Salesforce CEO Marc Beinoff slams Microsoft Copilot as ‘Clippy 2.0’

Fighting words? Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff took to his personal X account last night to criticize Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot as “disappointing,” saying “It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy,” before ultimately concluding “Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0,” with a shrug emoji.

“Clippy” of course is the popular nickname for Microsoft’s Clippit virtual on-screen Word and Office conversational assistant that debuted in 1996. While now looked upon with some ironic fondness for its cute expressions and large eyes, in the mid 1990s when it premiered, it was quickly found by many users to be more annoying than helpful, popping up while they tried to do tasks on their Microsoft software and offering unhelpful suggestions.

Copilot — a text-based chatbot assistant powered by Microsoft partner and investment OpenAI’s GPT models — was initially designed for Microsoft’s Office 365 and debuted in March 2023. It later expanded to include a web and mobile app version as well (and was the new name given to Microsoft’s GPT-powered Bing Chat). It was recently redesigned and upgraded to include many new features such as vision (watching and reacting to a user’s screen activity) and humanlike conversational voice input and output.

A loaded critique

Benioff’s critique is of course loaded and inherently biased, coming as he does from a rival software company — Salesforce’s signature customer relationship management (CRM) software competes directly with Microsoft Dynamics 365, as does the Salesforce-owned Slack with Microsoft Teams — and both companies have spent the two years since OpenAI’s debut of ChatGPT launching various new AI features, assistants, applications, and tools.

Yet curiously, Benioff, an early executive to embrace to the power and potential of AI — at least publicly — has lately been criticizing the gen AI era more broadly.

On Sunday, Benioff posted on X that he thought “much of AI’s current potential is simply oversold,” and that “AI isn’t yet curing cancer or solving climate change as pundits claim,” yet provided no evidence of these claims.

It’s a curious and contradictory tone for him to strike given he also recently told Fast Company he has “never been more excited about anything at Salesforce, maybe in my career,” as Agentforce, his company’s new enterprise AI agent builder tool.

Clearly, the founder is trying to thread a nuanced line of argument here — saying AI has potential for businesses but that Microsoft’s implementation of it doesn’t work well or provide enough value — but that presumably, Salesforce’s implementation is superior.

We’ll see if customers buy it. For now, some of the “pundits” he may be railing against such as public relations expert Ed Zitron have already seized on some of Benioff’s AI critical remarks as evidence the pro gen AI narrative more generally is starting to turn.