Despite the fact that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff talks about AI nonstop, regularly chimes in on the AI news of the day, and endlessly pushes his company’s AI platform, he seems worried that people just aren’t associating Salesforce with AI. Luckily, he has a solution in mind, according to a report from Business Insider: changing the company’s entire name to Agentforce to evoke the AI agents that he’d like the company to be known for.
While the suggestion of changing the company’s name was apparently raised in jest, Benioff took it seriously and told the publication that a new corporate name might be in the works. “That would not shock me,” he reportedly said, with an apparent preference for the name Agentforce—currently the name used by a number of the company’s AI-related services, including Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service, and Agentforce 365 Platform.
On one hand, Salesforce Agentforce Sales is pretty redundant, so there’s some logic in simplifying the naming convention. On the other hand, it’s hard not to get a whiff of the cryptocurrency goldrush era, where companies just started throwing the word “blockchain” into everything. Remember when Long Island Iced Tea Corporation changed its name to Long Blockchain Corporation, a name that doesn’t even make sense, and saw its stock immediately skyrocket by over 400%? It feels like we’re not that far off from a situation similar to that.
Salesforce, of course, would not be the first tech company to go through a rebrand. Google famously became Alphabet, Jack Dorsey’s Square changed to Block, Elon Musk renamed Twitter to X, and Michael Saylor changed Microstrategy’s moniker to Strategy as it became a bitcoin holding company. Notably, at least two of those are changes most people simply don’t acknowledge.
But perhaps the most appropriate parallel for this particular change is Facebook rebranding to Meta in the midst of an effort to pivot the company into a new era where it would become the platform of the metaverse, an immersive virtual reality world where just about anything you could imagine is possible, including having legs. The dream of that particular reality is largely dead now, with Meta reportedly that it’ll likely have layoffs within its Reality Labs division and will shift away from the virtual world to build more AI products. And yet, the name sticks.
That might be a fate Benioff should consider: if you go so far all-in on a single bet that you surrender your name to it, you might just be stuck with a reminder of that decision even if it fails.
