Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, has some harsh criticism of Microsoft Copilot. During an interview on the Rapid Response podcast (spotted by Windows Central), the decorated executive described Microsoft’s AI assistant as a “tremendous disservice” to the AI industry, and even compared it to Microsoft’s long-retired office assistant, Clippy.
The topic of discussion on the podcast, which you can find the full video of below, is Saleforce’s Agentforce AI. It’s a competitor to Copilot that offers an AI assistant targeted at increasing productivity in businesses. But Agentforce is customizable. Instead of one AI to rule them all, Salesforce offers agents targeted at different applications. There’s an agent built for customer service, another built for retail, and even another built to dig through analytics. Customers can build their own custom agents, too.
Benioff, unsurprisingly, thinks Agentforce has what it takes to beat Copilot, but the executive didn’t let Microsoft get out of the discussion unscathed.
“When you look at how Copilot has been sold to our customers, it’s disappointing. It doesn’t work. It spews data all over the floors,” Benioff said. “I haven’t found a customer who’s had transformational work with Copilot. It’s not Microsoft Copilot. Copilot is really the new Microsoft Clippy … I don’t think Copilot will be around. I don’t think customers will use it.”
It’s not secret that Microsoft is all-in on AI, with the release of ChatGPT prompting the tech behemoth to invest $10 billion into OpenAI. And for its part, Microsoft has its Copilot Agents that target a similar type of work as Agentforce. In addition, Microsoft is continuing to build out the Copilot+ ecosystem on consumer PCs by integrating AI into basic functions of laptops, including web browsing.
In the enterprise space, it’s still not clear where Microsoft stands. Although Microsoft is one of the wealthiest companies in the world, Salesforce has deep ties within the enterprise realm. And, at least according to its own numbers, Salesforce’s SFR-RAG model is more accurate than even the emerging GPT-4o model from OpenAI.
Although most of our readers will never touch Agentforce, there’s a good chance you’ll interact with the AI at some point. For instance, OpenTable and luxury clothing brand Saks are already using the AI tool for customer service inquires, targeting “routine requests” like reservation changes and redemption of loyalty points.
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