Marc Benioff has never been one to be shy when speaking his mind, but the chairman of Salesforce couldn’t have made so bold a statement as he did recently if he didn’t believe it to be true — or at least a sign of what’s coming for the software industry. In a statement that was part humbleness and part cheekiness, the Salesforce chief executive said he’s giving serious thought to changing the company name to “Agentforce.” At first it was so absurd that I thought he must be joking but as soon as he started talking it became obvious to me that he wasn’t joking at all. He was describing the company’s next act.
Salesforce spent years building its empire on cloud software. The CRM ruled, the platform stood steady — and the business model became a template for all of SaaS. But these days cloud software is hardly what has executives buzzing — it’s AI assistants. Not your typical chatbots, not your standard predictive analytics — but truly autonomous systems that can do work on their own inside a company. Benioff sees this as the next epoch, and is betting so hard on it that he’s even willing to consider a new name for the company he created.
That mindset flows from something he’s said in one form or another for about the past year now: AI is not a feature, but a business transformation. He believes AI agents will be a kind of “central employee” throughout every company, tasked with the routine— scheduling appointments, doing data entry and customer interactions — but ultimately analyzing everything and then just running entire workflows. In his opinion, these digitally intelligent agents will become so crucial that identity of Salesforce will change from being cloud-first to agent-first. And if that’s the future, suddenly “Agentforce” doesn’t seem like a punchline. It’s almost like Rebrand Awaiting Fresh Name.
What’s intriguing is how this rebrand concept underscores the pressure Salesforce is facing. The AI boom has changed the way investors think about tech start-ups. Every major platform, from Microsoft and Google to Amazon and Meta, has pursued a brand of AI marketing as insistent as its products, product launches, and moonshot projects. Salesforce doesn’t want to be thought of as the legacy cloud player left behind. Benioff would now like to plant the flag and declare that his company is just as relevant in this new era of A.I. as it was in the early days of cloud software.
Within the company, AI agents have emerged as the rallying cry. Already in Salesforce, are tools that automate customer support and streamline sales operations while plugging directly into enterprise data so agents can start acting instead of guessing. To Benioff, it is the logical extension of the CRM — a system that not merely houses customer information but uses that data to do work independently. And if this is where product development is headed, a name that suggests autonomy and intelligence starts making a weird kind of sense.
But branding strategy is at work here, too. Benioff has long recognized the strength of a story. ‘Agentforce’ is more than just a name — it’s a narrative, and one that suggests a company with the wind at its back — exactly where Salesforce wants to be as it tries to rewrite its story for a new era of buyers. Young founders and fast-moving companies aren’t looking up to the old guard in SaaS. They want AI-native tools. And Salesforce wants to prove it can be precisely that.
And yet renaming a company the size of Salesforce isn’t something to be done lightly. There is risk in walking from a brand that has been known around the world. Then there’s the practical question of whether AI agents will generate enough real value to justify such a drastic course-correct. Some technology executives fear that companies are rushing headlong into branding exercises before AI agents are sufficiently mature to meet enterprise expectations. But Benioff has no interest in waiting on everyone else to figure it out. He’s trying to articulate a vision before the market does it for him.
And perhaps that’s why the notion hit with such force. It wasn’t just about a name. It was a CEO saying: We’re not here to surf the wave — we’re here to make the next one. Whether the company actually becomes “Agentforce” or the idea just becomes a cornerstone of its product strategy, they put it out there. Benioff regards AI agents as the core of Salesforce’s future, and he wants customers —and competitors— to know it.
Whereas the cloud era shaped Salesforce’s past, you could say the agent era is what Benioff intends to shape its future. And rebranding the company is his signal to the world that he’s ready to reinvent everything — beginning with the logo on the door.
