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

Even though 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 frightened that individuals 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 complete identify to Agentforce to evoke the AI brokers that he’d like the corporate to be recognized for.

Whereas the suggestion of fixing the corporate’s identify was apparently raised in jest, Benioff took it severely and advised the publication {that a} new company identify could be within the works. “That might not shock me,” he reportedly mentioned, with an obvious desire 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. Alternatively, it’s laborious to not get a whiff of the cryptocurrency goldrush period, the place firms simply began throwing the phrase “blockchain” into every thing. 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 scenario 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, not less than two of these are adjustments most individuals merely don’t acknowledge.

However maybe probably 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 could 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 essentially lifeless now, with Meta reportedly that it’ll doubtless 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 could be a destiny Benioff ought to think about: in the event you go to date all-in on a single wager that you simply give up your identify to it, you would possibly simply be caught with a reminder of that call even when it fails.