Marc Benioff Trashes Microsoft Copilot, Says Salesforce Is Becoming A Digital Labor Provider: 'This Is What AI Was Meant To Be'

Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM) co-founder, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff took a shot at Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) while laying out his vision for the future of AI Wednesday in a CNBC interview from the World Economic Forum.

What Happened: Benioff told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin that Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot has already failed. He claimed that it has “no adoption” and is just a repackaged form of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“It’s not what AI was meant to be,” Benioff said.

According to Benioff, AI is meant to be experienced through agents that work in parallel with humans, but he may just be talking his own book.

Salesforce aims to be a leader in the AI agent space through its Agentforce offering. Agentforce allows customers to build autonomous AI agents that can work with humans to support customers and teams.

“That is what AI was meant to be … Every company is going to become agent-first,” the Salesforce chief said.

See Also: Apple’s AI Advances Can’t Offset Chinese Market Slowdown, Says Analyst

Salesforce has focused on helping companies manage information in the past, but the company is transitioning into a digital labor provider, Benioff said, adding that Salesforce is now focused on supplying digital workers for customers.

The company is also transitioning its own workforce to make it more digital. Benioff told Sorkin that 2025 will be the first year in the history of Salesforce that the company will not hire any net new software engineers. Instead, digital agents will be handling more and more work, he said.

“This is the moment of transformation in our industry that I’ve been waiting for … I’ve never been this excited about our industry,” Benioff said.

Salesforce shares were up 1.6% at $332.07 at the time of publication Wednesday, according to Benzinga Pro.

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