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 nervous that individuals simply aren’t associating Salesforce with AI. Fortunately, he has an answer in thoughts, in response to a report from Business Insider: altering the corporate’s whole title 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 title was apparently raised in jest, Benioff took it significantly and instructed the publication {that a} new company title is perhaps within the works. “That will not shock me,” he reportedly stated, with an obvious desire for the title Agentforce—at the moment the title utilized by plenty of the corporate’s AI-related companies, 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 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 state of affairs much 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 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 develop into 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 useless 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 title sticks.

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