BofA's Tal Liani lifts Salesforce to Buy, target to $285

BofA had previously flagged a specific risk for Salesforce: as workers hand tasks to AI assistants, they may stop opening Salesforce apps at all. That fear weighed on many software stocks for a stretch, though the group has rallied sharply since the end of June, with Salesforce among the top performers. Monday's upgrade marks BofA reversing its own earlier call.

The bank's new reasoning rests on conversations with chief information officers and other market participants. Large companies, BofA concluded, are unlikely to replace the platforms that house their business logic, data, workflows, and compliance frameworks, and it argued AI should if anything deepen dependence on them. BofA also pointed to Salesforce covering all four layers a company needs to put AI to work: data through Informatica and Data 360, applications through Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, agents through Agentforce, and the interface through Slack and Claudeforce. It called the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative an overstatement of how much losing the user interface translates into losing platform value.

Still, BofA named a main near-term risk: companies adopting AI more slowly than expected, since Salesforce's AI revenue is still small. Alongside the upgrade, it lifted its fiscal 2028 and 2029 subscription and support revenue growth forecasts to 10.4% and 10.5% from 9.9% and 10.2%, citing early signs such as strong growth in net new annual order value and faster gains at Slack.