Leading cybersecurity stalwart CrowdStrike (CRWD -1.82%) held its Fal.Con conference in mid-September and generated a lot of buzz for its stock.
During the company's keynote speech, management announced that revenue growth is expected to accelerate in the upcoming year, which prompted a slew of analyst upgrades.
However, while this rosy outlook helped shares pop 10% in one day, a separate announcement and its details suggest CrowdStrike stock could potentially soar over the next five years.
CrowdStrike: Cybersecurity for AI
On Tuesday, Sept. 16, CrowdStrike announced a partnership with customer relationship management juggernaut Salesforce to "enhance the security of artificial intelligence (AI) agents and applications" on the latter's platforms.
This deal acts as a launching point for CrowdStrike's foray into securing the rapidly growing world of AI -- and particularly AI agents. With these agents set to transform the world's workforce over the coming years, they will be a prime target for hackers and adversaries to exploit.
Through its Falcon Shield, CrowdStrike will help customers make sure their AI agents and related infrastructure don't become compromised. The company will monitor for misconfigurations or over-privileged agents, create a visible chain of accountability between an AI agent and its human creator, and disable agents that have been hacked, among other things.
Image source: CrowdStrike.
Protecting agentic AI could be a massive opportunity for CrowdStrike -- one that founder and CEO George Kurtz considers a "100x" opportunity.
Kurtz believes there could be over 150 billion AI agents deployed over the long haul. Compared to the 5 billion global addressable assets (cloud workloads, identities, and endpoints) available for CrowdStrike today, the opportunity is clear to see.
CrowdStrike also believes the target addressable market for securing AI will reach $90 billion by 2030. And with numerous research firms predicting the broader AI industry to be worth trillions by that time, I don't think that forecast is unreasonable.
This new market combines with the company's current TAM of $140 billion, giving CrowdStrike and its stock plenty of opportunity to soar over the next five years.
