Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has once again criticized Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, calling it “disappointing” and comparing it to the much-mocked Clippy, Microsoft’s animated paperclip helper from the late 1990s. In his most recent post on X (previously Twitter), Benioff was blunt: “When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing.” It simply doesn’t work, and it provides no amount of precision. Gartner claims that data is pouring everywhere, leaving customers to clean up the mess. To add insult to injury, clients are instructed to create their unique LLMs. I have yet to come across anyone who has had a transformative experience with Microsoft Copilot or the quest of training and retraining custom LLMs.
This is the second time Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s AI offerings. At Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference last month, he first compared Copilot to Clippy, calling it “Clippy 2.0.” He expanded on this criticism in a recent post, citing a Gartner analysis that he believes demonstrates the difficulties customers have with Microsoft’s AI technology. According to Benioff, “Microsoft is spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess.”
The Gartner report, titled “Copilot for Microsoft 365: Assessing the Impact and Value So Far,” polled 132 IT leaders who have used the AI assistant. It discovered that many organizations were unwilling to roll out Copilot at scale, with concerns about oversharing and security issues delaying implementations by at least three months.
“M365 Copilot respects user permissions.” It also respects data security rules, such as sensitivity labels, when properly applied, according to the Gartner assessment. However, it was warned that if these controls were not properly configured or permissions were extremely broad, Copilot might obtain or summarise sensitive content that users should not have access to.
Benioff’s criticism comes as both Salesforce and Microsoft compete for dominance in the AI-powered assistant area. Salesforce has its own AI helper, Einstein Copilot, which Benioff regards as a superior solution to Microsoft’s offering.
Microsoft’s Copilot, which was released for enterprise clients in November 2022, is based on the Azure OpenAI concept. It uses data from private customer environments to provide specialized assistance with tasks such as report preparation and workflow optimization. The CEO reportedly paid twice the customary fee to allow 500 employees to use Copilot but later canceled the upgrade, citing a lack of value for the investment.