Small business tax specialist 1-800Accountant was not ready to put Salesforce’s newest and most important product into a starring role this tax season. Next year, it will be a different story. Investors who have stuck with the struggling enterprise software stock hope that 1-800Accountant is far from alone. From last October until January, 1-800Accountant conducted a pilot of Agentforce, which is Salesforce’s platform of artificial intelligence assistants that can reason and problem-solve with little to no human intervention. 1-800Accountant then went live with its first use case — a virtual chat agent that answers administrative questions posed by clients. Still, the company was not yet confident enough in Agentforce’s capabilities to make major operational or staff changes during this year’s high-volume tax season. The script is set to flip in 2026. “We’re planning to significantly reduce the staffing that we’re doing with seasonal help because we can now utilize not only that use case, but a couple of dozen other use cases across the company,” Ryan Teeples, chief technology officer of 1-800Accountants, told CNBC in an interview. In the coming year, Teeples said the company wants “to reduce the number of employees that it takes to service each client in a support role through the tax season by 50%.” He added, “The people who aren’t doing the actual performance of accounting work or the performance of traditional advising, we hope to reduce that dependency.” While maintaining that it continues to hire rapidly due to the growth in its business, the firm said the pace of hiring will be slower than it would have been without Agentforce. This success story at 1-800Accountant presents a double-edged sword for Salesforce. With Agentforce out for a year, and the company’s annual Dreamforce conference just one month away, the customer relationship management software giant has a lot to prove to Wall Street and investors like the CNBC Investing Club. The ability of Agentforce to reduce headcount is great for its clients. But for Salesforce, it means fewer seats at these organizations paying for use of its software applications, which include those used by salespeople to track their accounts and prospects and by customer service agents to manage cases. That is the debate holding back Salesforce stock. It has been our worst performer this year, down more than 27% year to date. Additionally, Salesforce’s soft fiscal 2026 third-quarter revenue guidance and lack of upside in the full-year outlook, alongside earnings earlier this month, didn’t help its case . Shares have been battered by the idea that AI poses a threat to the software-as-a-service business model. Simultaneously, Salesforce has been criticized for its massive investments into its own AI agents at the expense of innovation in its core CRM platform business. Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, has repeatedly disputed such claims, arguing that Agentforce’s digital agents enhance the company’s core products. “The power of Agentforce is that humans with agents can work together because our apps and our agents and our data cloud are all one unified platform. There’s no more separation at Salesforce between all the things that we have,” Benioff told Jim Cramer on “Mad Money” back in April . Since launching Agentforce, Salesforce said it has over 6,000 paid deals and more than 12,500 deals overall. During the company’s fiscal 2026 second-quarter earnings call earlier this month, Benioff said that 40% of Agentforce’s new bookings for the three months ended in July were from “existing customers extending their investment with Salesforce.” Benioff added that the company has seen a 60% increase quarter-over-quarter in clients moving beyond piloting to full deployment. CNBC spoke with three other Agentforce customers: SharkNinja, reMarkable, and UChicago Medicine. All of the companies agreed that the artificial intelligence-driven product boosted efficiency to streamline operations and complemented existing core offerings. All of the organizations have gone live with use cases — specific tasks that Agentforce is deployed to handle — except UChicago Medicine. It plans to go live by the end of the year. “As we continue to grow, it’s obviously important for us to be able to continue to handle the [patient call] volume that we do. By utilizing generative AI to handle some of those calls, we’ll be able to shift our resources internally,” said Tyler Bauer, senior vice president of ambulatory operations at UChicago Medicine, which brings together the University of Chicago Health System, the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine. This feeds directly into the mounting worries that Salesforce’s core business, which relies on a seat-based pricing model, is at risk. “I am very concerned that the rest of [Salesforce’s core business] will continue to slow down even if the AI business grows. Since the