10 Things I Learned From CEOs on My 2025 West Coast Trip

My week in San Francisco, where I attended Salesforce’s annual AI conference and visited with CEOs from Starbucks, Broadcom, and more, was filled with new insights about AI, stocks, and the market in general. Here are my top 10: Consider these takeaways to inform your investment decisions in the days and months to come. 1. Salesforce’s AI platform works, but not in the way some people think. Skepticism surrounding Salesforce’s Agentforce, its platform of virtual agents and bots to augment your business, is waning after CEO Marc Benioff spoke to kick off the company’s annual Dreamforce conference. There is a dual problem that has made Salesforce stock one of the worst performers on the market. The first is that its agentic initiative is so powerful that it has created geniuses capable of writing code as good as that created by Salesforce’s legacy software unit; therefore, you no longer need the old Salesforce. And second, because your agent coders are so efficient, you can lay people off and therefore not have to pay as much as you currently do to Salesforce for their help. Remember, companies pay for legacy Salesforce per “seat” or per user. Therefore, if fewer people are making sales, you don’t need as many Salesforce products. Every year, Benioff gives an impressive 90-minute speech on all of his new products aimed at increasing sales for his clients. When I helped run thestreet.com, I found their addresses very helpful in getting new subscriptions. I learned a lot about what to do from the keynotes. This time, Marc had a very different type of presentation. It called on executives from four companies – PepsiCo, Dell, FedEx and Williams-Sonoma – and showed how they used agents to help them streamline their operations, save money and increase revenue. Real-world use cases where no one has scaled down the old Salesforce and used it more efficiently. All customers had the option to reduce inheritance (it’s now an option when you take Agentforce) but it doesn’t seem like many accept it. In fact, during an investor meeting at the conference, Salesforce raised its organic revenue growth rate above 10% for fiscal years 2026 to 2030 — it had fallen to 9% — and said it forecast sales of more than $60 billion in 2030, far higher than analysts’ estimate of $58.37 billion. This projection is important because Marc beat the company’s internal projections but not the Street’s. It had become a quarterly progression that was always disappointing. It’s over. It will now show you that Agentforce has made sense, hopefully several billion dollars over the next 18 months, and that the stock will begin to rise. I stopped by three of the four CEOs participating in the presentation to confirm everything I’ve written here, and I feel much better about our position than I have in a very long time. 2. OpenAI supporters worry… Skepticism surrounding OpenAI’s spending thickens as it expands to consumer products like Sora, which generates realistic, animated videos from text prompts, and adult “erotica” — both of which indicate it’s not succeeding in the business. Analysts hate consumer software because consumers are fickle and don’t want to pay for it. Companies pay a lot and do not change suppliers. The fact that OpenAI is already reaching deep into the consumer makes many of its backers extremely nervous. The company needs a gigantic increase in revenue next year to justify all of its expenses, and the crowd I was hanging out with thinks that won’t be possible. 3. …but not Broadcom’s Hock Tang. Countering this skepticism is the conversation I had with Hock Tan, the very tough CEO of Broadcom, who completely believes in the work he intends to do with OpenAI and says they will be great partners. Hock is far too strict and uncompromising to work with crazy companies. It was difficult for me to reconcile my own skepticism of OpenAI with Hock’s strong confidence in the company. Let’s just say it made me more confident in the sustainability of OpenAI. 4. AI development is not a zero-sum game. Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, was on everyone’s lips as the dragon slayer, or David versus Goliath, for her battles with Jensen Huang and Nvidia. This is a false construction. These hyperscalers need everything they can get, I mean everything, and that includes custom chips from Broadcom, lightweight chips from AMD, and robust software stacks from Nvidia. It’s not zero sum. Yet people seem to think so. AMD’s chips won’t be ready until the middle of next year; between now and then, there will be an entirely new iteration of Jensen, the Vera Rubin, which has considerably more power than AMD’s offering. If you’re selling Nvidia thanks to OpenAI’s deals with Broadcom or AMD, you’re making a mistake. But you can buy AMD and Broadcom to go with your Nvidia. 