Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff clearly isn't impressed with Microsoft Copilot. This can be said on the basis of the executive’s latest post on X in which he compared the AI-powered chatbot and interface with the discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office Clippy.
“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. Gartner says it’s spilling data everywhere, and customers are left cleaning up the mess,” Benioff said in a post on X.
“To add insult to injury, customers are then told to build their own 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,” he added.
Benioff’s post has reference from a report by Gartner, which highlighted potential security risks associated with Microsoft Copilot. The report, based on a survey of 132 IT leaders, found that concerns about data oversharing and security are causing many organisations to delay their Copilot deployments.
While Gartner acknowledges that Copilot generally adheres to security protocols and user permissions, it warns that improper configuration or overly permissive access controls could lead to unintentional data exposure.
“M365 Copilot honors user permissions. It also respects data security controls, such as sensitivity labels, where these have been correctly applied. However, if controls have not been correctly applied or permissions are too open, M365 Copilot can increase the risk of oversharing by retrieving, summarising and generating content that the user should not have access to. It could also surface content that should no longer exist,” said the August report titled “Copilot for Microsoft 365: Assessing the Impact and Value So Far.”
Incidentally, this is the second time in a month that he has compared Copilot with the Office Assistant, with the first instance being at the Dreamforce conference in mid-September.
What Salesforce CEO said at Dreamforce conference
Benioff dismissed competition posed by Microsoft and said “that Microsoft Copilot is basically the new Microsoft Clippy, that customers have not gotten value from it.”
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