Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been hitting the headlines over the past few months because of his sentiments toward Microsoft’s AI efforts. As you may already know, the AI bubble is the new craze in the tech industry that every major tech corporation is racing to adopt and integrate across its services. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has been the talk of the town after unveiling its V3-powered AI model, R1, which, according to benchmarks, surpassed OpenAI o1’s reasoning capabilities across math, science, and coding at a fraction of the development cost for proprietary models.
Microsoft Chief Communication Officer Frank X. Shaw recently addressed Benioff’s myriad of comments aimed at Microsoft’s AI and Copilot efforts on LinkedIn.
Lately, Marc Benioff has had quite a bit to say about Copilot and Microsoft’s AI strategy, which I recently provided comment for (in the FT: “Marc has no idea what he’s talking about.” In fact, I’m sure if anyone cared to plot a chart of our Copilot and agent news with Benioff’s posts on X, you’d find a relationship. As a communicator, I got curious. What’s behind this borderline obsession with Copilot? Well, it turns out there’s an answer in a playbook he published many years ago: “position yourself either as the leader, or against the leader in the industry”… and other sage advice in the excerpt below. Hint: it’s all about marketing, less about truth or substance.
It can be, as Marc notes, great marketing in the short term to highlight competitors. Of course, the challenge is that long term success requires actual competition. We’re still waiting.
And to my friends in the media…how does it feel to be used for marketing? If you need a quote….you know where to find me. 🤣Microsoft CCO, Frank X. Shaw
Last year, Benioff bashed Microsoft’s AI efforts, indicating the Redmond giant had done “a tremendous disservice” to the industry while referring to Copilot. According to the Salesforce CEO:
“When you look at how Copilot has been sold to our customers, it’s disappointing. It doesn’t work. It spews data all over our floors, it doesn’t deliver value. I haven’t found a customer who has transformational work with Copilot. Copilot is just the new Microsoft Clippy.”
Shaw’s LinkedIn post also features an attachment, which he refers to as Benioff’s playbook from many years ago. The executive indicated that Salesforce’s CEO had borrowed a page from his book to compete with rivals in the AI space. “Position yourself either as the leader, or against the leader in the industry,” a quote Shaw lifted from Benioff’s playbook. According to Microsoft’s CCO, Benioff’s comments about Microsoft’s AI efforts are “all about marketing, less about truth or substance.”
Marc Benioff — The Salesforce “marketing guru”
As Benioff notes in rule #23 of his playbook under the tagline “Reporters Are Writers, Tell Them a Story”:
“Although the battle between salesforce.com and Siebel wasn’t driven by a personal feud, the press didn’t see it that way, and reporters loved building drama around this story. That makes sense. After all, reporters like to tell a story with a protagonist and a villain.”
Elsewhere, the Salesforce CEO claimed Microsoft repackaged OpenAI and dropped it into Excel, further indicating that customers barely use Copilot, and that’s when they don’t have a ChatGPT license. He’s previously been spotted tooting his company’s own trumpet, indicating Salesforce is probably the largest AI enterprise supplier in the world, with the capability of doing “a couple of trillion AI transactions per week.”
Benioff was quick to indicate that Microsoft was in panic mode after it announced its plan to add support for creating autonomous agents to Copilot Studio, further indicating that Copilot is a flop because Microsoft lacks the data to create real corporate intelligence.
Microsoft CCO Frank Shaw isn’t the first executive at the company to call out Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff over his comments on the tech giant’s AI efforts. Earlier this month, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft CVP of Business & Industry, shared impressive stats indicating over “100,000 organizations” had used Copilot Studio to create AI agents by October 2024, potentially rebutting Benioff’s comments.