rest of the business is ten times bigger than the AI business, that means overall Salesforce’s revenue will continue to slow,” said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria. For household appliances maker SharkNinja, Agentforce has become an integral part in centralizing vast amounts of data to quickly respond to consumer questions. The company rolled out its first live use case in Canada this month. “Our focus is about how do we enhance and get to a better five-star [consumer] experience than we have today. It’s less of a cost discussion for us and more about the consumer,” said Velia Carboni, Shark Ninja’s chief information officer. At reMarkable, a digital notebook maker, the company has already scaled Agentforce to its internal IT department as well as human resources since launching a customer care agent in late 2024. Currently, the company has plans for a fourth and fifth agent. Thomas Indrelid, chief information officer at reMarkable, said, “Salesforce may represent a larger share of our IT budget than before, but this investment will produce a number of positive outcomes across the company that outweigh the added investment.” “We see Agentforce as complementing, not replacing, our human workforce. We can use it to handle our more basic, but often more time-consuming tasks, and use our human agents to focus on the more difficult questions,” Indrelid added. “This also helps us identify certain needed skills and knowledge in our hiring practices as we scale.” The key to Salesforce will be how quickly Agentforce’s usage-based consumption revenue model can grow to offset slower hiring, which impacts headcounts and is a headwind for its seat-based license model. As Salesforce figures this out, competitors like ServiceNow have also barged into the CRM space with agentic offerings of their own. It isn’t quite the battle of the AI agents just yet, with Salesforce capturing around 20.7% of the CRM market in 2024, according to IDC. That’s the largest piece of the pie, well ahead of competitors like Microsoft , Oracle, and SAP. CRM 5Y mountain Salesforce 5 years Salesforce shares fell off a cliff at the top of 2025 and never really got back on track. Following a well-received Dreamforce last year, shares hit an all-time high of $369 each on Dec. 4, 2024. Then, in early April, Salesforce tumbled again as the entire stock market got hammered on tariff concerns. The S & P 500 has since recovered and gone on to record highs as Salesforce stagnated. The company’s soft third-quarter outlook didn’t help its cause either. If Dreamforce is going to help the stock rebound again, Salesforce needs to show solid evidence that supports Benioff’s argument that AI growth is driving revenue across the board. “There’s going to be a lot of focus on customer adoption and any numbers they can give around customer adoption and the revenue that’s coming from those customers. Investors will also want to hear about how that is benefiting the other business,” Luria said. According to Salesforce SVP of Business Technology Andy White, driving customer adoption is definitely a focus for the company. “We’re really going after how can we make Agentforce simpler. And we’ve got a lot of really interesting things that we’re going to talk about a Dreamforce around using agents to create agents. We think that’s critical,” White told CNBC in an interview. While only time will tell, the Club has enough confidence in Benioff and his ability to navigate change. At 21 times 2026 earnings estimates and more than 30% off all-time highs, we’re still choosing to stick with the stock.. “Salesforce has maybe paid enough price,” said Jim during September’s Monthly Meeting for Club members , adding that he has faith Salesforce’s agentic display at Dreamforce mid-October will live up to the hype. “I don’t think this is a level to sell. It’s down too low,” Jim said. “[But] I can’t tell you to buy [either].” The other wildcard is potential activist pressure. Last month, in a second-quarter filing , Jeff Smith’s Starboard Value revealed that it increased its Salesforce stake by 47% during the three months ending in June. “The activists can help them take the next steps to expand margins and keep them from making more bad acquisitions,” said Luria, who actually upgraded Salesforce to neutral from a sell-equivalent rating last month following news of Starboard’s increased involvement. We also welcome Starboard’s bigger stake because Smith and other activist investors pushed for changes at Salesforce in late 2022 and into 2023. The campaign aimed at greater efficiency and profitability was a success as the stock nearly doubled in 2023 and added another 27% last year. We’re in the same wait-and-see boat as Luria, indicated by our 2 rating on the stock. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long CRM. See here for a full list of the stocks.) 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