Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, has lamented the performance of Microsoft Copilot within customer experience environments and beyond.
The CEO did so during the vendor’s latest earnings call, where Salesforce announced revenue growth of eight percent year-over-year (YoY), exceeding analyst expectations.
During the call, Benioff stated:
So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilots because they're not getting the accuracy and the response that they want. Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI.
While Benioff is not immune to taking potshots at rivals – recently comparing Salesforce vs. ServiceNow to McDonald’s vs. Wienerschnitzel – he is not alone in his criticism.
Indeed, recent commentary from Inc. Magazine included several accounts from underwhelmed Microsoft Copilot customers before giving the solution a D- rating.
However, the CEO has extra motivation for the low blow as Salesforce prepares for the formal launch of its Agentforce platform.
The platform will allow customers to build their own bots or "agents" to perform tasks autonomously – across Salesforce CRM apps – with human oversight.
In other words, the CRM leader is pivoting its generative AI (GenAI) strategy from "human in the loop" copilots to "human at the helm" autonomous agents.
With Agentforce set to receive its grand reveal at next month's Dreamforce event, Benioff teased:
This is really the future… and with this Agentforce platform, we're making it easy to build these powerful autonomous agents for sales, service, marketing, [and] for commerce.
"Embedding [these] agents in the flow of work and getting our customers to the agent future first… this is the primary goal of our company right now."
In July, Salesforce got ahead of the curve and announced an autonomous agent for customer service before unveiling two for sales teams just last week.
From September, the vendor will likely house these within Agentforce.
Yet, Salesforce has already put some of these autonomous agents in the hands of several early adopters, and Benioff shared several emerging success stories.
For instance, one of the largest healthcare companies in the world – with 20 million US consumers – is reportedly resolving 90 percent of patient queries autonomously via Agentforce.
The publisher Wiley is another early adopter, which has experienced a 50 percent uptick in case resolution. Benioff also quoted the business as stating:
We're seeing double-digit percentage increase in customer satisfaction and deflection rate compared to older technologies, and these [are the] early weeks of our busiest season.
Additional early adopters include ADP, OpenTable, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
