Salesforce CEO Mulls Changing Name to AI-Flavored ‘Agentforce’

Put "AI" in your name and watch the stock price climb.



The infamous ShinyHunters hackers have targeted customer-managed Gainsight-published applications to steal data from Salesforce instances.
The post Salesforce Instances Hacked via Gainsight Integrations appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Salesforce today unveiled new Agentforce 360 observability tools to give teams visibility into why AI agents behave the way they do, and which reasoning paths they follow to reach decisions.
Salesforce is providing the new tools as its agentic AI customers increasingly shift focus from building agents to maintaining them in production.
“We’ve had thousands of customers use the platform,” says Madhav Thattai, SVP and COO of Agentforce at Salesforce. “In the first 12 months, the focus has been, ‘How do we build good agents? How do we connect the right data? How do we control the agent behavior?’ It’s really been about build and design of the agents.”
But Thattai adds that an internal Salesforce survey now shows a three-fold increase in implementations that customers are now moving to production.
“Thousands of customers are now live with agents in production,” he says. “As customers move up the maturity curve, the problems shift from how to build a good agent to how to manage an agent at scale. That’s really what the observability tool stack is about.”
The new tools, he says, help customers understand whether agents deliver value, how they perform in interactions, and how to improve their performance.
The tools span three areas: Agent Analytics, Agent Optimization, and Agent Health Monitoring.
Agent Analytics is intended to help organizations continuously refine their AI agents by providing visibility into agent performance. Teams can use Agent Analytics to track agent usage and effectiveness metrics to understand how agents perform in real customer interactions. The tool surfaces KPI trends over time and highlights ineffective topics, actions, or flows.
Agent Optimization traces session flows to reveal how agents make decisions and help teams diagnose issues that arise. Teams can use the tool to see how agents respond, step-by-step, across complex reasoning chains. The tool groups similar requests into clusters to uncover patterns, friction points and quality trends. It scores agent responses using intent, topic, and quality metrics, and teams can also use the tool to identify configuration issues that affect performance and pinpoint the need for tuning, retraining, or guardrails.
Finally, Agent Health Monitoring focuses on uptime, reliability, and responsiveness, and tracks key health metrics in near real-time. It also provides alerts on critical errors, latency spikes, and escalations so teams can detect, investigate, and resolve problems while minimizing downtime.
1-800Accountant, a virtual accounting firm for small businesses, has been a beta customer of the new observability tools. Because of the nature of its business, the small firm is busiest February through April. Ryan Teeples, the company’s chief strategy officer, explains that automation and agentic AI have been essential to help it service customers in that period. It already has more than 20 agents in production. These agents work together to address some of 1-800Accountant’s biggest pain points.
For instance, when one of the company’s salespeople meets with a new lead for the first time, they take the lead through an assessment to understand specific needs. That process is supported by a slate of agents that records and transcribes the conversation, analyzes it, summarizes it, and then dynamically generates an agenda, based on data from the conversation, for a potential follow-up onboarding appointment if the lead opts to become a client.
“Observability allows us to have much faster throughput,” Teeples says, adding that the tools allow his team to iterate and improve agents at a much faster pace. “Now you have tools that allow you to monitor the interactions, get feedback, and get better prompting and better data to the agent. It accelerates the process of the agent and gives us more time on the development side to focus on better client experience, rather than on monitoring and ensuring the AI agents aren’t going off the rails.”
Agent Analytics and Agent Optimization are both part of Agentforce Studio and are available today; regional rollout for APAC customers will happen on Friday. Agent Health Monitoring will be generally available in spring 2026.

Salesforce launches a three-pillar water plan for data centers, power, and watersheds — backing restoration in Brazil and Mexico ahead of COP30.
The post Salesforce Unveils Three-Pillar Water Plan, Linking Data Center Efficiency to Global Watershed Health appeared first on TechRepublic.
Salesforce launches a three-pillar water plan for data centers, power, and watersheds — backing restoration in Brazil and Mexico ahead of COP30.
The post Salesforce Unveils Three-Pillar Water Plan, Linking Data Center Efficiency to Global Watershed Health appeared first on TechRepublic.

Seattle is looking to celebrate and accelerate its leadership in artificial intelligence at the very moment the first wave of the AI economy is crashing down on the region’s tech workforce.
That contrast was hard to miss Monday evening at the opening reception for Seattle AI Week 2025 at Pier 70. On stage, panels offered a healthy dose of optimism about building the AI future. In the crowd, buzz about Amazon’s impending layoffs brought the reality of the moment back to earth.
A region that rose with Microsoft and then Amazon is now dealing with the consequences of Big Tech’s AI-era restructuring. Companies that hired by the thousands are now thinning their ranks in the name of efficiency and focus — a dose of corporate realism for the local tech economy.
The double-edged nature of this shift is not lost on Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson.
“AI, and the future of AI, and what that means for our state and the world — each day I do this job, the more that moves up in my mind in terms of the challenges and the opportunities we have,” Ferguson told the AI Week crowd. He touted Washington’s concentration of AI jobs, saying his goal is to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its downsides.

Seattle AI Week, led by the Washington Technology Industry Association, was started last year after a Forbes list of the nation’s top 50 AI startups included none from Seattle, said the WTIA’s Nick Ellingson, opening this year’s event. That didn’t seem right. Was it a messaging problem?
“A bunch of us got together and said, let’s talk about all the cool things happening around AI in Seattle, and let’s expand the tent beyond just tech things that are happening,” Ellingson explained.
So maybe that’s the best measuring stick: how many startups will this latest shakeout spark, and how can the Seattle region’s startup and tech leaders make it happen? Can the region become less dependent on the whims of the Microsoft and Amazon C-suites in the process?
“Washington has so much opportunity. It’s one of the few capitals of AI in the world,” said WTIA’s Arry Yu in her opening remarks. “People talk about China, people talk about Silicon Valley — there are a few contenders, but really, it’s here in Seattle. … The future is built on data, on powerful technology, but also on community. That’s what makes this place different.”
And yet, “AI is a sleepy scene in Seattle, where people work at their companies, but there’s very little activity and cross-pollinating outside of this,” said Nathan Lambert, senior research scientist with the Allen Institute for AI, during the opening panel discussion.
No, we don’t want to become San Francisco or Silicon Valley, Lambert added. But that doesn’t mean the region can’t cherry-pick some of the ingredients that put Bay Area tech on top.
Whether laid-off tech workers will start their own companies is a common question after layoffs like this. In the Seattle region at least, that outcome has been more fantasy than reality.
This is where AI could change things, if not with the fabled one-person unicorn then with a bigger wave of new companies born of this employment downturn. Who knows, maybe one will even land on that elusive Forbes AI 50 list. (Hey, a region can dream!)
But as the new AI reality unfolds in the regional workforce, maybe the best question to ask is whether Seattle’s next big thing can come from its own backyard again.
Related: Ferguson’s AI balancing act: Washington governor wants to harness innovation while minimizing harms