Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s war of words with Microsoft rages on in Davos

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — The weather may have been chattering along the promenade in Davos, but that didn’t stop Salesforce ( CRM ) co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff from firing off a few new buzzwords at artificial intelligence rival Microsoft ( MSFT ).

“Everybody knows Microsoft let the world down with Copilot, and I mean it’s just a repackaged ChatGPT. You know that,” Benioff told Yahoo Finance at the World Economic Forum, continuing his long-running criticism of Microsoft’s AI business tools.

This comes hot on the heels of a shot at Salesforce by Microsoft’s often reserved CEO Satya Nadella.

“I think the idea that business applications exist, that’s probably where they’re all going to collapse, right, in the agent era, because if you really think about it, they’re basically CRUD databases with a lot of business logic, ” Nadella said on -a latest podcast recording with venture capitalists Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw declined to comment to Yahoo Finance about Benioff’s remark.

Benioff’s AI bots, which can autonomously answer customer questions or describe products to customers, go toe-to-toe with Microsoft’s Copilot for workplace superiority.

Salesforce closed 200 Agentforce deals in the third quarter. New users included FedEx ( FDX ), IBM ( IBM ) and Accenture ( ACN ). In total, Salesforce said it closed 2,000 AI-related deals in the third quarter.

Benioff declined to provide an updated figure on the number of Agentforce deals that have closed since the end of the third quarter. A source familiar with Salesforce told Yahoo Finance that consumption of Agentforce has been strong out of the gate, an important bottom-line signal since the company is paid $2 per conversation.

“Well, this is moving a lot faster than anything else we’ve ever done, and it’s been great, and it’s very exciting,” Benioff said.

The Street has largely piled in on the AI ​​agent bull narrative, sending Salesforce’s stock up more than 25% since new Agentforce solutions were introduced at the company’s annual Dreamforce event on Sept. 17.

But there are a few skeptics.

Earlier this month, Guggenheim analyst John DiFucci downgraded his rating to Sell in a rare move. He is only the second analyst on the Street to rate Salesforce a sell out of 51, according to Yahoo Finance data.

“We do not believe Salesforce will monetize Agentforce in a meaningful way unless it acquires several assets that over the past decade have done what Agentforce strives to do. Salesforce’s status as a system of record gives it staying power, but in our view it does” It gives it some advantage in delivering AI solutions that require dynamic data with rich context over the static data that Salesforce houses,” DiFucci said.

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