Salesforce CEO Mulls Altering Identify to AI-Flavored ‘Agentforce’

Even supposing Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff talks about AI nonstop, regularly chimes in on the AI news of the day, and endlessly pushes his firm’s AI platform, he appears anxious that individuals simply aren’t associating Salesforce with AI. Fortunately, he has an answer in thoughts, based on a report from Business Insider: altering the corporate’s total identify to Agentforce to evoke the AI brokers that he’d like the corporate to be identified for.

Whereas the suggestion of fixing the corporate’s identify was apparently raised in jest, Benioff took it critically and instructed the publication {that a} new company identify may be within the works. “That will not shock me,” he reportedly stated, with an obvious choice for the identify Agentforce—presently the identify utilized by a lot of the corporate’s AI-related providers, together with Agentforce Gross sales, Agentforce Service, and Agentforce 365 Platform.

On one hand, Salesforce Agentforce Gross sales is fairly redundant, so there’s some logic in simplifying the naming conference. However, it’s arduous to not get a whiff of the cryptocurrency goldrush period, the place corporations simply began throwing the phrase “blockchain” into every part. Bear in mind when Lengthy Island Iced Tea Company modified its identify to Lengthy Blockchain Company, a reputation that doesn’t even make sense, and saw its stock immediately skyrocket by over 400%? It appears like we’re not that far off from a state of affairs just like that.

Salesforce, after all, wouldn’t be the primary tech firm to undergo a rebrand. Google famously turned Alphabet, Jack Dorsey’s Sq. modified to Block, Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, and Michael Saylor changed Microstrategy’s moniker to Strategy because it turned a bitcoin holding firm. Notably, at the very least two of these are adjustments most individuals merely don’t acknowledge.

However maybe essentially the most acceptable parallel for this explicit change is Fb rebranding to Meta within the midst of an effort to pivot the corporate into a brand new period the place it might turn out to be the platform of the metaverse, an immersive digital actuality world the place absolutely anything you can think about is feasible, together with having legs. The dream of that individual actuality is basically useless now, with Meta reportedly that it’ll probably have layoffs inside its Actuality Labs division and can shift away from the digital world to construct extra AI merchandise. And but, the identify sticks.

That may be a destiny Benioff ought to contemplate: for those who go up to now all-in on a single wager that you simply give up your identify to it, you may simply be caught with a reminder of that call even when it fails.