Investing.com — Here are the biggest analyst moves in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) for this week.
Truist raises Meta to Street-high $1,000 target on Muse AI agent traction
This week, Truist Securities has raised its price target on Meta Platforms to $1,000 from $763, joining Wells Fargo as the highest on Wall Street, citing early traction for its Muse AI agent.
Analyst Youssef Squali kept a Buy rating and added a Muse contribution to his outer-year estimates, with a base case of $28.5 billion in incremental revenue by 2030. Meta shares have risen 21% since Muse launched on September 8, against a 2% gain for the S&P 500.
“With AI infusing higher performance across ads, wearables and Muse (building non-ad revenues from powering personal superintelligence, Muse for Enterprise/SMBs), we see Meta as an AI winner long-term,” Squali wrote.
He expects third-quarter revenue of $63.9 billion, up 25% year-over-year and at the high end of management’s $61-64 billion guidance, with cost per thousand impressions rising by double digits again, helped by adoption of Meta’s Advantage+ automated advertising suite.
“Meta’s growth [is] increasingly driven by monetization and retention rather than net new users, in our view,” he said.
Truist forecasts 2027 capex of $190 billion, up 32% year-over-year, against a consensus of $193 billion.
BofA double-upgrades Salesforce to Buy, says AI should “deepen dependence” on enterprise platforms
In another bullish move, Bank of America has double-upgraded Salesforce to Buy from Underperform and raised its price target to $285 from $160, reversing its previous concern that AI would disintermediate the software company.
Analyst Tal Liani said conversations with CIOs and other market participants suggest large enterprises are unlikely to replace platforms that house their business logic, data, workflows and compliance frameworks. “If anything, AI should deepen dependence on these platforms,” he wrote, adding that “we believe Salesforce offers one of the most comprehensive approaches to enterprise AI adoption.”
Liani outlined a four-layer architecture underpinning the bull case: a data layer that establishes governed context; applications such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud providing business logic and workflows; the agentic layer led by Agentforce supplying reasoning and orchestration; and Slack and the Anthropic-powered Claudeforce enabling natural-language interaction.
