Biel: Salesforce’s transaction data gives it real competitive protection

Not all enterprise software moats are created equal. That’s the framework analyst Biel laid out recently when assessing which software companies can actually survive the AI wave, and which ones just look protected until they aren’t.

The core thesis: “I think that Salesforce, the place where Salesforce has a lot of embedded workflow, is really in the fact that a lot of the transaction is captured in Salesforce. And I think that that gives them some level of protection.”

That’s a meaningful distinction. Lots of software is embedded in how people work. But being embedded in where the transaction lives is a different animal entirely. Think of it like the difference between being the road someone drives on versus being the toll booth they have to pass through. Adobe is the road. Salesforce is closer to the toll booth.

Salesforce: Transaction Data as the Real Moat

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) sits at the center of enterprise revenue operations. Every deal, every customer interaction, every pipeline stage runs through it. That’s not just workflow familiarity, it’s transactional dependency. Replacing Salesforce doesn’t just mean retraining your team, it means migrating years of institutional transaction history.

The numbers back up the stickiness. Agentforce ARR reached $800 million, up 169% year-over-year, with 29,000 deals closed since launch, up 50% quarter-over-quarter. More telling: more than 60% of Q4 Agentforce and Data Cloud bookings came from existing customers. Expansion within the installed base is the clearest signal of embedded dependency.

Biel also flagged Salesforce’s pivot away from an OpenAI-exclusive partnership toward Anthropic as a smart move. The reasoning: Anthropic has a better motion in the enterprise market, better safeguards, and is a better partner for the workflows Salesforce is going after. Marc Benioff framed the platform vision plainly on the Q4 call: “We’ve rebuilt Salesforce to become the operating system for the Agentic Enterprise, bringing humans and agents together on one trusted platform. And the more intelligence moves to where work happens, the more valuable Salesforce becomes.”

Adobe: Embedded But Exposed

Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) is deeply embedded in creative workflows, but Biel draws a hard line here. AI tools from companies like Anthropic are actively attacking Adobe’s core markets. The workflow familiarity is real, but the transaction data dependency isn’t. A designer can switch to an AI-native tool without orphaning years of irreplaceable records. That’s the vulnerability.

Adobe’s stock tells part of the story: shares are down nearly 39% over the past year. Meanwhile, AI-first ARR more than tripled year-over-year in Q1 FY2026, which shows Adobe isn’t standing still. But Biel’s point isn’t that Adobe fails immediately. It’s that the protection is thinner than it looks.

The AI era is forcing a reckoning across enterprise software. Biel’s framework gives you a clean lens: follow the transaction data, not just the workflow. Salesforce owns where the deal closes. That’s harder to displace than any interface, no matter how familiar.