Salesforce reinvents itself

Salesforce’s $1.9 billion acquisition of Own.co, a specialist maker of tools for backing up data in the cloud and preventing risk, is the most important since it bought Slack in December 2020, another stage in the company’s ongoing reinvention to meet the challenges of the AI and machine learning age.

Protecting the security and integrity of data in the cloud from data center issues or ransomware attacks is critical, and the company, which has long specialized in backup and disaster recovery procedures, has been diversifing to expand its market and provide solutions to other corporate cloud environments such as AWS and Microsoft’s.

But beyond standard protection against those types of threats, Salesforce wants to create constellations of autonomous AI agents within the corporate cloud environment with a pay-per-use model and a plethora of applications ranging from visual recognition to automated sales team management.

Salesforce had already hinted at using advanced automation models with bots based on the popular Einstein platform, adding the predictive capabilities characteristic of new AI models.

Agentforce is a new AI platform that will be presented at the company’s annual event, Dreamforce, which allows users to quickly develop and deploy AI-powered autonomous agents (pieces of software with the ability to make…