A simmering Salesforce vs. Microsoft rivalry recently boiled over thanks to sharp words from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. In a recent interview, Benioff accused Microsoft’s Copilot AI of failing to deliver on its promises and blamed the company for misleading the enterprise market.
Microsoft customers were “told things about enterprise AI, maybe AI overall, that are not true,” Benioff told Business Insider, going so far as to imply that Microsoft has done a monumental disservice to the AI industry and the research that went into developing the technology.
Benioff’s comments came just days before Salesforce rolled out Agentforce, its new AI autonomous agent platform, on October 29, 2024. Boasting that Agentforce requires no training and can be set up within minutes, he contrasted it with what he perceives as the complexity and limitations of Microsoft’s offerings. However, he acknowledges that even Salesforce’s AI solutions aren’t yet capable of tackling humanity’s greatest challenges, such as curing diseases or solving global crises, as some experts envision the technology someday will be able to do.
Microsoft didn’t sit back and take Benioff’s statements lightly. Instead, the tech giant highlighted its growing influence in the AI market by sharing data with Fortune showing that 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Copilot. It also revealed its customer base for Copilot has grown by 60 percent quarter-over-quarter, emphasizing the tool’s popularity and widespread adoption.
To be fair, Benioff’s critique wasn’t limited to Microsoft—he called out the entire AI industry for overselling the capabilities of the technology. As a plea for honesty, he urged developers and providers to adjust their claims and be more realistic about what’s truly possible.
The ongoing leap to AI autonomous agents is closer to what AI can achieve—making logical decisions, solving problems, and independently executing tasks, for example—but there’s still much more work and research to be done.
The AI autonomous agents competition between Salesforce and Microsoft is likely to continue, especially with the release of Salesforce’s Agentforce fueling the race. However, viewed as a whole, autonomous agents are only one element of the current state of artificial intelligence. Nasdaq lists three companies as industry leaders:
It’s difficult to argue against Salesforce being the top AI Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company, which serves as a reminder that the AI industry is expansive and reshaping every corner of technology.
Learn more about our picks for the top 150 AI companies redefining the industry.
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