Microsoft and Salesforce’s AI agent war is getting serious. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, in a recent podcast, criticised Microsoft’s Copilot. “This Copilot thing has been a huge disaster for them from a branding and validation standpoint. Customers don’t look at them and don’t take them seriously in AI,” Benioff said.
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He was responding to Microsoft Chief Satya Nadella, who recently, in a podcast, indirectly took a dig at Salesforce by saying that traditional SaaS companies will collapse in the AI agent era. “I think the notion that business applications exist—that’s probably where they’ll all collapse, right, in the agent era. Because if you think about it, right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic,” he said.
“Business logic is all going to these agents, and these agents are going to be multi-repo CRUD. They’re not going to discriminate between what the back end is; they’re going to update multiple databases, and all the logic will be in the AI tier,” Nadella added.
Furthermore, Benioff expressed his scepticism about Microsoft’s approach to integrating AI into its enterprise offerings, particularly through its Copilot initiative.
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“Microsoft has disappointed everybody with how they’ve approached this kind of AI world,” Benioff said. He suggested that Copilot, which incorporates OpenAI technology into Microsoft’s products has failed to deliver transformative results for customers.
“Customers are not finding themselves transformed with this Copilot technology,” Benioff said. He added, “I’ve spoken to these customers, they barely use it, and that’s only if they don’t already have a ChatGPT license or something like that in front of them.”
Benioff said Salesforce is making progress in the AI space, highlighting the company’s focus on delivering an “agentic platform” that is already in production and widely adopted by enterprise customers. “We’re delivering this at scale globally to our customers,” he said, adding that Salesforce is currently handling two trillion enterprise AI transactions per week.
He suggested that Microsoft’s AI strategy has not resonated with enterprise customers, claiming, “Customers don’t look at them and don’t take them seriously in AI, nor should they, because they’re not even making the AI themselves.”
Benioff also commented on Microsoft’s business strategy, accusing the company of being a “fast follower” in the software industry. “I’m sure they will try to copy our stuff like they usually do and move towards us, but we’re out there right now in production with thousands of customers,” he said.
At the recent Microsoft AI Tour in Bengaluru, Nadella said that “building agents should be as simple as creating a spreadsheet”. He introduced a no-code platform called Copilot Studio that allows users to create new agents based on their needs.
“Think of AI as a co-pilot for your work. It’s the UI for AI,” Nadella said, illustrating the role it will play as an interface between employees and the AI. He gave the example of an AI agent in a healthcare setting, describing a scenario where a doctor prepares for a tumour board meeting, and the AI creates the agenda, prioritises cases, and takes detailed notes during the discussion.
Meanwhile, Salesforce launched Agentforce 2.0 last month, an upgraded version of its digital labour platform designed to augment enterprise teams with autonomous AI agents.
