- Marc Benioff calls “this Copilot thing” “a huge disaster” for Microsoft
- He was responding to Satya Nadella who, on a completely different podcast, forecasted that software-as-a-service will collapse with the rise of easy-to-create AI chatbots
- Benioff also pointed out Microsoft is leveraging external technology with its deal with OpenAI - “they’re not even making the AI themselves”
Marc Benioff, the CEO of top CRM software firm Salesforce, has clapped back at his Microsoft counterpart Satya Nadella after the latter suggested software-as-a-service companies like Salesforce could go bust in the wake of the AI chatbot agent boom.
Speaking on The Logan Bartlett Show, Benioff claimed, “customers don’t look at them and don’t take them seriously”.
“I’ve spoken to these customers,” he went on, “they barely use it, and that’s only if they don’t already have a ChatGPT license or something like that in front of them.”
Salesforce’s Agentforce 2.0 platform
Benioff pointed out that Salesforce has its own “agentic platform” in production, while adding Microsoft “[isn’t] even making the AI themselves” - referring to its $10 billion USD investment into OpenAI - the company behind ChatGPT.
Nadella made his remarks on the Bg2 podcast in December 2024, albeit without referring to Salesforce by name.
Salesforce even launched Agentforce 2.0, an AI chatbot agent creation platform, in December 2024 - a clear effort to keep up with the AI trend, so it’s not entirely clear why he has Microsoft in his sights, because Microsoft doesn’t seem to have Salesforce on its own radar.
Benioff does have form for taking aim at Microsoft’s Copilot AI, mind you. At Dreamforce 2024, he compared Copilot to Microsoft’s erstwhile mascot Clippy, and has maintained that comparison in tweets.
Back in a missive from October 2024, he wrote “Copilot’s a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence.”
Via IT Pro
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