1 week Ago By David Swan
Tech giant Microsoft’s AI efforts are glorified “science projects” that can’t be trusted in the workplace, according to the chief executive of enterprise software giant Salesforce, Marc Benioff, as the race to roll out generative AI tools into the workplace intensifies. Nearly 50,000 people descended on San Francisco last week for Salesforce’s annual summit, Dreamforce, which the company described as the world’s largest AI event. Speaking to assembled journalists at a press conference, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff criticised Microsoft’s recent AI efforts including Copilot, and said they were failing businesses and could not be depended on for workplace use.
Credit: AP In a rare pointed attack on a rival, Salesforce boss Benioff criticised Microsoft’s recent AI efforts including Copilot. He said the tools were failing businesses and could not be depended on for workplace use. “There are a lot of narratives out there from vendors, and a lot of it is not true,” Benioff told journalists.
“I really think that Copilot is the next Clippy. It hasn’t really delivered for customers what they intended. It’s cute, it’s fun, it does some things and then you’re not really using it.
“Microsoft Copilot has been spilling data all over these customers’ floors, and that’s not what we’re about. We’re about a trusted layer, we’re about doing it the right way, and I think this is a better model. Salesforce announced ‘Agentforce’, a set of AI agents that will let companies increase their workforce capacity during busy periods without having to hire additional full-time employees.
Credit: Bloomberg “This is what AI is meant to be.” Clippy was the unofficial name for Microsoft’s infamous talking paperclip. It was meant to charm and help users but its unsolicited offers of advice were widely viewed as annoying, and the assistant was killed off in 2001.
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