Marc Benioff stepped up his Microsoft Copilot broadside last week, characterising it as “basically the new Clippy” and branding it a “failed idea”.
The Salesforce CEO’s comments come as Microsoft partners and end users continue to roll the AI assistant across their businesses, with Vodafone last week claiming it is saving its employees around three hours a week.
Benioff, however, claimed in a Bloomberg interview at last week’s Dreamforce conference that Copilot is about as useful as Microsoft’s cute but ineffectual 90s paperclip assistant.
Benioff in prime @benioff form: “We all know now that Microsoft Copilot is basically the new Microsoft Clippy.”pic.twitter.com/Re1sdvOi3z
— Emily Chang (@emilychangtv) September 20, 2024
Customers have “not gotten value from it”, he said as he talked up Salesforce’s next-generation platform, Agentforce.
We asked leaders from five UK MSPs (including a couple who just happen to be dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft partners), for their take on Benioff’s explosive diatribe.
Here’s what they said:
“Benioff is feeling the pressure”
Francesca Lukes, CEO, Wanstor
It’s interesting to see Salesforce’s new strategy which leans into more ‘autonomous AI’, including a new outcome-based pricing model to protect against subscription revenue decreases. They are clearly backing themselves, as well as riding the wave of greater AI acceptance, though by Benioff’s own admission there is no shortage of big talk when it comes to AI!
Copilot was one of the first serious business AI products to launch and has evolved significantly over the last year. We have observed a wide variation of adoption approaches from a few licenses limited to execs, to truly embracing and embedding AI fed on (secured) company data, with a continued focus on adoption. The latter have seen substantial value out of it in the terms of hours saved per day for a typical knowledge worker so it’s by no means a failed product.
I expect Benioff is feeling the pressure of [Salesforce’s] longstanding investment in AI not having seen the commercial returns that Microsoft have seen to date, but we’re excited about all of the developments in this space and the opportunity this means for businesses of all sizes.
“Their GenAI story so far hasn’t been great”
Andre Azevedo, CEO, Ancoris
I think what he’s trying to sell – Salesforce’s new AI tool, Agentforce – does compete with Copilot (or Gemini for workspace) so he needs to put a marker down and hype up his solution. So there is an element of just trying to sell his wares. They both play in the productivity space, but will have totally different uses. One is how to accelerate the creation and sharing of documents, etc. and the other will be to leverage customer data and other sources to provide AI-generated recommendations or insights.
Agentforce looks like it will have some potentially interesting uses, but like everything else I doubt it will be perfect from day one. Their GenAI story so far hasn’t been great, so this is a big launch for them. The future will tell.
I think Copilot (or Gemini for workspace) is still evolving, and calling it an “experiment” is doing it a disservice. I am sure Agentforce will probably fall into the same category for the first year or so of its life. While these tools have been hyped up, they are also very useful and can provide incredible productivity gains for organisations.
What we have seen with our clients is that the adoption of Gemini for Workspace (similar to Copilot in its principles, although probably better integrated) is also dependent on users changing the way they approach work – i.e. to really leverage the best of the AI-aided functionality you have to change the way you work, the way you approach a task, the way you start solving a problem. So the success of these tools is intrinsically linked to proper change management, training, cultural change, etc. The functionality is broadly there and keeps evolving quickly.
Back to Salesforce and Agentforce – we have worked with several customers on building solutions that leverage the different AI technologies and LLMs and adapt them to their specific needs, which I believe will give them a longer-term differentiator against competitors. Using out of the box AI, which covers common use cases will be fine, but everyone will be able to use it and therefore not give them a competitive advantage. Like using Salesforce as CRM is no longer a differentiator because everyone else uses it too.
“We must respectfully disagree”
Melissa Rambridge, COO (pictured), and Mark Armstrong, Director of Modern Workplace, inTEC Group
We must respectfully disagree with Benioff. Both internally and among our customer base, we’ve observed significant benefits from Copilot, particularly its impact on meetings through automatic task generation and the ability to query a meeting transcript. Globally, Copilot users read 11% fewer emails and increase document creation by 10%, which is a substantial productivity boost, far surpassing the much-criticised Clippy. In fact, if Clippy were around today, it would likely say “It looks like you’re saving time” instead of “It looks like you’re writing a letter”!
“Marc is being disingenuous”
Stuart Fenton, CEO, Ingentive
I believe Benioff is being disingenuous to Copilot and I believe this is a little competitive dig and does not reflect reality. Recent financial results indicate that Salesforce is less effective in the AI space than its competitors and I suspect that is the root of the comment.
Copilot is selling fabulously well, and more than Salesforce could ever hope for. Copilot itself is well integrated within the Microsoft stack and brings OpenAI capabilities to content across the Microsoft landscape. As a tool it has been widely adopted and its capabilities at the most basic level of personal productivity are being activated and used every second. The advanced capabilities of Copilot Studio are far beyond what can be done within certain competitors products and provide truly unique abilities and solutions to organisations. In short, shut the **** up Marc.
“Microsoft 365 Copilot will become the norm for the new generation”
Jodie Rodgers, Chief AI Officer, Transparity
Like Teams is for us now, Microsoft 365 Copilot will become the norm for the new generation of workers. Prompt engineering will be as intuitive as using search and social media and this is what will lead to Copilot generating specific, accurate, and contextually relevant responses.
We are still seeing significant productivity and wellbeing benefits from our own Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption (rolled out to 60% of our organisation with 98% monthly active usage) and continuous interest from customers from a variety of industries to support them with their journey.
It’s a new way of working which isn’t yet ingrained into employees’ day-to-day lives which is why the time to value can potentially be longer than the market/customers initially expected. The main learning we have seen is that organisations’ pilots need to be expanded outside of IT, taking a persona specific approach to identify high-value use cases and that is why adoption and change management is key.
The product is constantly evolving, based on customer feedback, with more than 700 product updates and over 150 new features being shipped this year alone. Wave 2 launched on 16th September and with that we will see dramatically improved performance (two times faster on average) and improved response satisfaction by nearly three times.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
