At the Salesforce Dreamforce conference last week, Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO, compared Microsoft’s Copilot to ‘Clippy’. This was his reply to the question asked by a Bloomberg journalist while trying to dismiss his competitor’s AI assistants as underdeveloped and inefficient.
For those who don’t remember the decade ago launched Clippy, it was the prototype of an AI assistant in the shape of an animated paperclip. It appeared randomly on Microsoft Word files prompting users to ask questions and delivered not so accurate replies.
Marc Benioff further remarked that AI products like the LLMs are being sold like science projects to companies with little value to offer. He also pointed out that compared to other artificial intelligence services, Salesforce’s Agentforce is far better and more advanced.
In the conference, he assured the investors confidently that, “We’ve onboarded tens of thousands of customers, and we’ve convinced them that you don’t have to DIY your AI. This is a direct hit at Microsoft, which has been promoting Copilot as a powerful productivity tool.
Even though Microsoft’s Copilot has been largely driven by OpenAI ChatGPT, many users are not convinced that the product is as good as it seems. This is not just the case with one company, other AI-driven chatbots are only being used for answering basic questions. Google’s Gemini is also in its infancy and lots of AI-based image and video editing tools are far from perfect.
While customers are excited for the advanced artificial intelligence integration in varied industries, if these automated tools are inefficient then investing in them is a mere trend.
