Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has once again taken a swipe at Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, calling it “disappointing” and likening it to the much-mocked Clippy, Microsoft’s animated paperclip assistant from the late 1990s. In his latest post on X (formerly Twitter), Benioff didn’t mince words: "When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing. It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy. Gartner says it’s spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess. To add insult to injury, customers are then told to build their own custom LLMs. I have yet to find anyone who’s had a transformational experience with Microsoft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs. Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0."
This marks the second time Benioff has criticised Microsoft’s AI offering. Last month, at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, he first drew comparisons between Copilot and Clippy, branding it “Clippy 2.0.” He doubled down on this critique in his recent post, pointing to a Gartner report that he claims highlights the challenges users face with Microsoft’s AI tool. 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,” surveyed 132 IT leaders who had trialed the AI assistant. It found that many organisations were hesitant to roll out Copilot at scale, with concerns over oversharing and security issues delaying implementations by at least three months for 40% of the respondents.
“M365 Copilot honors user permissions. It also respects data security controls, such as sensitivity labels, where these have been correctly applied,” the Gartner report explains. However, it also noted that if these controls were not correctly set or permissions were overly broad, Copilot could retrieve or summarise sensitive content that users shouldn’t have access to.
Benioff’s criticism comes at a time when both Salesforce and Microsoft are vying for dominance in the AI-powered assistant space. Salesforce has its own AI assistant, Einstein Copilot, which Benioff has touted as a superior product compared to Microsoft’s offering.
Microsoft’s Copilot, launched for enterprise customers in November 2022, is built on the Azure OpenAI model. It uses data from private customer environments to offer tailored assistance for tasks like report generation and workflow optimisation. However, some users, including the CIO of a pharmaceutical company, have expressed dissatisfaction. The executive reportedly paid double the usual price to allow 500 employees to use Copilot but ultimately cancelled the upgrade, citing a lack of value for the cost.