Marc Benioff rails against Microsoft’s copilot

After lashing out against Microsoft at the Dreamforce customer conference, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has taken another swipe at his competitor. “When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing,” Benioff wrote in a post on Twitter/X. “It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy. Gartner says it’s spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess,” he said.

“I have yet to find anyone who’s had a transformational experience with Microsoft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs” the Salesforce CEO concluded. “Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0.“

At Dreamforce 2024, Benioff had already compared Microsoft’s Copilot to Clippy, the Office assistant Microsoft released in 1997. The animation in the form of a cartoon paper clip appeared in certain work situations, asking if users needed help and giving suggestions. However, Clippy was not well received. Too intrusive and annoying, was the criticism of many users. In 2001, Microsoft deactivated Clippy by default, and a few years later the unloved Office assistant disappeared from the program altogether.

Copilot — hardly better than Clippy?

Benioff, however, has not forgotten Clippy and draws nasty comparisons between it and Microsoft’s current AI technology. The sharpness in the comments makes it clear how important it is for manufacturers to stake out their terrain in the highly competitive AI market. Salesforce itself has been trying for years to anchor AI features in its cloud ecosystem under the Einstein brand. With genAI, the whole thing has taken on a new dynamic. A few weeks ago, Benioff presented Agentforce, a platform on which users could easily build AI agents and integrate them into their infrastructure.

Many other manufacturers are also currently jumping on the agent bandwagon — including Microsoft. The world’s largest software company recently announced that users could use Copilot Studio to develop AI agents themselves to complete or automate tasks more easily.

“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff sneered on X. “Let’s be real—Copilot’s a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence.” Instead, Benioff promoted his own technology, which he said is ready to really change companies. “Agentforce doesn’t just handle tasks—it autonomously drives sales, service, marketing, analytics, and commerce,” Benioff boasted. “With data, LLMs, workflows, and security all integrated into a single Customer 360 platform: This is what AI was meant to be.”

The reactions to Benioff’s tirades are mixed. While some posts join in the criticism of Microsoft, other voices are more critical. Benioff should work out the strengths of his portfolio instead of mocking the competition, said one user, while another told Benioff to show how his own agents create added value for the business, asking, “Where are Salesforce’s great success stories?”