Shares of Salesforce climbed Friday, rising 4.47%, or $6.72, to $156.91 in midday trading, offering a rare bright spot for a stock that has spent much of 2026 mired in one of the steepest declines of any major technology company this year.

Even with Friday’s gain, the cloud software giant remains deep in negative territory for the year, trading well below where it started 2026 and not far from its 52-week low.

A brutal year by any measure

The scale of Salesforce’s decline this year has been striking for a company long considered one of enterprise software’s bluest of blue chips. The stock has declined approximately 42% year-to-date, a drop that has prompted growing comparisons to peers like Palantir as investors reassess what a fair valuation looks like for the customer relationship management pioneer.

That slide has pushed shares down to levels not seen in years. As of this week, Salesforce was trading within a 52-week range spanning from $146.32 to $276.80 — meaning Friday’s bounce, however welcome for shareholders, still leaves the stock closer to its yearly low than its high.

Investor fears about AI disruption

Much of the pressure on Salesforce’s stock this year has stemmed from a broader anxiety gripping software investors: the worry that artificial intelligence tools could erode the value of traditional enterprise software platforms like Salesforce’s customer relationship management suite. That concern has weighed heavily on sentiment even as the company has continued posting solid financial results.

Salesforce’s most recent quarterly report illustrated that tension directly. The company posted $11.13 billion in revenue, a 13% year-over-year increase that beat Wall Street’s expectations, alongside adjusted earnings per share of $3.88 against a consensus estimate of $3.12. Despite that earnings beat, the company’s full-year guidance came in slightly below Wall Street expectations, with management citing continuing challenges in marketing and commerce, weaker performance in Tableau bookings, and higher license revenue volatility following its Informatica acquisition.

A wave of capital returned to shareholders

In an effort to support the stock amid the AI-related anxiety, Salesforce has leaned heavily on shareholder returns this year. The company returned $27.5 billion to shareholders, including $27.1 billion through share repurchases, and entered into a $25 billion accelerated share repurchase agreement — among the largest capital return programs of any major software company this year.

That aggressive buyback strategy has been paired with continued investment in the company’s own AI offerings. Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, which the company markets as enabling customers to build, deploy and manage autonomous AI agents at scale, has become the centerpiece of its pitch to investors that the company is positioned to benefit from AI adoption rather than be disrupted by it.

A security backdrop adding pressure

Beyond the AI competition narrative, Salesforce has also spent much of the past year contending with the fallout from a wave of data theft incidents tied to its platform and third-party integrations. Multiple lawsuits have been filed against the company in Northern California, where it is headquartered, alleging that personal information stolen in various breaches has exposed affected individuals to risks of identity theft. Salesforce has consistently maintained that its core platform itself was not compromised, attributing the incidents instead to credential theft and malicious third-party connected applications.

That security overhang has continued to surface in recent weeks alongside the company’s ongoing AI expansion efforts, including new Agentforce deployments with public-sector customers such as the U.S. Department of Labor — a juxtaposition that has kept questions about data governance in the conversation even as Salesforce pushes deeper into autonomous AI tools.

A notable acquisition to bolster AI capabilities

Salesforce has also been actively acquiring companies to strengthen its AI positioning. Earlier this month, the company agreed to acquire Fin, a developer of artificial-intelligence-powered customer service agents, in a deal valued at roughly $3.6 billion. Analysts have generally framed the acquisition as a move to accelerate AI adoption across Salesforce’s existing customer base, even as some have raised questions about the price paid relative to the target’s current revenue scale.

A wide gap between Wall Street and the market

Despite the stock’s punishing decline this year, Wall Street analysts have remained largely unmoved in their underlying optimism about Salesforce’s longer-term prospects — creating an unusually wide gap between where the stock trades and where analysts believe it should be. According to one tracking service, 49 analysts carry an average “Buy” rating on the stock, with a 12-month price target of $251.53 — implying upside of more than 60% from recent trading levels even before Friday’s gain. A separate analysis of 64 Wall Street analysts similarly found a bullish consensus, with a median price target of $255.00 implying nearly 37% upside, supported by 38 Buy ratings against just one Sell rating.

Not every analyst has stayed unconditionally bullish through the stock’s decline, however. Jefferies analyst Brent Thill recently cautioned that an earlier rebound attempt in Salesforce shares looked more like “a dead cat bounce, not the beginning of a trend,” reflecting skepticism among at least some on Wall Street about whether the stock’s troubles are truly behind it.

What investors are watching next

For now, Friday’s gain offers Salesforce shareholders a reprieve after a difficult stretch, even as the broader debate over the stock’s value continues. Whether the move represents the start of a more durable recovery or simply another temporary bounce within an extended downtrend will likely hinge on continued evidence that Agentforce and the company’s other AI investments are translating into accelerating subscription growth, rather than simply offsetting the pressures investors have spent much of 2026 worrying about.

The New York City Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) voted 7-1 on Thursday to freeze the rent for rent-stabilized apartments.

