Jim Cramer believes the swift selloff in shares of Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) on Thursday can be linked back to NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) and the advancement of AI.

What To Know: Salesforce stock is down more than 20% at the time of writing following the company’s first revenue miss in more than a decade. The enterprise cloud company reported first-quarter revenue of $9.13 billion, missing estimates of $9.147 billion, according to Benzinga Pro.

Salesforce also issued weak guidance for the second quarter, forecasting revenue in the range of $9.2 billion to $9.25 billion versus estimates of $9.34 billion, and adjusted EPS of $2.34 to $2.36 versus estimates of $2.40.

Salesforce’s surprise miss is dragging down several software stocks on Thursday, and rightly so, according to Cramer. He believes the rapid advancement of AI is sparking an operational rethink across multiple industries.

Why It Matters: Thursday on CNBC’s “Squawk On The Street,” Cramer suggested Salesforce faced a demand pullback due to AI.

“All of a sudden there is this realization that companies may not need as many people moving forward if they can deploy AI effectively,” he said, adding that such may be causing companies to reassess spending.

“Let’s not buy a really big software package because we may not have as many people next year … that’s what I’m saying,” Cramer said.

Some believe the slowdown at Salesforce is cyclical, but Cramer believed it may be structural. Although CEO Mark Benioff noted that the company has been seeing signs of a slowdown for a couple of years, Cramer said “this was not the same.”

“I’m waiting for an executive who comes on and says ‘Look, we budgeted for X demand. We don’t have that much demand and the reason we don’t have that much demand is because people are reconsidering whether they need our product,'” Cramer said.

“I think that there’s simply not as many people needed to do the same tasks … the fact is that every major company is trying to reassess things because of Nvidia. So you may think it’s next year or the year after, it’s this quarter.”

CRM Price Action: Salesforce shares were down 21.53% at $213.10 at the time of publication Thursday, according to Benzinga Pro.

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Photo: Owen Byrne from Flickr.