Bank of America upgrades Salesforce to Buy, betting AI will deepen customer reliance

Bank of America reversed its bearish Salesforce call on October 12, 2026, upgrading the stock from Underperform to Buy and raising its price target from $160 to $285. Its argument: AI may change how employees use business software without displacing the platforms that hold company data, workflows and rules—and could deepen dependence on them.

Shares rose as much as 5% Monday morning following the upgrade, before trading about 2% higher shortly before 10 a.m. ET. The new target was roughly 24% above the previous closing price. That is Bank of America’s forecast for the stock, not a gain Salesforce has already delivered.

The reversal comes against a difficult year for Salesforce shares. CNBC reported that the stock had fallen about 14% in 2026, largely because investors feared wider AI adoption would reduce demand for software tools. Analyst Tal Liani now takes the opposite view of what AI means for Salesforce’s enterprise relationships.

Losing the screen is not losing the platform

Bank of America’s earlier concern centered on the interface—the screen through which employees get work done. If workers hand tasks to AI assistants, they may no longer need to open Salesforce applications themselves. The bank had treated that shift as a threat to Salesforce’s place in enterprise software, according to Yahoo Finance.

Conversations with chief information officers and other market participants changed the bank’s assessment. Liani argues that large enterprises are unlikely to replace platforms containing their business logic, data, workflows and compliance frameworks. In that interpretation, a different front door does not necessarily remove the value of the systems behind it.

The distinction is central to the upgrade. Bank of America says the software-disruption narrative overstates how much losing the user interface would diminish Salesforce’s platform value. Rather than assuming assistants cut Salesforce out, Liani expects AI to deepen dependence on the platforms that already organize a company’s work.

The bank’s four-layer case

To explain why Salesforce could retain that role, Bank of America maps its portfolio across four layers it says companies need to put AI to work. The argument extends beyond selling an AI agent: it includes the data, applications and interfaces surrounding that agent.

• Data: The bank places Informatica and Data 360 in the layer supplying business information.
• Applications: Sales Cloud and Service Cloud represent the business-software layer in its assessment.
• Agents: Agentforce supplies the AI-agent layer in Bank of America’s account of the portfolio.
• Interface: Slack and Claudeforce sit in the layer through which users interact with the systems.

Liani’s investment case also rests on strong free cash flow—the cash a company generates after capital spending—and an expected return to faster growth. He says those factors, together with Salesforce’s AI strategy and the possibility of more enterprise spending, justify a modest valuation premium.

Adoption still has to catch up

The bank points to strong growth in net new annual order value, a bookings measure, and accelerating Slack performance as early signs of improving momentum. Liani sees those indicators as support for faster growth over the coming quarters, while the revised revenue forecasts extend into fiscal 2028 and 2029.

But Liani identifies slower-than-expected AI adoption as the greatest near-term risk, noting that Salesforce’s AI revenue remains small. His upgrade therefore combines a more favorable view of the platform’s staying power with a warning about the pace of customer uptake. The bullish call does not erase that commercial constraint.