Sailors name their boats, musicians their instruments, plenty of people their cars. Naming an object is an ancient, universal and perfectly harmless gesture. So why worry that a piece of software is called Casey? Because one thing separates all those examples from the case at hand, and it is decisive.
This morning we reported on seven enterprise agents bearing first names. Let us take the time to examine the question.
What naming usually does
Giving an object a name produces three effects, and all of them are benign.
It creates attachment. We take care of what we have named. A christened boat is better maintained than a registered one.
It makes talking easier. A name is simpler to say than a description.
It marks a singularity. It is no longer an interchangeable object, it is that one.
None of these effects is a problem, because at no point does the sailor believe his boat answers him. The name expresses a one-way relationship, and everyone knows it.
What changes when the object speaks
Here is the difference, and it is one of kind rather than degree.
A first name on a system that produces language does not describe a relationship: it proposes one. It suggests an interlocutor, that is, someone whose reliability, intention and good faith can be assessed.
Yet we developed in our article on good faith that this assessment is exactly what does not work. A system's tone contains no information about its reliability. We bring an extraordinarily fine social skill to bear on an object for which it returns nothing.
The first name does not create this reflex — it exists anyway, as we wrote about anthropomorphism. But it deliberately activates it, and makes it harder to correct.
Not everything is equivalent, and the useful criterion is that of the stakes of the error. A named voice assistant setting a timer: no risk, because a mistake is immediately visible. A named agent preparing a client file or committing an amount: the first name relaxes exactly the vigilance the stakes would demand. It is not naming that is the problem, it is naming applied to a context where the error is costly and invisible.
The problem specific to work
There is an additional dimension in the enterprise, and it is the one that seems to us the most serious.
A human colleague is someone who can be held to account. If they get something wrong, they own it, they explain it, they learn from it. It is this possibility that justifies the trust placed in them, far more than their competence.
A named agent borrows the form of that relationship without being able to meet its condition. It occupies a place in the mental org chart without occupying any place in the chain of responsibility.
This produces a sentence we have already encountered in other forms: "Casey signed off on it." It is the mechanism we described in our article on the recommendation to dismiss an employee — the risk is not that the machine decides, it is that it serves to no longer know who decided.
What would make naming acceptable
The answer is not to ban it, which would be ridiculous and counterproductive. It comes down to one simple rule: an agent's first name should never appear without a human's name beside it.
Not in a legal notice at the bottom of the page, but in the same place, with the same visibility. The person who configured the agent, defined its scope, and who answers for what it produces.
This preserves all the benefits in use — simplicity, memorability, adoption — and removes the only genuinely problematic effect, which is the dilution of responsibility.
What to take away
The answer to the question in the title is yes, on one condition.
Naming is useful, human, and we have always done it. What is new is not the gesture, it is that the named object now produces language — and that language is what we spontaneously grant an interiority to.
A name on a thing that speaks is no longer a vocabulary convenience: it is a proposal of a relationship. We can accept it, provided we know that we cannot expect from it what we expect from a relationship. No one has ever held anything against a boat.