Salesforce Agentforce, Microsoft Copilot AI battle heats up

Earlier this year, Salesforce rebranded Einstein Copilot as Agentforce. Once the company ejected the word copilot from the cockpit, cofounder and CEO Marc Benioff began to criticize Microsoft Copilot, likening it to Microsoft Office's 1990s and 2000s rules-based agent, "Clippy."

Benioff's bashing started Aug. 28, during the company's most recent quarterly earnings call. In his Dreamforce keynote this month, he doubled down and said Microsoft customers failed to derive value from their Copilot investments, calling it a "science project." He said on social media that Microsoft Copilot suffers from "a lack of context, skills and adaptability."

Where does this leave Salesforce's relationship with Microsoft?

"Very good," Benioff said when asked directly, his tone unmistakably dripping with snark and sarcasm. "I love them. They're great. An impressive company. They have tremendous acuity in their ability to run their business." He then listed several of Microsoft's questionable competitive issues over the years, even going back to Netscape -- which led to the U.S. government's antitrust case against Microsoft.

Microsoft declined to comment for this story. After Benioff first slagged Microsoft in the late-August quarterly earnings call, however, Microsoft's corporate vice president for artificial intelligence at work, Jared Spataro, responded to the Copilot criticism. He said both internal Microsoft and third-party measurements show a doubling of Copilot daily users in the previous quarter -- and a 60% increase in sales, quarter over quarter -- proves it brings value to the workplace.

Salesforce reportedly has about 150,000 customers. Microsoft has about 85% market penetration for productivity apps. In theory, 127,500 customers would integrate Microsoft 365 and the Salesforce platform for email, calendar, to-dos and contact management to drive business. Salesforce claimed upward of 25 million end users in 2022, which would mean that, likely, 21.5 million users need Salesforce and Microsoft to get along for their systems to continue to work together.

"There's always noise in the system," said Ian Kahn, PwC principal and alliance leader for the professional services company's Salesforce practice. "Frankly speaking, I don't think our clients care about it. You tune out the noise."

Rebecca Wettemann, founder of research and advisory firm Valoir, said that while she can confirm some of the things Benioff said -- such as Copilots don't work very well and not a lot of customers are deploying them yet -- many Salesforce customers are on Azure, Microsoft's public cloud.

"You've got to play both sides. You have to," Wettemann said. "You've got to be on Azure, because it's one of the biggest public clouds, and people want to be there. But you also got to take potshots at Microsoft. That's the way the world works."

Salesforce's AI tools, of course, are specialized for sales, service, marketing and e-commerce. They are embedded in the company's apps. Users can compose agents in Slack, and there are many industry-specific tools for different verticals. By comparison, Microsoft Copilots are more general use. Copilots are also embedded in apps and have a no-code "wizard" interface to bring in data from sources -- including Salesforce. Microsoft recently added Copilot agents, AI assistants that can automate and execute business processes.

While there are similarities between Salesforce Agentforce and Microsoft Copilot, in the end, Benioff isn't comparing apples to apples, even if Salesforce aspires to get users to build agents that tap other vendors' app data and warehouses. Salesforce's AI is much more targeted to service, sales and marketing, while Microsoft's targets office worker productivity.

That, however, is business as usual.

"If they didn't make aggressive marketing claims," Wettemann said, "it wouldn't be Dreamforce."

Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.