Salesforce has long been the poster child for enterprise software. It built the modern SaaS model, scaled relentlessly with acquisitions like Slack, MuleSoft, and Tableau, and entrenched itself as the backbone of customer relationship management. For years, investors treated Salesforce as untouchable: a recurring revenue machine with deep moats across enterprise workflows. But the rise of AI is exposing cracks that look eerily similar to the ones that once brought down giants like Siebel, Lotus, and eventually even the once-untouchable Oracle on-premise empire. The danger is not that Salesforce is ignored—it’s that its relevance may erode quietly, masked by subscription inertia until disruption is already irreversible.
Salesforce’s strength has always been its breadth: sales automation, service, marketing, analytics, collaboration. But this breadth is also its weakness. Much of Salesforce’s suite was built for a world where enterprises needed centralized, structured software to manage customer data. AI, however, changes the equation. Why wrestle with clunky Salesforce dashboards when an AI assistant can instantly summarize every customer interaction across emails, chats, and calls? Why rely on manual CRM input when AI can extract, classify, and predict customer behavior in real time? The fundamental promise of Salesforce—visibility and automation—can increasingly be replicated by AI-native platforms without the bloat.
The company’s answer has been “Einstein GPT” and a wave of AI branding. But much like Adobe’s Firefly, it feels more like a corporate add-on than a transformative leap. Einstein often comes across as bolted into workflows rather than redefining them. It’s reactive, not leading. Meanwhile, startups are building CRM-like systems directly atop GPT-4, Claude, and open-source large models, offering lighter, cheaper, and more intuitive solutions. Just as Slack once embarrassed Salesforce’s clunky Chatter platform, AI-native CRMs threaten to embarrass Salesforce’s massive but aging architecture.
There is also the cultural challenge. Salesforce is not an agile startup—it is a $200 billion behemoth with layers of acquisitions stitched together into one sprawling platform. Its incentive is to protect recurring subscription revenue, not to risk cannibalizing itself with an AI-native reinvention. This is the exact pattern that doomed Kodak and Nokia: companies that saw the disruption coming but could not dismantle their own empire to rebuild for the new era. If customer-facing teams can increasingly bypass Salesforce through AI copilots integrated directly into email, Zoom, or Slack (ironically, a Salesforce property), then Salesforce becomes a data graveyard rather than the beating heart of customer engagement.
Investors are beginning to ask sharper questions. Growth is slowing, margins are under pressure, and the AI narrative that once sent the stock soaring now feels thin compared to the actual breakthroughs happening elsewhere. Salesforce may not collapse overnight—its enterprise stickiness ensures a slow bleed rather than a cliff dive—but the risk is clear. If Adobe risks becoming the Kodak of creative software, Salesforce risks becoming the Lotus Notes of enterprise SaaS: once essential, now a relic.