Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has lamented the performance of Microsoft Copilot within customer experience environments and beyond.
The CEO did so during the vendor’s latest earnings call, where Salesforce announced revenue growth of eight percent year-over-year (YoY), exceeding analyst expectations.
During the call, Benioff stated:
So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilots because they’re not getting the accuracy and the response that they want. Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.
While Benioff is not immune to taking potshots at rivals – recently comparing Salesforce vs. ServiceNow to McDonald’s vs. Wienerschnitzel – he is not alone in his criticism.
Indeed, recent commentary from Inc. Magazine included several accounts from underwhelmed Microsoft Copilot customers before giving the solution a D- rating.
However, the CEO has extra motivation for the low blow as Salesforce prepares for the formal launch of its Agentforce platform.
The platform will allow customers to build their own bots or “agents” to perform tasks autonomously – across Salesforce CRM apps – with human oversight.
In other words, the CRM leader is pivoting its generative AI (GenAI) strategy from “human in the loop” copilots to “human at the helm” autonomous agents.
With Agentforce set to receive its grand reveal at next month’s Dreamforce event, Benioff teased:
This is really the future… and with this Agentforce platform, we’re making it easy to build these powerful autonomous agents for sales, service, marketing, [and] for commerce.
“Embedding [these] agents in the flow of work and getting our customers to the agent future first… this is the primary goal of our company right now.”
In July, Salesforce got ahead of the curve and announced an autonomous agent for customer service before unveiling two for sales teams just last week.
From September, the vendor will likely house these within Agentforce.
Yet, Salesforce has already put some of these autonomous agents in the hands of several early adopters, and Benioff shared several emerging success stories.
For instance, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world – with 20 million US consumers – is reportedly resolving 90 percent of patient queries autonomously via Agentforce.
The publisher Wiley is another early adopter, which has experienced a 50 percent uptick in case resolution. Benioff also quoted the business as stating:
We’re seeing double-digit percentage increase in customer satisfaction and deflection rate compared to older technologies, and these [are the] early weeks of our busiest season.
Additional early adopters include ADP, OpenTable, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
However, even before formally launching Agentforce, Benioff is considering its next evolution. Alongside autonomous agents for various customer-facing functions, he wants to create them for specific verticals, too.
Indeed, the CEO promised that these sector-specific agents could come “in the coming months”.
But, he also warned that replicating the success of early adopters with Agentforce won’t be possible without Data Cloud, feeding the autonomous agents with huge amounts of data and metadata.
More Highlights from the Salesforce Earnings Call
Before teasing Agentforce, Benioff declared: “If you look at our enterprise software overall, we’re the largest enterprise software company in the world.”
According to the 2023 Forbes 2000 list, Salesforce is fourth, behind Microsoft, Google, and Oracle.
Nevertheless, Benioff stresses that, according to his calculations, Salesforce is either the first or second largest “because we’re not delivering infrastructure or hardware”.
Meanwhile, the CEO and his executive team rattled many more statistics highlighting Salesforce’s multi-CRM, AI, and Data Cloud momentum last quarter.
For instance, multi-cloud deals comprised 80 percent of Salesforce’s new business in Q2. Also, last quarter, the company signed 1,500 AI deals.
Meanwhile, Benioff declared that Data Cloud is Salesforce’s “fastest-growing organic product”.
Yet, the CEO also wished a fond farewell to CFO Amy Weaver, who paid tribute to Benioff’s leadership.
“Mark, special thanks to you for your confidence in me and everything you saw, and I will never forget you calling me more than four years ago for the CFO role,” she said.
“I’ve rarely been so surprised in my life, but it’s been extraordinary.”
The next chapter of that “extraordinary” journey is close, with Dreamforce just around the corner. There, Salesforce will unveil Agentforce, which Benioff describes as a “quantum leap” in AI.
