10 things I learned from CEOs on my trip to the West Coast 2025
My week in San Francisco, where I attended Salesforce’s annual AI conference and visited with CEOs of Starbucks, Broadcom, and many other companies, was filled with new information about AI, stocks, and the market in general. Below are my top 10: Consider these takeaways to inform your investment decisions in the days and months ahead. 1. Salesforce’s AI platform works; but not as some people think. Skepticism about Agentforce, Salesforce’s platform featuring agents and virtual bots to grow your business, is waning after CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote speech kicking off the company’s annual Dreamforce conference. There’s a two-way trend that’s causing Salesforce’s stock to be one of the worst performers in the market. One is that the brokerage initiative is so powerful that it is creating geniuses who can write the kind of code that Salesforce’s legacy software unit created; so you don’t need the old Salesforce anymore. Second, because your agency coders are so effective, you can fire people and therefore not have to pay as much for their help as you currently do to Salesforce. Note that businesses paid by “seat” or user for legacy Salesforce; So if you have fewer sales people, you don’t need as many Salesforce products. Every year, Benioff delivers a compelling 90-minute keynote about all of his new products aimed at increasing sales for his customers. While helping manage thestreet.com, I found their address very useful for gaining new subscriptions. I learned a lot about what to do from the conversations. This time Marc had a very different presentation. It brought together leaders from four companies—PepsiCo, Dell, FedEx, and Williams-Sonoma—and showed how they use intermediaries to streamline their business, save money, and increase their revenue. Real real use cases where no one is giving up on old Salesforce and is instead using it more efficiently. All customers had the option to reduce inheritance – this is now included as an option when you buy Agentforce – but most people don’t seem to get it. In fact, at an investor meeting during the conference, Salesforce said it put its organic revenue growth rate above 10% for fiscal years 2026-2030 — a rate that had fallen to 9% — and said it expects sales of more than $60 billion in 2030, well above analysts’ forecast of $58.37 billion. This forecast is important because Marc beats the company’s internal estimates but falls short of the Street’s estimates. It had become a consistently disappointing quarterly progression. Finished. Now it just goes to show you that Agentforce is worth billions of dollars over the next 18 months to make sense and the stock will start to climb upwards. I spoke with three of the four CEOs who were part of 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 backers worry… Suspicions about OpenAI’s spending are thickening as it moves from text commands to consumer products like Sora, which produces realistic and animated videos, and “erotica” for adults; Both of these signal that the company is not successful in the venture. Analysts hate consumer software because consumers are fickle and won’t pay for it. Businesses pay a lot of money and don’t change vendors. The fact that OpenAI is already delving deeper into the consumer makes many of its supporters extremely uneasy. The company needs massive revenue growth next year to justify all its spending, and the crowd I hang out with doesn’t think that’s going to be possible. 3. … but not Broadcom’s Hock Tang. This skepticism was countered by my conversation with the rather stern Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, who was completely convinced of what he planned to do with OpenAI and said they would be great partners. Hock is too rigid and stubborn to work with companies in the air. It was difficult for me to reconcile my skepticism about OpenAI with Hock’s strong belief in the company. Let’s just say this made me feel even more confident about the staying power of OpenAI. 4. AI architecture is not a zero-sum game. Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su was on everyone’s lips for her role as the dragon slayer or David versus Goliath in their battle with Jensen Huang and Nvidia. This is the wrong structure. These hyperscalers need everything they can get—I mean everything—and that includes Broadcom’s custom chips, AMD’s light-duty chips, and Nvidia’s heavy-duty software-filled stacks. It’s not zero-sum. But people seem to think it is. AMD’s chips won’t be ready until the middle of next year; by then there will be a brand new version of Jensen called Vera Rubin, which will have much more power than what AMD has to offer. If you sell Nvidia on OpenAI’s deals with Broadcom or AMD, you’re making a mistake. But you can buy AMD and Broadcom along with your Nvidia. 5. It’s time to sell your nuclear stocks… We keep hearing about data centers using so much power that they’re replacing the grid. I come back thinking that the grid is connected to it, but the energy it produces needs to be distributed better. Go back and listen to my interview with PG&E CEO Patti Poppe. He said there are no power outages, there is only so much energy that can be produced when no one is using it. He said if you could spread the power usage around and perhaps store it, that would be a better solution than what we’re doing now. After talking with him and Hamid Moghadam, CEO of Prologis, which owns several large data centers and runs on rooftop solar, I felt better about the power part of the equation. Many tech executives don’t know much about power and should spend some time with big utility CEOs to better address the issues on both sides of the equation. Moreover, executives I spoke to said you would be crazy not to sell all uranium and nuclear stocks. There is no real pressure to produce new nuclear bombs, even of small size, or GE Vernova, the most established manufacturer, would be taking orders. Sell each of these. Check out my new book, “How to Make Money in Any Market,” where I outline my system for building long-term wealth with your investments. 6. … your quantum stocks too. Quantum is so unready for prime time that I would sell all of these shares. No one is seriously talking about quantum as a way to get things done, and if they are it’s about seeing how IBM does it commercially. Quantum stocks, like nuclear stocks, are completely inflated, typically sustained by press releases from a cash-strapped government. Although the groundbreaking inventions of quantum computing may not be of much use, they will not be able to produce commercial computing for a very long time. All of these companies need to make major capital offerings. Insider selling will soon overwhelm them, and they have shareholders with really weak knees. 7. Don’t sleep with Meta’s smart glasses. Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of glasses and small handheld pocket computers as a way to bring artificial intelligence to humans may be taking shape faster than I think. Meta’s Elvis-Costello-like glasses send large amounts of information to the cloud. But they also have a lot of computing power in their facilities, so to speak, because they’re loaded with Arm chips. These glasses can make calls, take photos, and speak multiple languages, among many other uses. These seem to be a must for every traveler and businessman trying to handle business abroad. 8. You want to buy Dell shares if they fall. Dell is pulling out of all other coordinators of the Nvidia setup and shelves of which chips are part of. I thought Hewlett Packard Enterprise was catching up, but it had a terrible quarter. There are real dreams in Nebius and I would sell it tomorrow; Dell is this far ahead. I regret not pulling the trigger on purchasing Dell. If the stock price drops, it should be bought because it is doing so much better than everyone else. I’m not buying Bitcoin and data mining company IREN. Sell this and buy Coreweave. These sales may not be accurate immediately. But insider selling and corporate financing that must come will mark the end of the upward spiral. 9. Levi Strauss is back. Away from technology, I’ve been impressed by the growth of Levi’s women’s collection, and Levi Strauss is on a new path of growth that isn’t reflected in the stock. My entire team was blown away by CEO Michelle Gass’s offerings, and the stock is cheap compared to the innovations she brings to the party. 10. San Francisco is also returning. The city of San Francisco is becoming safer, thanks to the tireless work of Mayor Daniel Lurie. The density that disappeared due to start-ups looking for cheap real estate is coming back. There are still too many open storefronts and too few police; Hence Marc Benioff’s opinionated remarks about the need for National Guard troops. There are fewer restaurants due to so many closures. The night is still a little quiet. But I felt safe. The threatening tent cities and excessive drug use on city streets are over. It’s just emerging, but it’s true. (See here for a complete list of stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) When you subscribe to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trading alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable foundation’s portfolio. If Jim talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he would wait 72 hours after issuing the trading alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTMENT CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY, TOGETHER WITH THE DISCLAIMERS. 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