Microsoft and Salesforce’s AI Agent War Gets Dirty
After criticising Microsoft at the recent Dreamforce conference, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took to X to attack its competitor some more. “Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff posted on X. “Let’s be real—Copilot’s a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence…” He further said the tech giant’s AI companion, Copilot, was inaccurate, leaking corporate data, and forcing customers to build their own LLMs. Comparing it with Salesforce’s AI agent, Benioff said Agentforce doesn’t just handle tasks, it also autonomously drives sales, service, marketing, analytics, and commerce. This reaction came when Microsoft announced new autonomous agent capabilities across Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365. During the announcement, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said the new agents will help customers boost the impact of every individual, team and business function. “Copilot is the UI for AI, and with Copilot Studio, customers can easily create, manage, and connect agents to Copilot,” Nadella said. But Benioff wasn’t about to let that pass without firing salvos. Earlier this month, he had compared Coilot with Clippy 2.0. “When you look at how Copilot has been delivered to customers, it’s disappointing. It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t deliver any level of accuracy,” Benioff said in a post on X. Leading analyst firms opine that Copilot was making customers deal with the data mess while they build their custom LLMs. “I have yet to find anyone who’s had a transformational experience with Microsoft Copilot or the pursuit of training and retraining custom LLMs. Copilot is more like Clippy 2.0,” Benioff added. Meanwhile, at Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce launched its Agentforce Partner Network. This global ecosystem brings together top partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM, and Workday, to enhance the capabilities of its AI-driven Agentforce platform. Who Offers Better AI Solutions for CRM? As leading tech giants in the enterprise software industry, both Microsoft and Salesforce have been competing over AI agents. Salesforce’s agents are embedded into its CRM platform. Einstein AI and Einstein GPT enhance CRM functions like sales automation, customer service, and marketing personalisation. Salesforce Copilot assists sales, marketing, and customer service reps by providing insights, drafting content, and suggesting next steps. Not to be left behind, Microsoft, too, is increasingly pushing its Dynamics 365 platform in the CRM and ERP space. The introduction of Copilot and autonomous agents within Dynamics 365 Microsoft brings the next-generation AI to every line of business. Salesforce vs Microsoft. Which company will do better in the next years? byu/NeighborhoodNo3586 insales “I prefer dynamics. I switched 2.5 years ago and had the chance to come back but I stayed in the dynamics universe. I like the whole UI much more, the customising process is much smoother imho and end users love the Microsoft integration and business owners the price. However I prefer Salesforce trailheads to Microsoft learning. Feature-wise they’re almost the same,” said a Reddit user. Flexibility and Customisation While Salesforce is highly customisable in the CRM context, Microsoft is taking a more integrated approach by positioning its AI agents across all business functions, not just customer engagement. Salesforce enables businesses to customise their Einstein Bots and Salesforce Copilot to align with customer engagement workflows by automating certain tasks. With the introduction of Copilot Studio, Microsoft allows the customisation of AI agents, not only within CRM but across a wide range of business functions. It offers a low code/no code platform that enables users to design, manage and scale autonomous agents capable of performing complex tasks without constant human interaction. Generative AI vs Predictive AI “Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI tool for CRM,” claims Salesforce. While Salesforce leans heavily into generative AI within the CRM space, Microsoft aims to combine both generative and predictive AI capabilities across a broader spectrum of business solutions. With Einstein GPT, Salesforce has embraced generative AI to enhance its CRM platform, particularly in terms of content creation. Einstein GPT generates personalised marketing emails, sales follow-ups, and even customer service responses based on CRM data. “We have the world’s #1 CRM and the world’s most robust customer data set, which allows Einstein GPT to produce AI content in a way that no other enterprise technology company can match,” says Salesforce. Einstein AI also provides predictive analytics, helping businesses forecast customer behaviour, sales outcomes, and service needs based on past interactions and current data. Similarly, Copilot also uses generative AI across multiple business applications, to help users create documents, spreadsheets, presentations and customer communications. However, its AI agents in Dynamics 365 and Azure go beyond generative tasks, including predictive and autonomous decision-making. AI Agents for All OpenAI recently introduced a new approach for creating and deploying multi-agent AI systems: The Swarm framework. The most crucial aspect of Swarm is simplicity and control. It is designed to ease the process of creating and managing multiple AI agents that can work together seamlessly to accomplish complex tasks. Shyamal Anadkat, a researcher at OpenAI, wrote on X that Swarm is not an official OpenAI product, but is more of a cookbook. “It’s an experimental code for building simple agents. It’s not meant for production and won’t be maintained by us,” he wrote, clarifying that Swarm is an open-source, community-driven initiative. The experimental framework by OpenAI has revived discussions about the impact of AI-driven automation on enterprises. Because of its lightweight nature and control, companies can use Swarm to create networks of specialised, interconnected AI agents to generate sales leads, provide customer support, develop marketing campaigns, and more – with little to no human intervention. Khosla Ventures-backed DevRev, an AI-native platform for enterprises, has unveiled new product enhancements aimed at transforming enterprise SaaS through advanced conversational AI Agents to streamline workflows and simplify operations for businesses, addressing common challenges in AI adoption. The new “Conversational AI Builder” allows businesses to design custom AI agents through a no-code interface, ensuring up to 95% accuracy in completing tasks. “AI agents will only be as good as the context we provide them,” the company said, emphasising the role of its knowledge graph in powering its AgentOS platform. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla recently predicted that AI agents will increasingly handle most consumer interactions online, filtering out marketers and bots. This raises the critical question of how enterprises are using AI agents to address business challenges and drive efficiency. As highlighted in this list of top 10 AI agents used in enterprise automation, companies across industries – from finance to customer service – are already implementing AI agents to streamline operations, enhance customer management and optimise workflows.
As leading tech giants in the enterprise software industry, both Microsoft and Salesforce have been competing over their autonomous agents.
As leading tech giants in the enterprise software industry, both Microsoft and Salesforce have been competing over their autonomous agents.
["AI", "AI Agents", "Microsoft", "Salesforce"]
["OpenAI", "AI", "autonomous agents", "AWS", "ML", "Azure", "AI Agents", "Aim", "Salesforce", "analytics", "generative AI", "predictive analytics", "Microsoft"]
["AI", "ML", "analytics", "generative AI", "OpenAI", "Aim", "autonomous agents", "predictive analytics", "AWS", "Azure"]
Shalini is a senior tech journalist, exploring the latest advancements in AI. When she's not reporting on the latest innovations, you can find her immersed in her next literary adventure.