- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff criticized Microsoft for its AI-powered agents.
- Benioff said Microsoft Copilot was inaccurate and compared it to “Clippy 2.0.”
- Salesforce recently announced a pivot to Agentforce, its own product that includes customized AI agents.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on Monday accused Microsoft of being in “panic mode” in his latest criticism of the tech giant.
Microsoft announced Monday that the ability to create AI-powered “autonomous agents” with Copilot — the company’s AI digital assistant — would be in public preview next month. The company said the agents could handle “everything from accelerating lead generation and sales order processing to automating your supply chain.”
Benioff’s post comes over a month after Salesforce announced its own pivot to AI agents through Agentforce.
“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? It’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a post on X. “Let’s be real – Copilot is a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata and enterprise security models to create true enterprise intelligence.”
Benioff also called Copilot inaccurate, saying it “wastes corporate data” and forces users to create their own large language models, comparing the tool to Clippy 2.0, a reference to the paperclip assistant introduced to Microsoft Office products in 1990 ‘ers.
Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. Salesforce declined to provide further comment.
Microsoft announced that it was introducing custom “copilots” that could “act as independent agents” earlier this year. In its latest announcement, Microsoft said 60% of Fortune500 companies use Copilot and some of its customers, including McKinsey and Thomson Reuters, are already using customized autonomous agents to “increase revenue, reduce costs and scale impact.”
Benioff previously said his company’s Agentforce will allow customers to build custom AI agents that interact directly with customers, are more advanced than AI chatbots, and can be used with the company’s products, including its customer relationship management software and apps.
“This is the next big transformation,” Benioff told Fortune in September, referring to AI agents.
In his X post criticizing Microsoft Copilot, the Salesforce boss said Agentforce, by contrast, was “what AI was meant to be.”
Benioff has recently criticized Microsoft Copilot on several occasions, calling it “disappointing” and claiming it “just doesn’t work” in another post on X last week.
He also criticized Copilot and compared it to Clippy at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference last month.