Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is no fan of Microsoft’s AI tool, Copilot, and he’s not staying quiet about it.
While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last year compared the significance of Copilot’s launch to that of historic technologies like the PC and the internet, Benioff said in an X post Thursday that Copilot is not worth the hype (to put it lightly).
“When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing. It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy,” he wrote.
Benioff also called Copilot “Clippy 2.0” and implied it would be as much of a failure as Microsoft’s retired paperclip assistant meant to help users craft Word documents and save documents among other things.
“I have yet to find anyone who’s had a transformational experience with Microsoft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs,” he wrote.
Copilot was released by Microsoft last year to help users be more productive by assisting in the creation of PowerPoints, Excel documents and more using artificial intelligence.
When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing. 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. To add insult to injury, customers are…
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) October 17, 2024
Benioff’s comments were the latest attack in what has become a monthslong feud with Microsoft and its AI product. Benioff also compared Copilot to Clippy in an interview with Bloomberg during the company’s annual Dreamforce event. And in August, during the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Benioff said “Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.”
In his most recent tirade against Microsoft’s AI, Benioff linked to an article covering his comments during a podcast interview in which he expanded on his Copilot criticism. Benioff cited a report in the interview from research firm Gartner, which found that only 6% of the 132 IT leaders it surveyed had completed a pilot and were moving to wide-scale adoption of the product in their organizations, Business Insider reported.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
In the interview, Benioff also hyped up Salesforce’s new AI product, Agentforce, which it released in September. The suite of AI tools—”what AI was meant to be,” in Benioff’s words—helps companies analyze data and make decisions in service, sales, marketing, and commerce. Agentforce is already being piloted by companies such as OpenTable and the Wyndham hotel chain.
Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI at work, Jared Spataro, told Yahoo Finance that its number of 10,000 seat subscriptions had doubled, and among its customers were large companies like Disney, Dow, and Novartis.
But as for Copilot’s future success, Benioff isn’t holding his breath.
“I don’t think Copilot will be around. I don’t think customers will use it, and I think that we will see the transformation of enterprises with agents, and Agentforce will be the number one supplier,” he said.
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