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 anxious that folks simply aren’t associating Salesforce with AI. Fortunately, he has an answer in thoughts, in keeping with 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 recognized for.

Whereas the suggestion of adjusting the corporate’s identify was apparently raised in jest, Benioff took it severely and informed the publication {that a} new company identify is perhaps within the works. “That might not shock me,” he reportedly stated, with an obvious desire for the identify Agentforce—at the moment the identify 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. However, it’s onerous to not get a whiff of the cryptocurrency goldrush period, the place corporations simply began throwing the phrase “blockchain” into every part. 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 state of affairs much like that.

Salesforce, in fact, 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 least 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 into the platform of the metaverse, an immersive digital actuality world the place absolutely anything you may think about is feasible, together with having legs. The dream of that specific actuality is basically lifeless 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 is perhaps a destiny Benioff ought to contemplate: should you go up to now all-in on a single guess 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.