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 apprehensive 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 title to Agentforce to evoke the AI brokers that he’d like the corporate to be identified for.

Whereas the suggestion of adjusting the corporate’s title was apparently raised in jest, Benioff took it significantly and instructed the publication {that a} new company title may be within the works. “That may not shock me,” he reportedly mentioned, with an obvious choice for the title Agentforce—at the moment the title utilized by plenty 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. Alternatively, it’s exhausting to not get a whiff of the cryptocurrency goldrush period, the place firms simply began throwing the phrase “blockchain” into every little thing. Keep in mind when Lengthy Island Iced Tea Company modified its title to Lengthy Blockchain Company, a reputation that doesn’t even make sense, and saw its stock immediately skyrocket by over 400%? It looks like we’re not that far off from a scenario much like that.

Salesforce, after all, wouldn’t be the primary tech firm to undergo a rebrand. Google famously grew to become 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 grew to become a bitcoin holding firm. Notably, at the very least two of these are adjustments most individuals merely don’t acknowledge.

However maybe probably the most applicable 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 could grow 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 essentially lifeless now, with Meta reportedly that it’ll possible have layoffs inside its Actuality Labs division and can shift away from the digital world to construct extra AI merchandise. And but, the title sticks.

That may be a destiny Benioff ought to take into account: if you happen to go thus far all-in on a single wager that you simply give up your title to it, you may simply be caught with a reminder of that call even when it fails.