Saleforce CEO Marc Benioff is taking another swipe at Microsoft Copilot, saying “customers are left cleaning up the mess” and that it’s “more like Clippy 2.0.”
Salesforce has been working to define itself as a safe option for AI, providing customers with solutions that go far beyond what Microsoft and others can offer. The company most recently introduced its Agentforce platform, designed to provide a level of autonomy Salesforce says Microsoft can’t match.
“But we’re seeing that breakthrough occur because, with our new Agentforce platform, we’re going to make a quantum leap for in AI, and that’s why it wants you all at Dreamforce because I want you to have your hands on this technology to really understand this,” Benioff said when introducing Agentforce. “This is not copilots. So, many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilots because they’re not getting the accuracy and the response that they want. Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.”
Benioff is taking aim at Microsoft once again in an X post, this time comparing Copilot to Microsoft’s much-maligned Clippy Office Assistant.
In the Fortune interview Benioff links to in his post, the CEO goes into more detail about the AI revolution, in including how excited he is about it.
I would just say I’ve never been more excited about anything at Salesforce, maybe in my career.
This is what AI was meant to be. Just yesterday, I was reading feedback from a customer who had just turned it on and they were like, “This must be witchcraft. This is crazy what’s happening with my customers now.” And I am really excited about this. I think this is going to change companies forever. I think it’s going to change software forever. And I think it’ll change Salesforce forever.
When Robert Safian asked Benioff about comparisons with Microsoft Copilot, Benioff didn’t hold back.
Oh, God. Bob, you know you’re going there. Well, first of all, Bob, I think, unfortunately, I’ll just have to tell you, I think Microsoft has done a tremendous disservice to not only our whole industry but all of the AI research that has been done.
Because 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 floor, it doesn’t deliver value to customers. I haven’t found a customer who has had transformational work with Copilot.
Benioff says he doesn’t think Copilot will last, while he believes Agentforce will go on to be a great success.
Copilot is really the new Microsoft Clippy. I don’t know if you remember that, Bob, but it was not a huge success. I don’t think Copilot will be around. I don’t think customers will use it, and I think that we will see the transformation of enterprises with agents, and Agentforce will be the number one supplier.
I think we’ll have more than a billion agents running from Salesforce within the next 12 months. Even at Dreamforce, I got 10,000 customers hands-on with Agentforce. This was very important to me. And, Bob, you’ve been in the industry a long time. You know you can have a vision for technology in a demo, and you can have customers, but you’ve got to put two and two together to get four.
Microsoft’s History and Challenges
There’s no denying that Microsoft jumped to an early lead in the AI race, thanks to its partnership with OpenAI. That early lead has given the company plenty of mindshare, but has also come with significant downside, not the least of which some high-profile stumbles.
Windows Recall is one such example, with Microsoft and CEO Satya Nadella proudly showing off the feature and touting what it could do. Recall essentially takes screenshots of everything a person is doing on their computer, making those screenshots easily searchable using natural language.
Unfortunately, in addition to the creep factor of having a computer record everything the user does, the initial implementation of Recall was deeply flawed from a security standpoint. It was so flawed that Microsoft delayed its implementation and reworked it.
Despite the changes, security experts still worry that Recall will open the door to a whole new generation of cyberattacks, as the database of information it collects is simply to sensitive and valuable for bad actors to ignore. It’s probably not a matter of if Recall will be compromised, but when.
In contrast, companies like Salesforce have the advantage of observing the forerunners’ actions and making changes to their own plans to address concerns, shortcomings, and backlash.
This is by no means the first time Microsoft has found itself in this position. In fact, there is a whole list of products that Microsoft was the first to bring to market on a large scale, only to see another company learn from its mistakes and do better.
- Tablets. Microsoft was the first major purveyor of tablets, but the company’s efforts were met a mediocre response. Apple learned from Microsoft’s missteps with its early tablets and used those lessons to release the far more popular iPad series.
- Smartphones. While not the first to make mobile phones, Microsoft was certainly one of the biggest names to enter the early smartphone market, back when Nokia, Blackberry, and Palm were the major players. With its entrenched user base, Microsoft should have been the company that dominated the smartphone market, but it made so many missteps that its devices never gained much traction. A few years later, Apple released the iPhone, with Google releasing Android shortly after that, and the rest is history.
There are certainly many benefits to being the first in a particular technological category, but Microsoft doesn’t always do well when it tries to be the first. In fact, the company’s greatest successes (Windows, Office, and Azure) have come when it’s taken an Apple-like approach and let someone else be the first to bring something to market, learn from that product, and then make an alternative that meets users’ needs better.
In the AI war, Salesforce could well be the new Apple, learning from the mistakes of frontrunners and designing its products accordingly.
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