Prediction: This Stock Will Be Worth More Than Palantir 5 Years From Now

Key Points

• Salesforce is focusing on embedding AI agents across its product portfolio.

• Palantir’s lofty valuation multiples show that the company is priced for near-perfect execution.

• Salesforce’s AI strategy, solid financials, and cheap valuation can help it surpass Palantir’s market capitalization in the next five years.

• 10 stocks we like better than Salesforce ›

Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) has been one of Wall Street's hottest stocks, with share price gains of nearly 2,400% in the past three years. The company transformed itself from a defense-focused data analytics and mining player to an enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) giant catering to several government and commercial clients.

Palantir now has a market capitalization of roughly $435 billion and trades at a staggering 134 times sales. While these numbers highlight Wall Street's optimism about Palantir's future, they also leave little room for error.

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On the other hand, customer relationship management (CRM) pioneer Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) is being largely ignored by many investors as a mature software-as-a-service (SaaS) player. However, with the company's focus on agentic enterprise opportunity, driven primarily by its Agentforce and Data Cloud platforms, Salesforce can witness a dramatic acceleration of its growth trajectory in the coming years. If adoption of these AI-powered platforms continues at the current pace, Salesforce could very well be worth more than Palantir five years from now.

Agentic AI is gaining traction

Salesforce's recent financial and operational performance highlights its accelerating business momentum. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026 (ended July 31, 2025), the company's revenues increased 10%year-over-year to $10.2 billion, while the non-GAAP operating margin remained robust at 34.3%. Current remaining performance obligations (CRPO) climbed 11% year over year to $29.4 billion, highlighting a strong contracted revenue backlog for the following year.

However, it is the company's recent advances in agentic AI that can genuinely transform its future growth prospects. Instead of just focusing on workflow automation, Salesforce is embedding native agents across all its core clouds -- sales, service, marketing, analytics, IT, and commerce -- such that they work together with humans and make informed decisions based on trusted data. Agents now handle high-volume, repetitive tasks, while people focus on judgment and empathy.

Salesforce enables clients to design, develop, and orchestrate all these embedded agents through the Agentforce agentic AI platform. The company secured more than 6,000 paid deals and more than 12,500 deals in just three quarters since launching the Agentforce platform. Nearly 40% of the new Agentforce bookings in the recent quarter were from existing customers expanding their usage of Salesforce's offerings, underscoring the success of the company's cross-selling and upselling strategies.

The Data Cloud is the backbone of the Agentforce platform, providing agents with the necessary data and context to ensure high accuracy. Already a $7 billion business , Data Cloud saw a 140% year-over-year jump in customers in the second quarter. Although half of the Fortune 500 companies are already on Data Cloud, Salesforce claims this is just the beginning of a long growth path ahead.

Salesforce's edge

Palantir is growing at an impressive pace, with revenues surging 48%year over year to exceed $1 billion in the second quarter of fiscal 2025 (ended June 30, 2025). Its ontology-based (a framework that associates digital assets with an organization's physical assets) Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) is being rapidly adopted by governments and enterprises to resolve real-time challenges. Analysts expect the company's annual revenues to scale toward nearly $14.7 billion by the end of fiscal 2026 (ending Dec. 31). The challenge, however, is valuation. Even if the company continues to grow at this pace, history suggests that its price-to-sales multiple is unlikely to remain stable.

Salesforce's, contrarily, is priced at just 5.9 times sales, far lower than even its historical five-year average of 7.2. It already commands a massive installed base, with more than 150,000 customers globally. The company is seeing additional cross-selling and upselling opportunities with Agentforce and Data Cloud.

Salesforce expects to generate $15 billion in operating cash flow by the end of fiscal 2026 (Jan. 31, 2026), providing the flexibility to fund new growth initiatives. The company returned $2.6 billion to shareholders as dividends and share repurchases in the second quarter. Management is committed to returning capital to shareholders, as evidenced by the expansion of the share buyback program by $20 billion, bringing the total authorization close to $50 billion.

Can Salesforce's market cap surpass that of Palantir?

Palantir currently trades at lofty valuation levels. Even if its price-to-sales multiple compresses to its five-year average of 46.6, the company would command a market capitalization of approximately $685 billion in five years, assuming analyst revenue projections for fiscal 2029. That's very impressive, but it highlights how Palantir's growth trajectory depends heavily on sustaining a valuation at levels far higher than those of its SaaS peers.

Salesforce, however, is in a different situation. Although historically, it hasn't traded above 12 times sales, it is gearing up for better multiples due to its AI-powered growth initiatives. Salesforce is more profitable than in its previous years as a major CRM player. Hence, if Wall Street starts seeing Salesforce in the same light as AI-powered SaaS companies such as ServiceNow or CrowdStrike -- which are trading at price-to-sales multiples of 16.9 and 29, respectively -- it's reasonable to expect that Salesforce can trade at 12 to 15 times sales after five years.

At those levels, with projected revenues of $60.1 billion in fiscal 2030 (ending Jan. 31, 2030), Salesforce's market cap would reach between $721 billion and $901 billion. That is more than Palantir's market cap of $685 billion at a much higher valuation level.

It's evident that Palantir's stock depends heavily on maintaining very high valuation multiples. At the same time, Salesforce's valuation multiples only need to move closer to peer levels -- which is possible as its AI platforms scale. In five years, Salesforce may be viewed not as a legacy software company but as the core system for the agentic enterprise -- and may prove more valuable than Palantir.

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Manali Pradhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CrowdStrike, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.