You won’t believe what Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had to say about Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Copilot

Microsoft (MSFT -0.78%) was an early winner of the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). The company was an early investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI and has moved quickly to leverage the development capabilities of generative AI.

The fruit of these efforts is Copilot, Microsoft’s suite of AI-powered digital assistants, and its user base has grown like wildfire. The company recently reported that “60% of the Fortune 500 have adopted Copilots, and 65% are using Azure OpenAI Service.” This seems to suggest that Copilot has been wildly successful — but not everyone is convinced.

A blast from the past

to Salesforce (CRM 0.30%) At the annual Dreamforce user conference this week, CEO Marc Benioff had some choice words about Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant: “Microsoft Copilot is basically the new Microsoft Clippy that customers haven’t gotten value from.” Regarding the recent rush to develop the large language models (LLMs) that underlie generative AI, “It’s like we’re selling science projects to companies and they’re sick of it.”

Benioff is referring to Microsoft’s widely despised animated paper clip introduced as part of Office 96. The “intelligent” digital assistant was designed to help with certain tasks, but was seen more as an annoyance and reviled by users. As such, Benioff’s comments had a mocking tone.

The comments came as Benioff touted Salesforce’s Agentforce utility, his own suite of AI “agents” designed to help employees be more productive by streamlining tasks in service, sales, commerce and marketing, “driving unprecedented efficiency.” . If this sounds a lot like what Copilot does, that’s because it is.

So what does this mean for Microsoft investors? In a word: nothing. It’s clear that Benioff has an ulterior motive for promoting Salesforce’s own AI tools.

Despite its disparaging comments, customers continue to adopt Copilot at a rapid pace, and Microsoft has a list of testimonials from users detailing how they use Copilot to save time and money. Salesforce has yet to prove the value of its offering.

Oh, and at 37 times earnings, Microsoft stock is cheaper.