We recently published a list of 10 Buzzing AI Stocks This Week. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) stands against other buzzing AI stocks this Week.
Paul Hickey, Bespoke Investment Group co-founder, said while talking to CNBC in a latest program that despite the market gains still concentrated in a few names, he’s bullish short and long term because of AI.
“The longer term play is the AI trade. This is an AI bull market. Every bull market has a theme, and ChatGPT was to AI what Netscape and AOL were to the internet.”
Hickey also mentioned the possible scenario where market gains would start to broaden out.
“ChatGPT didn’t invent AI; it made it tangible for consumers and businesses, just like Netscape with the internet. It caused, you know, made it a lot more practical on the part of businesses and the consumer. So I think in that respect, there’s a lot more investment to go, and we’ve seen the infrastructure stocks in AI benefit. But even just last week, some of these software names—and we’re going to slowly start to see that broaden out to the rest of the economy.”
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For this article, we picked 10 AI stocks currently buzzing on the back of latest news and analyst ratings. With each company we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A customer service team in an office setting using the company’s Customer 360 platform to communicate with customers.
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 116
Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) is among the key enterprise software vendors that are poised to benefit in 2025, according to a survey of chief information officers by KeyBanc, which shows that IT budgets are expected to rise in the coming year.
The survey found that IT budgets are anticipated to grow by 3.9% year over year in 2025. Among the large companies surveyed, 71% of respondents expect increases in their IT budgets, while 82% of small businesses surveyed also anticipate growth.
“Following our second half 2024 survey, we are incrementally more optimistic compared to our midyear report six months ago,” said KeyBanc analyst Jackson Ader in a detailed report. “We are seeing positive signs of a potential rebound within front office applications in 2025 with increasing budget priorities.”
“Specific vendor callouts include CRM’s rising priority and MSFT remaining a leading cloud vendor and beneficiary of generative AI, a category where expectations for spending were up this survey,” he added.
Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:
“In the third quarter, we purchased new positions in Apple and Oracle and eliminated our small positions in Nike and Salesforce, Inc. (NYSE:CRM). We exited our position in Salesforce to fund better opportunities in Shopify and MSCI. Salesforce is seeing slower revenue growth than we would have expected, given the weakening macroeconomic environment. Furthermore, since its core end markets in customer relationship management (“CRM”) and Service are fairly mature, a lower growth level versus our expectations could persist for some time.”
Overall, CRM ranks 7th on our list of buzzing AI stocks this Week. While we acknowledge the potential of CRM, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CRM but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
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