Salesforce Chief Marc Benioff. Evan Agostini
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff compared Microsoft Copilot to the much-maligned “Clippy” from Office.
Benioff made the remarks at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference last week.
Salesforce has just introduced its own suite of autonomous AI agents.
This is a machine translation of an article from our US colleagues at Business Insider. It was automatically translated and reviewed by a real editor.
It’s unclear which assistant should be more offended: Microsoft Copilot or Microsoft Office’s Clippy. But Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently took on both.
Benioff dismissed Microsoft’s Copilot AI features during an interview amid his company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
“We all know now that Microsoft Copilot is basically the new Microsoft Clippy, that customers get no benefit from it,” Benioff said in an interview with “Bloomberg„.
Microsoft introduced Clippy – the animated paperclip that made suggestions in Microsoft Word and other applications and can be seen as a very early version of an AI assistant – in the 1990s, but discontinued the feature a decade later.
Users found Karl Klammer annoying
Many users found Clippy’s overly positive attitude annoying and his suggestions unhelpful.
Karl Klammer, the former assistant of Microsoft. Microsoft
Last year, Microsoft introduced Copilot, touting it as “your copilot for work” that can “turn your words into the world’s most powerful productivity tool.”
Copilot was Microsoft’s entry into the race for AI products, which was mainly driven by OpenAI’s ChatGPT But Copilot was about as well received as Clippy.
Customers complained that the feature wasn’t as good as ChatGPT, even though it was built on OpenAI’s technology. Microsoft said customers simply weren’t using the features properly, but that didn’t stop some executives from backing out because of the high cost and low benefit.
Benioff’s Salesforce, of course, competes with Microsoft, so his criticism is not surprising. He also took aim at some other companies competing in the AI race, poking fun at AI products that rely on large language models, like ChatGPT.
“These LLMs, it’s like we’re selling scientific projects to companies, and they’re tired of it. They haven’t seen the value, which is why these clients are so excited. They come here and get immediate value,” Benioff said, referring to the clients who attended his conference.
Earlier this month, Salesforce launched Agentforce, a collection of independent, specialized AI agents to support businesses and their employees.
“We’ve brought tens of thousands of customers on board and convinced them that you don’t have to build your AI yourself,” Benioff told Bloomberg.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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