Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff slams Microsoft’s Copilot again, calling it ‘disappointing’

• Marc Benioff criticized Microsoft’s Copilot again, calling it “disappointing” and inaccurate.
• The Salesforce CEO slammed Microsoft’s AI assistant in an X post, saying, “It just doesn’t work.”
• Last month Benioff compared Copilot to Clippy, Microsoft’s discontinued animated paperclip assistant.

Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, for the second time in as many months.

The Salesforce chief called Copilot “disappointing” in a post on X. Salesforce has launched its own AI assistant called Einstein Copilot.

On both occasions, Benioff compared Microsoft’s Copilot to Clippy — the discontinued animated paperclip that offered suggestions in applications including Word.

“When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing,” Benioff wrote on Wednesday. “It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy.”

Benioff first compared Copilot to Clippy at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference last month and doubled down on his remarks in the recent X post, saying, “Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0.”

The billionaire cited research firm Gartner in the post, claiming that it said Microsoft is “spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess.”

Benioff appears to be referencing a Gartner report from August titled “Copilot for Microsoft 365: Assessing the Impact and Value So Far.”
Gartner surveyed 132 IT leaders who tried out Copilot for the study, which found that many of the respondents’ organizations aren’t yet deploying Copilot at scale.

The study also found that Copilot deployments were “significantly” impacted by “oversharing and security concerns,” with 40% of the survey respondents noting a delay of at least three months to implement Copilot.

“M365 Copilot honors user permissions. It also respects data security controls, such as sensitivity labels, where these have been correctly applied,” the Gartner report states. “However, if controls have not been correctly applied or permissions are too open, M365 Copilot can increase the risk of oversharing by retrieving, summarizing and generating content that the user should not have access to. It could also surface content that should no longer exist.”

The report continued: “Many organizations are extremely concerned about these risks.”

Microsoft made its AI assistant Copilot available to enterprise customers in November last year. Its tools are built on the Azure OpenAI model, which takes the ChatGPT maker’s models and adds in some other capabilities. Copilot then sifts through private customer data to offer bespoke support with specific work tasks.

A pharmaceutical company’s chief information officer paid Microsoft double the usual price to have 500 staffers use Copilot in the fourth quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024. However, he canceled the upgrade and said: “We really just do not see the value we’re getting out of those tools worth double.”

Salesforce and Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider, sent outside normal working hours.