Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has taken yet another shot at Microsoft.
Speaking during an earnings call, the Salesforce Co-Founder was openly critical of Microsoft’s Copilot solution, describing it as “just repackaged ChatGPT.”
From there, he boasted that Salesforce is uniquely capable of operating Agentforce across its own business and website in a way that Microsoft cannot replicate.
Indeed, Salesforce customers can go to help.salesforce.com and test it out for themselves.
The CEO baited some of the Microsoft specialists on the call, asking them to “try to find this running on microsoft.com, and I will be looking forward to getting your responses.”
Benioff continued to talk up Agentforce, detailing how the solution is projected to impact Salesforce’s own business this year:
“We expect that our own transformation with Agentforce on help.salesforce.com and, in many other areas of our company, is going to deflect between a quarter and a half of our annual case volume, and in optimistic cases, probably much, much more of that.
Agentforce is going to deliver the same unprecedented accuracy, speed, and cost savings to our customers.
The speed of these results is impressive, with Salesforce only announcing Agentforce in September.
In doing so, it seized the AI mantle and left much of the competition playing catch up.
That includes Microsoft, which has a much broader ecosystem and considerably more to piece together when it comes to agentic AI.
Nevertheless, Benioff’s most recent comments are the latest in a series of jabs thrown at Microsoft over the past few months, with the CEO having used the company’s previous earnings call to claim that “so many customers” were “disappointed” with their Copilot purchases.
He followed this up with a post on X, where he criticized the Microsoft AI tool for “spilling data everywhere”, as well as comparing Copilot to “Clippy 2.0”, referencing Microsoft’s often-ridiculed virtual assistant from the 1990s.
Some may agree, with recent feedback from Inc. Magazine featuring several dissatisfied Microsoft Copilot users, who ultimately rated the solution a collective D-.
Meanwhile, experiences across the web seem mixed, as evident across various forums, like that below.
Nevertheless, Microsoft is only just getting started with agentic AI in Copilot.
Indeed, during the company’s Ignite 2024 event, Microsoft highlighted how it’s transforming Copilot into a base for autonomous agents.
While Copilot will continue to function as a virtual assistant, these agents and another layer, operating without direct human input but under human oversight.
Money Talk
Away from Agentforce, Salesforce posted a solid set of financial results.
Year-over-year (YoY) Q3 revenue rose by eight percent, reaching $9.44BN.
There was also a significant increase in YoY operating cash flow, which jumped by 29 percent to $2BN.
Despite these figures, the company’s stock saw a slight decline in aftermarket trading, indicating mixed investor sentiment.
More News from Salesforce
Last week, Salesforce discussed its new pilot program, “Bring Your Own Channel for CCaaS”, to enhance its cloud contact center integrations.
Building on its “Bring Your Own Telephony” (BYOT) initiative, which allowed 17 CCaaS partners to integrate voice solutions into Service Cloud, the new program enables select partners to incorporate digital engagement channels as well.
Elsewhere, Salesforce recently finalized its $1.9BN acquisition of Own Company, a SaaS data backup and recovery specialist.
This marks the vendor’s largest purchase since acquiring Slack for $28 billion in 2021.
The acquisition strengthens Salesforce Data Cloud’s security and data protection capabilities.