A summary of the rent-stabilized apartment guidelines adopted on Thursday indicates that “Together with such further adjustments as may be authorized by law, the annual adjustment for leases for apartments shall be” 0% for one-year and two-year leases starting “on or after October 1, 2026, and on or before September 30, 2027.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose prominent rent-freezing pledge marked a key plank of his Big Apple mayoral campaign last year, issued a statement hailing the board’s move.

“This is a historic victory for New York City tenants. After reviewing the data and hearing from New Yorkers across the city, the independent RGB has delivered a freeze on one-year leases, and the first-ever freeze on two-year leases in our city’s history. This is the relief that working people across our city deserve,” the mayor declared in the statement.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani delivers a speech during a reception hosted at Gracie Mansion to celebrate Juneteenth in New York on June 16, 2026. (Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images / Getty Images)

“I’m grateful for the board members’ thoughtful consideration of the data, including tenants’ ability to pay, cost of living and building operating costs. I’ll continue working to deliver a more affordable city by building and preserving affordable housing, lowering building operating costs like insurance, and ensuring tenants know their rights,” he added.

The board is stacked with six people appointed by Mamdani.

“Chantella Mitchell will serve as the Chair of the RGB; Sina Sinai, Lauren Melodia and Brandon Mancilla have been appointed as public representatives; Maksim Wynn will serve as an owner representative; and Adán Soltren has been reappointed as a tenant representative,” a February press release noted. “They join Arpit Gupta, Christina Smyth and Sagar Sharma on the nine-member board.”

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Chantella Mitchell, chair of the Rent Guidelines Board, speaks prior to a vote by the Rent Guidelines Board in New York on Thursday, June 25, 2026. (Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Smyth issued a statement announcing her immediate resignation on Thursday morning, prior to the board’s vote later that day.

“I am resigning because the process I was appointed to take part in is not administered the way the law requires. The Rent Guidelines Board has stopped being a fact-finding body. It has become a body that starts with an answer and vibe codes its way backward to justify it,” she asserted in a statement.

“This year’s RGB order was decided last year on the campaign trail. Then in February, the Mayor appointed six of the nine members of this board. This rebuilt board was required to deliver a rent freeze. Everything since has been theater. The hearings, the reports, the public comment, the data. None of it was ever going to change the result,” she declared.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a primary-night watch party for NYC Congressional candidate Claire Valdez at 99 Scott Studio on June 23, 2026, in the East Williamsburg neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York City. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images / Getty Images)

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The board “is mandated to establish rent adjustments for the approximately one million dwelling units subject to the Rent Stabilization Law in New York City,” according to the city.

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But more importantly, Micron’s shift to long-term agreements with customers gives the group a more stable earnings profile, and makes it less vulnerable to sharp swings in demand, the head of technology research said. “These long-term agreements effectively put a ceiling and a floor on pricing and commit customers to taking supply, which smoothes what has historically been a highly cyclical market.”

The next era of mobile technology will turn everyday Americans into “walking cameras” as AI-powered smart glasses monitor everything they see and hear, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.

During an appearance on “Mornings with Maria,” Amon described a future in which ultra-fast 6G networks will allow smart glasses to stream information to AI models in real time. He said the shift could reshape both the technology industry and everyday life. 

“6G is going to transform all of us into walking cameras because we have the ability to, everything that we see, send it to AI models that will interact with us and get intelligence right away,” Amon said Friday. “And that’s an exciting new device category.”

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Qualcomm President and CEO Cristiano Amon delivered the keynote address at Computex 2024 on June 3, 2024, in Taipei, Taiwan. (I-Hwa Cheng/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Qualcomm is known for creating technology inside devices such as smartphones, allowing them to connect to the internet. Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced its latest partnership with Meta to support the company’s rapidly growing computing needs.

Amon pointed to smart glasses as a key device for the future, saying they allow people to interact with technology close to their faces while AI processes what users see and hear.

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“There’s a very interesting thing about glasses, and Meta is correct, and there’s many other companies investing in this,” he said. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wore a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Display AI smart glasses during the Meta Connect event on Sept. 17, 2025, in Menlo Park, California. Meta introduced its first smart glasses featuring a built-in display as part of its expanding we (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

“As we humans start to interact with the computers the way we interact with ourselves, glasses is a very important real estate because it’s close to our eyes, our ears, our mouth. And AI is [going to] see what we see, hear what we hear, read what we read. And then you have this intelligence very quickly.”

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Meta, Google and Apple have all invested in developing their own smart glasses, with newer models incorporating artificial intelligence. On Tuesday, Meta announced a new line of lower-cost AI glasses powered by the company’s AI technology, Muse Spark. 

A man tried on AI smart glasses during the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai on June 24, 2026. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

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Qualcomm has also expanded its focus into data centers and AI software. It introduced a new “Dragonfly C1000” central processing unit that it says Meta is using. The company also plans to acquire AI startup Modular.

“I was reading a lot of the analyst reports from Investor Day, and there’s one headline that really, I really liked it and it caught my attention. There’s a headline that said, ’This is not your father’s Qualcomm anymore,’” Amon said of the changes. “And I think that’s kind of the story of the company.”