- Marc Benioff calls “this Copilot thing” “a huge disaster” for Microsoft
- He was responding to Satya Nadella, who on a completely different podcast predicted that software-as-a-service would collapse with the rise of easy-to-create AI chatbots
- Benioff also pointed out that Microsoft is leveraging outside technology with its deal with OpenAI – “they don’t even make the AI themselves”
Marc Benioff, CEO of top CRM software company Salesforce, has hit back at his Microsoft counterpart Satya Nadella after the latter suggested software-as-a-service companies like Salesforce could go out of business 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 talked to these customers,” he continued, “they hardly ever use it, and that’s only if they don’t already have a ChatGPT license or something 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] making the AI itself” — referring to its $10 billion investment in OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT.
Nadella made his remarks on the Bg2 podcast in December 2024, though without referring to Salesforce by name.
Salesforce even launched Agentforce 2.0, a platform for creating AI chatbot agents, 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 isn’t looking appears to have Salesforce on its own radar.
Benioff has the form to take aim at Microsoft’s Copilot AI, mind you. At Dreamforce 2024, he compared Copilot to Microsoft’s former mascot Clippy and has maintained this comparison in tweets.
Back in an October 2024 letter, he wrote “Copilot is a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create true enterprise intelligence.”
Via IT Pro
