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 may be in the works. “It wouldn’t shock me,” he reportedly said, with a clear preference for the AgentForce name – the name is currently used by several of the company’s AI-related services, including AgentForce Sales, AgentForce Service, and the AgentForce 365 platform.
On the one hand, Salesforce AgentForce Sales is fairly redundant, so there is 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 started throwing the word “blockchain” into everything. Remember when Long Island Iced Tea Corporation changed its name to Long Blockchain Corporation, a name that makes no sense, and its stock immediately soared more than 400%? It feels like we’re not too far from a situation like that.
Of course, Salesforce wouldn’t be the first tech company to undergo a rebrand. Google famously became Alphabet, Jack Dorsey’s Square changed to Block, Elon Musk changed Twitter’s name to X, and Michael Saylor changed MicroStrategy’s nickname to Strategy as it became a Bitcoin holding company. Notably, at least two of them are changes that most people do not accept.
But perhaps the most fitting parallel to this particular transformation is Facebook’s rebranding to Meta amid an effort to lead the company into a new era, where it will become the platform of the Metaverse, an immersive virtual reality world where anything you can imagine is possible, including feet. That special reality dream is now largely dead, with Meta reportedly saying there will likely be layoffs within its Reality Labs division and a move away from virtual worlds to building more AI products. And yet, the name persists.
This might be a fate Benioff should consider: If you go so far as to make the same move that you leave your name in front of him, you might be reminded of that decision, even if it fails.
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