Optimus Prime—the software engine, not the Autobot overlord—was born in a basement under a West Elm furniture store on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Starting two years ago, a band of artificial-intelligence acolytes within Salesforce escaped the towering headquarters with the goal of crazily multiplying the impact of the machine learning models that increasingly shape our digital world—by automating the creation of those models. As shoppers checked out sofas above their heads, they built a system to do just that.

Scott Rosenberg is an editor at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter.

They named it after the Transformers leader because, as one participant recalls, “machine learning is all about transforming data.” Whether the marketing department thought better of it, or the rights weren’t available, the Transformers tie-in didn't make it far out of that basement. Instead, Salesforce licensed the name of a different world-transforming hero—and dubbed its AI program Einstein.

The pop culture myths the company has invoked for its AI effort—the robot leader; the iconic genius—represent the kind of protean powers the technology is predicted to attain by both its most ardent hypesters and its gloomiest critics. Salesforce stands firmly on the hype side of this divide—no one cheers louder, especially not in AI promotion. But the company’s actual AI program is more pragmatic than messianic or apocalyptic.

This past March, Salesforce flipped a switch and made a big chunk of Einstein available to all of its users. Of course it did. Salesforce has always specialized in putting advanced software into everyday businesses' hands by moving it from in-house servers to the cloud. The company’s original mantra was “no software.” Its customers wouldn’t have to purchase and install complex programs and then pay to maintain and upgrade them—Salesforce would take care of all that at its data centers in the cloud. That seems obvious now, but when Salesforce launched in 1999 it sounded as revolutionary as AI does to us today.

Talkin’ revolution has been good for Salesforce. The firm now has 26,000 employees worldwide, and it has pasted its name on the city’s new tallest skyscraper. Its founder, Marc Benioff, is a philanthropist who has put his own name on hospitals and foundations. Despite all this, in its own world of B2B (business-to-business) software, Salesforce still holds onto its scrappy upstart self-image.

So naturally, when the AI trend took off, the people inside the company and the experts they recruited coalesced around an idealistic mission. The team set out to create “AI for everyone”—to make machine learning affordable for companies who’ve been priced out of the market for experts. They promised to “democratize” AI.