Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff railed against Copilot artificial intelligence products offered by Microsoft and other vendors, touting his company's agentic approach as one that delivers better accuracy while maintaining the importance of the vendor's services partners.
In response to a question from CRN during a press and analyst event, the CEO of the San Francisco-based enterprise software said of Salesforce's 12,000-strong partner ecosystem in delivering AI that "it's critical that we enable and train them and give them this extension."
"A lot of them are already next generation Salesforce platform users," Benioff said. "These are the people using the product. And it (new AI features) just appears inside the platform. It's not some new thing that they're going to buy or add on or plug in or whatever. It's going to appear from within."
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Benioff's view is that providing Salesforce customers a full AI platform without adding on or plugging in AI products will result in better accuracy and lower hallucination. "We believe that this is the key to making it work," he said. "This is what AI is meant to be."
Microsoft has been most visible with its Copilot brand of AI virtual assistants, but other vendors have used the term as well, including Salesforce itself with Einstein Copilot. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Spot AI and SymphonyAI.
CRN has reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment.
Benioff pointed out that during a virtual Microsoft event Monday on the next wave of the tech giant's AI updates, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI was becoming "more capable and even agentic" and models were becoming "more of a commodity"--observations Benioff has also made.
Benioff directly attacked Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which has received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft and helped power some of Microsoft's AI offerings. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman notably spoke at Salesforce Dreamforce 2023.
"Many customers are reporting the OpenAI models are not delivering high levels of accuracy and resolving even basic customer service issues for them," Benioff said.
"The lack of grounding, the lack of access to the metadata, the data itself, the sharing model, all of the components of a platform that are then needed to be able to achieve this kind of level of accuracy."
He added that Salesforce's Agentforce AI offering "is outperforming OpenAI on Azure in cost, time to value and accuracy."
Benioff also went after Microsoft's business practices, commenting on the tech giant's treatment of Slack, which Salesforce bought in 2021.
"The European Union wrote this interesting statement about how they run their business, about Slack and some of the things that they did inside their company when these two entrepreneurs were trying to build this company and what actions they took and how they went after them.
"You might want to read it. It's very interesting. A lot of insights. It reminded me also, on Netscape was another one. They had a very interesting document about that. … It's a very interesting business philosophy there."
Benioff also expressed some concerns about the perils of AI.
"I hope we're on the right side of history here," he said. "It's a very high-wire act. . … I am sure that there's going to be good stories and bad stories. I'm sure that some of this is going to work, and some of it is going to go horribly wrong. I hope the horribly wrong stories are not as bad as I have them in my mind that they could be. Because they could be horrible. But they also could be magical. And I'm not sure what's going to happen."
Here's more of what Benioff had to say during Dreamforce across his keynote and during a press event.
