Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been highly critical of Microsoft’s AI efforts this month, even going on a podcast to call Copilot “disappointing.” Now the drama continues as Benioff criticizes Microsoft’s AI for businesses.
On Monday, Microsoft announced new AI agents that can act on a company’s behalf for sales, finance, and customer service tasks. But based on Benioff’s tweet the next day, he still thinks Salesforce can beat Microsoft at AI.
Salesforce’s CEO wrote in a Tuesday post on X that Microsoft pitching its Copilot AI as “agents” signaled “panic mode.”
“Let’s be real—Copilot’s a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence,” Benioff wrote. “That is why Copilot is inaccurate, spills corporate data, and forces customers to build their own LLMs. Clippy 2.0, anyone?” Clippy was the office assistant that Microsoft pulled in 2007.
Benioff then pushed Salesforce’s Agentforce, a set of AI agents customized for sales, marketing, and customer service tasks, as an example of “what AI was meant to be.”
Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode. Let’s be real—Copilot’s a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence. That is why Copilot is inaccurate, spills corporate data, and forces… pic.twitter.com/fBRFoVhWOG
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) October 22, 2024
Related: Microsoft Strikes Back at Salesforce, Announces New AI Agents That Can Take Over Finance, Sales, and Service Tasks
Has Copilot revealed private information or been inaccurate?
In August, Microsoft fixed a bug in Copilot that could have spilled confidential information. Users have commented on inaccuracies with Copilot, but that isn’t a problem isolated to Microsoft’s AI — large language models across the board struggle with accuracy.
Benioff’s comments attempt to distinguish Salesforce’s business AI offerings from Microsoft’s by restating what he’s said before. Earlier this month, on an episode of the Masters of Scale Rapid Response podcast, Benioff said that Microsoft has done a “tremendous disservice” to the AI industry by providing AI that “doesn’t work.”
Benioff drew a comparison then between Copilot and Clippy and said that Copilot didn’t have staying power.
Microsoft, meanwhile, says that clients like McKinsey & Company and Thomson Reuters are creating AI agents with its technology.
Related: Can Anyone Beat Microsoft at AI? The CEO of Salesforce Thinks His Company Can.