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

Even if 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 nervous that folks simply aren’t associating Salesforce with AI. Fortunately, he has an answer in thoughts, in accordance with a report from Business Insider: altering the corporate’s whole identify to Agentforce to evoke the AI brokers that he’d like the corporate to be recognized for.

Whereas the suggestion of adjusting the corporate’s identify was apparently raised in jest, Benioff took it significantly and instructed the publication {that a} new company identify is perhaps within the works. “That will not shock me,” he reportedly stated, with an obvious desire for the identify Agentforce—at the moment the identify utilized by various 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 onerous to not get a whiff of the cryptocurrency goldrush period, the place corporations simply began throwing the phrase “blockchain” into the whole lot. Keep 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 looks like we’re not that far off from a scenario much like that.

Salesforce, in fact, 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 modifications most individuals merely don’t acknowledge.

However maybe essentially 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 will turn out to be the platform of the metaverse, an immersive digital actuality world the place absolutely anything you would think about is feasible, together with having legs. The dream of that exact actuality is basically useless now, with Meta reportedly that it’ll seemingly 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 is perhaps a destiny Benioff ought to contemplate: in case you go to this point 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.