The CEO of Salesforce has taken aim at Microsoft saying that his company’s clients are decidedly underwhelmed by Copilot, Microsoft’s AI solution.
Marc Benioff didn’t pull any punches as he launched into a tirade against Microsoft’s AI efforts, claiming that Copilot is a huge disappointment while his company’s own AI is delivering magic for its clients.
Poor Copilot has come up short against ChatGPT since its launch, with Microsoft being criticized for delivering the inferior of the two products, despite the fact that they are both built using OpenAI models. A Microsoft spokesperson even got on the defensive and said it was down to bad prompts.
War of Words
The comments from Benioff came during a recent airing of The Bartlett Show. Specifically, the CEO was asked for his response to comments made by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about the future of software as a service (SaaS) platforms like Salesforce.
“I think the notion that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right, in the agent era, because if you think about it right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic.” – Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
Benioff was scathing in return, scorning Microsoft for “repackage[ing] OpenAI and dropp[ing] it into Excel” to create Copilot. He added that his customers “barely” use Copilot “and that’s when they don’t have a ChatGPT license or something like that in front of them.”
Not the First Attack
In October last year, Benioff used an appearance on the Rapid Response podcast to give a brutal takedown of Copilot while giving Salesforce’s Agentforce a glowing review. He claimed that customers are so blown away by his company’s offering that they declare it “witchcraft.” He added that it is capable of doing “a couple of trillion AI transactions per week.”
Benioff didn’t stop himself from bordering on petty, describing Copilot as merely “…the new Microsoft Clippy.”
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“When you look at how Copilot has been sold to our customers, it’s disappointing. It doesn’t work. It spews data all over our floors, it doesn’t deliver value. I haven’t found a customer who has transformational work with Copilot.” – Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce
Is Copilot “A Sinking Ship”?
So, do Benioff words have any merit? Well, if you ask Microsoft employees (anonymously), apparently they agree.
In November, just after a huge update to Copilot, a Business Insider report suggested that it had fallen flat. Indeed, the BI team even spoke to Microsoft employees – who remained anonymous – but were absolutely damning of the company’s AI efforts.
One told the title: “I really feel like I’m living in a group delusion here at Microsoft.” The company claims that “AI is going to revolutionize everything,” they added, “but the support isn’t there for AI to do 75% of what Microsoft claims it’ll do.”
If Microsoft employees are underwhelmed, it comes as no surprise that customers are too.
