI is that the technology has the power to greatly scale productivity, and Agentforce is one of the first tools to tap into that. Benioff said, "This is really a moment where productivity is no longer tied to workforce growth, but through this intelligent technology that can be scaled without limits." Salesforce's revenue growth rate has slowed substantially from pre-pandemic levels, coming in at just 8.3% in the third quarter, and there isn't evidence yet in its forecast that Agentforce is moving the needle. For the fourth quarter, the company guided for 7% to 9% revenue growth, and for remaining performance obligations (RPO) growth of 9%, referring to the growth of its backlog over the next year. It will likely take a few more quarters for Agentforce and Agentic AI to begin to impact the company's growth as it just launched the product in September. A product like Agentforce also has the potential to deliver high-margin profits for Salesforce as the product, like software generally, is highly scalable and the marginal cost of delivering it for additional customers is essentially zero. Once the intellectual property is created, the costs are primarily associated with the cloud computing power necessary to run it. The research and development necessary to create the product has already been done, though Salesforce is likely to improve on it, meaning that the incremental revenue from Agentforce should be mostly profit. That helps explain why cloud infrastructure companies have been willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on Nvidia components to build out AI infrastructure. The potential of software programs like Agentforce is massive as it's a huge value-add and productivity improvement that Salesforce's customers are likely to pay up for. It's unclear how much Agentforce will expand Salesforce's TAM and drive its growth, but investors should heed Benioff's words above. The new technology is likely to be a game changer for Salesforce.

This Industry-Leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock -- Up 7,900% Since Its IPO -- Finds Itself at the Center of a $1 Trillion Opportunity | The Motley Fool

Salesforce is quietly emerging as a force in the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, and the company's next big opportunity could be worth trillions. Under the leadership of technology visionary Marc Benioff, Salesforce (CRM 0.52%) has become one of the most influential companies in the world of enterprise software. At its core, Salesforce is a leader in customer relationship management (CRM) -- a tool that allows sales leaders to track deal flow, pipeline trends, marketing campaigns, and more in a data-centric, efficient way. But over the last several years, Salesforce has diversified its platform through several high-profile acquisitions. The company acquired data integration service MuleSoft for $6.5 billion back in 2018. A year later, it acquired dashboarding tool Tableau, and it added messaging platform Slack to its ecosystem back in 2021. While the specific tools and end markets that these various assets serve differ, a common thread is a hefty reliance on data. By acquiring these various software businesses, Salesforce has quietly become a market leader for data-driven enterprise tools. This dynamic has served Salesforce well over the last couple of years, as investment in artificial intelligence (AI) has become a staple for businesses of all sizes. While the majority of AI attention revolves around semiconductors, autonomous driving, or robotics, I'd encourage investors to take a serious look at Salesforce. The company is going head to head with "Magnificent Seven" member Microsoft in an emerging field known as agentic AI. Below, I'm going to explain what agentic AI is and detail why this is such an enormous opportunity for Salesforce. Furthermore, I'll explore how Salesforce is making headway in this pocket of the AI realm and assess if now is a good opportunity to buy the stock. Odds are that if you've ever called a customer support number, you were required to go through a tedious rigmarole just to get a human operator on the other end of the line. While that process alone can be frustrating, it's even more annoying when the support agent isn't capable of resolving the issue you called about. What if processes like these could be improved, or even go away altogether? Well, that's partially why agentic AI is garnering a lot of attention right now. Agentic AI is built to operate with autonomy. By leveraging enormous volumes of data, companies such as Salesforce are building AI agents that are capable of streamlining complicated workflows -- bringing higher levels of efficiency and even customer satisfaction to the corporate environment. Benioff has said the total addressable market (TAM) for agentic AI could be $1 trillion, but prominent venture capital (VC) firm Battery Ventures is calling for the total AI software market to eclipse $4 trillion thanks in large part to how AI is transforming the services industry -- and agentic AI is a core pillar of how software is expected to bridge the gap with services and labor. Salesforce is jumping into the agentic AI pool through a new product it's calling Agentforce. When referring to demand for Agentforce, Benioff touted that Salesforce has "never seen anything like it." During Salesforce's third-quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call (for the period ended Sept. 30), investors learned that IBM, Accenture, and FedEx are some notable customers using Agentforce. Personally, I am intrigued about how the collaboration with Accenture could unfold, as the company recently partnered with Nvidia to help train 30,000 workers on AI integration services. And taking this a step further, Nvidia is also investing in the area of agentic AI, through a partnership with healthcare start-up Hippocratic AI. Although it's still early days, I'm cautiously optimistic that there could be some upside for Salesforce through further developments with Accenture or Nvidia. In the chart below, it's easy to spot that Salesforce stock has experienced some meaningful valuation expansion over the last six months or so. Thanks to its $10 billion investment in OpenAI a couple of years ago, Microsoft gained a first-mover advantage in developing agentic AI products in its new CoPilot platform. Nevertheless, I remain moderately bullish over Salesforce's prospects relative to those of Microsoft. The reason is that Salesforce has built a truly ubiquitous enterprise software platform thanks to its various acquisitions over the years. In turn, Salesforce has an opportunity to build numerous agents into its various product offers, and cross-sell these tools across chat, marketing, sales, data, and more to its customers. As such, Salesforce is well positioned to not only capture a good portion of the agentic AI market, but also keep customers sticky throughout its ecosystem. For these reasons, I think the premium in Salesforce stock is warranted and I see the company as a screaming buy on the AI narrative.