‘A science project’: Billionaire executive unloads on Microsoft’s AI chatbot

Microsoft has been aggressively signing up business customers for Copilot, its conversational AI chatbot launched in 2023. In July Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said 77,000 organisations had adopted the tool, up by nearly 200 per cent year-on-year.

“Every customer is at a different place in their journey, but overall, we are hearing something quite different from our Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers,” Microsoft said in a supplied statement from executive Jared Spataro. “Last quarter alone, we saw a customer increase of over 60 per cent, and daily users have more than doubled. When I talk to CIOs directly, and if you look at recent third-party data, organisations are betting on Microsoft for their AI transformation.”

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Salesforce’s approach, according to Benioff, goes a step beyond Copilot’s. The company’s headline announcement at Dreamforce was 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.

The agents can run 24/7 and be trained to resolve customer issues, offer refunds, and answer questions, leveraging business data already held by Salesforce. At Dreamforce, Salesforce encouraged customers to build AI agents, a process it said could take only 10 minutes.

“We’re only about one thing, customer success,” Benioff said. “We care about, are you successful? Yes or no. Are we getting you there? Yes or no. And where we have been successful as a company is, people will come in and say, you have to ‘DIY this’, about AI and agents.

“And we say, ‘oh no, you don’t have to spend that money’. This is a science project. They’re selling you science projects, and you need to move away from it. And over and over again with our best customers, we have shown them that our approach is better.”

Benioff, who has led Salesforce since its inception 25 years ago and is worth an estimated $US9.4 billion ($13.8 billion) said AI would likely lead to reduced headcount for some companies, though others would benefit from increased capabilities and therefore add staff.

Salesforce will charge $US2 per AI conversation, and Agentforce will be released widely to customers in October. Benioff underscored just how ambitious and aggressive his plan is: “We want to get a billion agents with our customers in the next 12 months.”

Despite the hype and strong initial customer interest, Salesforce – like Microsoft – is also coming up against uncertainty and scepticism around what is still a nascent technology. One key concern with use of generative AI in the workplace is its “hallucinations”, which are inaccurate or nonsensical outputs.

Salesforce encouraged customers to build AI agents, a process it said could take only 10 minutes.

Benioff said Salesforce’s agents will produce lower hallucinations than its rivals because it’s fed on customers’ data, which already exists on their Salesforce platform, rather than relying on data scraped from the public internet, as ChatGPT is for example.

The agent will also be much more limited in scope, and trained specifically to handle customer enquiries, so should be less prone to going off-piste.

Benioff said a tweet he posted six months ago – that AI large language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini are “just commodities” and that the real value lies in the data held by customers – led to a long phone conversation with Elon Musk, who agreed.

“And then I said what am I doing to help my customers realise that?,” Benioff said.

“It started to really bother me, and that’s where I was starting to ramp it up internally, and I said we’re going to deliver this by Dreamforce.

“So this isn’t some future fantasy thing, our customers are doing this right now.”

Salesforce’s share price has nearly doubled over the past five years, but the company is facing questions about its revenue growth, which is dropping to single digits after years of being in the double digits. While some tech companies like Nvidia and Oracle have benefited from the AI boom and grown sharply in valuation, other companies like Salesforce haven’t yet benefited to the same degree.

Agentforce should grow into a key revenue line for the company and help restore that double-digit growth, according to Salesforce president and chief operating officer Brian Millham.

“We absolutely see Agentforce as a driver of our growth going forward,” he said.

“At $US38 billion [in current full-year revenue] it’s hard to move the needle next week or next quarter, but in the long run, we feel that this is a huge opportunity for growth.

“Our international markets also remain a huge opportunity for us. We’ve had a lot of success here in the US and we’re a little overweight in terms of revenue. We see that as a huge opportunity for us to go and drive growth in the international markets.”

Salesforce has over 2500 employees in Australia, and the company’s general manager for Australia and New Zealand, Frank Fillmann, said some Australian companies are already deploying Agentforce ahead of its wider release.

He said appliance manufacturer Fisher and Paykel has reduced its service queries by 30 per cent, saving the company around 3300 hours per month in human productivity. Salesforce will also offer AI training from its Sydney office to help businesses better navigate AI technology.

“Having consumer generative AI like Copilot on your phone is great for meal planning or planning a vacation for your family, and it’s actually really clever, but the challenge is when you bring it into the workplace, it isn’t grounded in customer data so it isn’t relevant to the customer experience,” Fillmann said.

“We can take a few clicks to convert a use case into reality, versus what could be months or years to build yourself.”

David Swan travelled to Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.

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