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.

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.