Salesforce, Walmart Get Analyst Upgrades as Wall Street Turns on Tech Hardware

What happened

Wall Street's analyst corps shuffled the deck last week, and the pattern is worth paying attention to. Bank of America upgraded Salesforce (CRM) to Buy from Underperform, slashing its skepticism and nearly doubling its price target to $285 from $160. Walmart and Lockheed Martin also picked up fresh analyst support, while Adobe and a cluster of tech hardware names — Dell, HPE, and NetApp — got hit with downgrades from Barclays.

Why Salesforce flipped the script

Bank of America's reasoning is the interesting part. The firm argued that big enterprises aren't going to rip out the software platforms that house their core business logic, compliance frameworks, and workflows just because AI is reshaping everything else. If anything, AI adoption could make companies *more* dependent on these systems, not less. That's a meaningful reversal — Salesforce has spent the last couple years fielding worries that AI agents and copilots would make traditional SaaS platforms obsolete middlemen. BofA's new $285 target values the stock at 16 times expected 2027 free cash flow, up from 9 times, and now above the peer average of 15 times. Translation: the analyst went from betting against Salesforce to betting it's actually positioned to benefit from the AI build-out, not get steamrolled by it.

The flip side: hardware makers lose favor

While software names caught a break, hardware got squeezed. Barclays downgraded Dell, HPE, and NetApp from Overweight to Equal Weight, trimming price targets on Dell (to $574 from $603) and HPE (to $77 from $83). The concern: these companies' recent growth has leaned heavily on elevated memory prices and enterprise IT spending that may not hold up, especially with valuations already stretched. It's a sign some analysts think the AI infrastructure trade has run ahead of fundamentals for certain hardware players, even as the software side of the AI story gets a fresh look.

What it means for the bigger picture

Put together, these calls tell a story about where Wall Street thinks AI value actually accrues. For a while, the dominant narrative was that AI would disrupt everything — software included. Now some analysts are betting the opposite: that entrenched enterprise software with deep data and compliance ties will be AI's beneficiary, while hardware makers riding a memory-price and spending wave face more downside risk if that spending cools. Walmart and Lockheed Martin's upgrades add to a broader theme of analysts rotating toward resilient, less AI-hype-dependent names — retail defensiveness and defense spending stability — as tech valuations get re-examined.

The bottom line

This isn't a single stock story — it's a sentiment shift. When a major brokerage does a full 180 on a stock it was bearish on for this long, and simultaneously turns cautious on names it previously loved, that's a signal the AI trade is entering a more selective phase. Investors watching the AI theme should take note: the market is starting to differentiate between companies that benefit from AI adoption and those merely riding its infrastructure wave.