Damo Diandian FTSE (CRM.US) Investor Day: The AI narrative is stronger, but there is still no evidence of accelerated growth, maintaining the “same rating as the market”

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Morgan Stanley published a research report stating that after the Dreamforce Investor Day (CRM.US) meeting, it maintained the stock's “same rating as the general market”, with a target price of 235 US dollars. The bank said that SAFTSE did not update its financial guidelines at the conference, and that the outlook for fiscal year 2027 and the long-term framework for achieving “Rule of 50” by fiscal year 2030 remain the same. Management is more vocal about the accelerated spread of AI on the enterprise side, but partner research shows that the large-scale deployment of Agentforce is still in its early stages. The debate over whether SEFTSE can achieve organic revenue acceleration in the second half of fiscal year 2027, and whether the “end of SaaS” (SaaS Pocalypse) has given way to “SaaS acceleration” (SaaS Acceleration), did not dissipate due to Investor Day.

According to information, Dreamforce's “A Day” has not always been an occasion to release major financial updates, and the market also generally anticipated that Saifu would not adjust its guidelines. What is really worth paying attention to is how management describes the AI monetization path and whether partners have given strong enough cross-validation. Morgan Stanley analysts Adam Wood, Elizabeth Porter, and others pointed out that Saifushi believes that AI will penetrate business operations more substantively and more effectively, and that the company can monetize it through advanced version upgrades, consumer billing, and wider platform adoption, thereby continuing the recent net increase in average order value (AOV) and supporting the acceleration of organic revenue in the second half of fiscal year 2027 and beyond. The problem, however, is that the lack of net new financial details, combined with repeated high-single-digit growths/prospects in partner meetings, has left this narrative at the stage of “clear direction and insufficient evidence.”

Corporate “harness” becomes the core of AI monetization

Morgan Stanley said management's statements about AI opportunities were more confident than in the previous quarter. CEO Marc Benioff (Marc Benioff) described the current moment as the starting point for an AI-driven transformation of the enterprise, and SEFX hopes to be a key beneficiary. The logic is not to provide the strongest model by itself, but rather to provide a so-called “enterprise harness” — the model provides intelligence, but to apply intelligence to specific businesses, a trusted context, business logic, and governed execution are required. In management's words, models may understand the world, but they don't understand your business.

In this architecture, Informatica/Data 360 is responsible for preparing and contextualizing enterprise data, Tableau provides business semantics, and Guardian/MuleSoft Agent Fabric is responsible for security, governance, and cost control. As a CRM-based inference model, Koa complements domain intelligence for multi-step sales and service tasks. Agentforce brings these capabilities into customer workflows through new cutting-edge model integration, Slack Force, and Agentforce Coworker. The Max version, which costs $550 per user per month, packages Slack and Slackbot to drive the next upgrade cycle.

Morgan Stanley mentioned that in the past eight quarters, SAFTSE has accumulated about 1 billion US dollars of AOV through premium upgrades. Upgraded customers spent 60% to 80% more, and the total account annual recurring revenue (ARR) was approximately 1.4 times the original after customers rebalanced product expenses during contract renewal. Management believes that this flexibility not only supports current net account expansion, but also helps reduce the risk of future churn. Broader relationship monetization was achieved through ALAs and Salesforce Commit, which already accounted for seven of the top ten deals in the second fiscal quarter. Company account data also provides some support: AI appears in 80% of the top ARR growth stories, and the top 100 customers by agency work unit approximately doubled their ARR within 18 months of AgentForce's launch.

Partners: Demand is improving, but not enough to drive overall growth

In parallel with the conference, Morgan Stanley hosted two partner meetings. The feedback isn't pessimistic, but it's not optimistic either. Partners have seen more Agentforce deployments out of the experimental phase, but only about single-digit customers have actually achieved scale. Early scale use cases focused on customer service, and accuracy and labor savings were persuasive; flexible credits, outcome-based pricing, and additional sales from Data Cloud and MuleSoft also provided room for incremental monetization.

The competitive pressure is just as real. Private AI natives such as Sierra and Decagon are still credible rivals, often using more flexible pricing, aggressive discounts, and dedicated features to transform FTSE faster. One partner even mentioned that in the positive reviews, SAIFS won only a few projects. Seflex's strengths are still CRM data access, governance, integration, and enterprise-level workflows, but the risk is that private vendors may gradually take over the participating tier, and Seflex is being promoted to a less valuable back-end role, especially when customers reduce seat permits but do not make up for revenue through consumption.

Morgan Stanley said the market's initial interest in headless architectures (headless architectures) was seen as a positive sign, as easier access to Seflex data could increase productivity and speed up use case creation. However, partners doubt that this monetization drive will last: as context engineering improves, the model may reduce its reliance on SAFTSE's closed metadata advantage, thereby weakening its ability to charge access premiums. Overall, partner practices are still only growing by a high single digit, with limited visibility above 10%. The main constraint is not Saifushi's lack of AI innovation, nor the large-scale migration of customers to competitive platforms; rather, the CRM market is mature, the penetration rate is high, the decision-making cycle is lengthened, and the degree of customer data preparation is uneven. Agentforce is currently more like an incremental benefit than a catalyst for a full range of practices.

Overall, Morgan Stanley maintains SEFTSE's “same as the market” rating, with a target price of $235. The target price is based on 12 times the FY2029 free cash flow/share of approximately $22, discounted at approximately 10%, plus $13 net cash per share. The bank said that in a bull market scenario, if Agentforce and Data Cloud were rapidly adopted and the renewal rate improved, the revenue CAGR could reach about 15%, and the operating profit margin rose to about 39% by FY29, and the target price could be seen as $350; under the benchmark situation, the revenue CAGR was about 10%, operating margin was about 36%, and the target price was 235 US dollars; while the bear market scenario assumes that AI's native competition intensifies, and the legacy mix will drag down growth, and revenue falls to the middle single digits, corresponding to a valuation of $90 over the next 12 months.