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SAN FRANCISCO — After riding the artificial intelligence craze to new heights, business software maker Salesforce has been pummeled by a wave of investor skepticism that’s intensified the pressure on its persuasive CEO Marc Benioff to reverse the tide.

Benioff, who helped spearhead the transition to cloud computing after founding Salesforce in 1999, got a chance to try to change the AI narrative late Wednesday with the release of his company’s latest quarterly results.

The key numbers covering the August-October eclipsed the analyst projections that help steer the stock market, providing Benioff with some material to support his contention that Salesforce’s big bets on AI will yield a jackpot. The San Francisco-based company earned $2.1 billion, or $2.19 per share, a 37% increase from the same time last year while revenue rose 9% to nearly $10.9 billion. Salesforce also provided an outlook for the current quarter ending in January that exceeded analysts’ predictions.

“We’re uniquely positioned for this new era,” Benioff boasted during a 25-minute address on an analyst conference call that sometimes sounded like an AI sermon that also featured comments about “wow” moments that customers experience when seeing the company’s technology.

Salesforce’s shares initially surged by more than 5% after the results came out, but backtracked to a gain of 2% following Benioff’s presentation.

It’s unclear if that modest momentum will be sustained in Thursday’s regular trading session because making more money than analysts anticipated isn’t necessarily enough to keep propelling a technology stock amid persisting doubts about whether the hundreds of billions of dollars being poured into the much-hyped technology will pay off.

Nvidia, the dominant maker of the chips needed to power AI, put a dent in the wall of worry a couple weeks ago with a quarterly earnings report that soared far beyond analyst estimates and initially eased fears about a Big Tech bubble bursting.

But the tranquility quickly evaporated, leaving Nvidia’s stock price slightly below where it was trading before the company’s stellar earnings report and 15% below its peak price reached in late October when the chipmaker became the first company to be valued at $5 trillion.

The AI jitters have punished Salesforce even more severely. Before the earnings report was released, Salesforce’s market value had plunged by 35%, wiping out about $125 billion in shareholder wealth, since Salesforce’s stock price peaked at $369 a year ago.

The downturn has happened even as Benioff has been doing his best to highlight AI’s potential benefits while calling upon the flair for salesmanship that he developed while become the become a chief evangelist behind the rise of software subscription services amid the ruins of the dot-com bust a quarter century ago.

Benioff, who owns Time magazine in addition to his Salesforce job, also is among the Big Tech leaders who have forged ties with President Donald Trump this year while trying to persuade the administration to adopt AI-friendly policies to protect U.S. interests as China also works feverishly on the technology.

Salesforce has been primarily focused on creating Ai agents that can automate more customer sales agents while spawning a digital labor force that will take over jobs that have traditionally been filled by people.

In a sign that Benioff intends to practice what he preaches, Salesforce laid off 4,000 of its own customer support workers as its “Agentforce” technology took over more of the responsibilities.

But the corporate customers that buy Salesforce’s services haven’t been embracing AI agents as quickly as investors initially thought, turning the company into a “poster child” for the doubts hanging over the technology, said Jay Woods, chief market strategist for investment banking firm Freedom Capital Markets.

The second-guessing hasn’t dimmed Benioff’s AI exuberance – a passion that recently displayed in a resounding endorsement of Google’s latest version of the Gemini technology powering its AI suite.

“We all know that the speed of innovation has exceeded the speed of customer adoption,” Benioff conceded while confidently predicting that dynamic is about to change dramatically as more companies and government agencies build AI services into their operations.

Salesforce is projecting $60 billion in revenue for its fiscal year ending in January 2030 – a target that would require average annual increases of 10% from its forecasted sales of $41.5 billion for its current fiscal year. The company also just completed an $8 billion acquisition of another software maker, Informatica, that is building AI tools to manage corporate data.

“We’re continuing to execute on the path to our $60 billion dream” Benioff said.

Can’t afford to rent an apartment in San Francisco? No problem. Now you can rent a bed.

Brownstone Shared Housing, a Bay-Area based “sleeping pod” startup, recently bought a six-level building in downtown San Francisco with the intention of housing up to 400 pods. The deal, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, represents a huge expansion for the company, which is currently operating about two dozen sleeping pods at a much smaller location in the city.

The company, which transforms commercial office space into residential space, charges $700 a month for the pods. Each pod contains a twin-size bed and can be stacked on top of one another, in a similar vein to Japan’s sleep capsule hotels. Tenants of Brownstone buildings also have access to a shared kitchen, bathroom and workspace. The pod’s price tag is in stark contrast to the $3,065 median rent for an apartment in San Francisco, and has become appealing to those seeking cheap accommodation.

Just a few months ago, Brownstone was facing an eviction lawsuit due to a failure to pay over $150,000 in rent it attributed to a “miscommunication” with a landlord whose mailed notices did not reach the company. The case was ultimately dismissed. The Brownstone Shared Housing chief executive, James Stallworth, said that he intended to continue operations at the original building at 12 Mint Plaza in addition to the new location at 1049 Market.

“We’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of applications” from prospective renters, he told the Chronicle. “We’ve seen it even on a small scale [at 12 Mint Plaza] … we’ll see our residents walking down the street downtown. It’s just dramatically different from when that building was empty.”

The demand for cheap, temporary housing from companies such as Brownstone suggests people are willing to give up the finer things in life (or even the not-so-fine things, like walls) in a city that has pushed out many of its workers. San Francisco’s median rent has increased 12.2% year on year, far outpacing the 1% increase in average rent in California and a national average that has decreased 1.1%, according to online marketplace Apartment List.

The AI-boom is the latest player in the city’s housing market, with an influx of demand for housing from wealthy founders. Patrick Carlisle, chief market analyst at Compass, explained to the San Francisco Standard that “if the worldwide AI economic tsunami continues, I would expect an accelerating explosion of wealth in San Francisco”.

With limited supply to meet the high demand, that leaves the rest of the city’s middle-class employees fighting for what’s left over – and heading to the sleep pods.