5. It’s time to sell your nuclear stockpiles… We constantly hear that data centers consume so much energy that it will alter the grid. I come away thinking that the network is up to the task, but that the energy it produces must be better distributed. Go back and listen to my interview with Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E. There is no shortage of electricity, she said, just a lot of energy that can be produced when no one is using it. She said if you could spread out the energy usage and maybe store it, that would be a better solution than what we’re doing now. I felt better about the energy part of the equation after speaking with her and with Hamid Moghadam, the CEO of Prologis, which has several large data centers, and they are powered by rooftop solar. Many tech executives don’t know much about energy and should spend time with CEOs of large utilities to better understand the issues on both sides of the equation. Additionally, the executives I spoke with said you would be crazy not to sell all the uranium and nuclear stockpiles. There is no real pressure to build new nuclear weapons, even small ones, otherwise GE Vernova, which is the most established manufacturer, would receive orders. Sell ​​each one. Check out my new book, “How to Make Money in Any Market,” where I describe my system for creating long-term wealth through your investments. 6. …your quantum stocks too. Quantum is so not ready for prime time that I would sell all of this stock. No one is seriously talking about quantum as a way to move things forward, and if so, it’s a matter of seeing how IBM does it commercially. Quantum stocks, like nuclear stocks, are totally overblown and live on press releases, usually from a cash-strapped government. Although not a promise, advances in quantum computing will not produce commercial computing for a very long time. All of these companies are due to make huge stock offerings. Insider selling will soon overwhelm them, and their shareholders are really weak. 7. Don’t sleep with Meta’s smart glasses on. Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of glasses and a small handheld computer as a way to bring AI to humans could take shape faster than I thought. Meta’s glasses, which look a bit like Elvis-Costello’s, send a lot of information back to the cloud. But they also have plenty of computing power on-site, so to speak, because they’re loaded with Arm chips. These glasses can call, take photos, and speak many languages, among other uses. They seem to be a must-have for any traveler and businessman trying to advance their business abroad. 8. You want to buy Dell stock on a downturn. Dell is moving away from all the other coordinators of the Nvidia installation and the racks that the chips are part of. I thought Hewlett Packard Enterprise was catching up, but the quarter was miserable. There are real dreams in Nebius, and I’ll sell that one tomorrow; that’s how far ahead Dell is. I regret not pulling the trigger on purchasing Dell. He should be bought if the stock price falls, as he is doing much better than everyone else. I do not join IREN, the bitcoin mining and data company. Sell ​​that one and buy Coreweave. These sales may not be immediately correct. But the coming insider sales and subsequent corporate financing will mark the end of the upward spiral. 9. Levi Strauss is back. Outside of tech, I’ve been very impressed with the growth of Levi’s women’s line, and Levi Strauss is on a new growth path that isn’t reflected in the stock. My entire team was blown away by the deals CEO Michelle Gass came up with, and the stock is way too cheap compared to the innovation she brought to the party. 10. San Francisco is coming back too. The city of San Francisco is becoming safer thanks to the tireless work of Mayor Daniel Lurie. Density, which had disappeared, is returning thanks to start-ups looking for cheap real estate. There are still far too many stores open and too few police officers – hence Marc Benioff’s capricious remarks about the need for National Guard troops. There are fewer restaurants due to numerous closures. The night is still a little calm. But I felt safe. The menacing tent cities and excessive drug use on city streets have disappeared. It’s nascent, but it’s real. (See here for a complete list of Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust stocks.) As a subscriber to CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after a trade alert is sent before buying or selling a stock in his charity’s portfolio. If Jim talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after the trade alert is issued before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTMENT CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY, AS WELL AS OUR DISCLAIMER. NO OBLIGATION OR FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTMENT CLUB. NO SPECIFIC RESULTS OR PROFITS ARE GUARANTEED.