Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has again fired shots at Microsoft Copilot, branding the tool a “huge disaster” and suggesting customers don't take the firm seriously in the AI space.
The comments came in retaliation to a remark Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made about the future of software as a service (SaaS) platforms, which was then put to Benioff on ‘The Logan Bartlett Show’ podcast.
“I think the notion that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right, in the agent era, because if you think about it right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic,” Nadella said.
In response, Benioff said Microsoft has disappointed everybody with its approach to AI and has largely just repackaged OpenAI’s technology.
“Customers are not finding themselves transformed with this copilot technology,” Benioff said.
“I've spoken to these customers - I mean, they barely use it, and that's only if they don't have, you know, a ChatGPT license or something like that in front of them,” he added.
While Benioff admitted that Microsoft is a “very good” company, he highlighted the trillions of enterprise AI transactions being delivered to customers on Salesforce and the firm’s agentic AI service.
“We're out there right now in production with thousands of customers, and they're just not at that level,” Benioff said.
“I think this Copilot thing has been a huge disaster for them from a branding and validation standpoint. Customers don't look at them and don't take them seriously in AI, nor should they, because they're not even making the AI themselves,” he added.
Marc Benioff has a bone to pick with Copilot
Benioff’s recent comments are the latest in a long-running war of words with Microsoft over its supposed failings in the AI race so far.
The Salesforce CEO first grilled Copilot at the firm’s Dreamforce conference in September 2024, comparing it to the widely lampooned Microsoft ‘Clippy’ tool on an early version of Windows.
Benioff doubled down on this comparison just over a month later in a post to X, calling the tool “Clippy 2.0” and critiquing its lack of accuracy, lack of security, and failure to deliver business value.
“I have yet to find anyone who’s had a transformational experience with Microsoft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs,” Benioff claimed.
He also lashed out at Microsoft’s pivot to agents earlier that month, suggesting the firm was in panic mode and that it lacked the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create “real corporate intelligence.”
