The biggest hype man in the tech industry - Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff - has a message for you: he's totally stoked for generative AI, but even he doesn't think it can do what the biggest proponents of the tech say it will. And he - not surprisingly - blames Microsoft.

A month after Salesforce's ginormous tech conference, Dreamforce, during which Benioff incessantly pitched, pumped, and lauded AI — at least as it's used in Salesforce's own products — he's now on a setting-expectations tour. And he's trash talking his biggest competitor and arch rival, Microsoft. He recently appeared on the podcast Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Bob Safian.

Of AI's potential, he said: "I've never been more excited about anything at Salesforce maybe in my career."
But he also warned that "customers have been told things about enterprise AI maybe AI overall that are not true," he said. "I think Microsoft has done a tremendous disservice to not only our whole industry but all of the AI research that has been done."

He was very critical of Microsoft Copilot's accuracy and usefulness. In fact, Benioff had nothing but negative things to say about Microsoft Copilot. He even compared Copilot to Clippy, an assistant which the tech giant was supposed to launch for users of Microsoft Office in the 1990s.

We may have heard from those AI priests and priestesses of these LLM model companies and Microsoft and others about AI is now curing cancer, and AI is curing climate change, and we all have to plug into these nuclear power plants to get these data centers. None of this is true," Benioff said.

He is doubling down on the comment he made to X, stating, "LLMs are not the direct bridge to AGI, and much of AI's current potential is simply oversold. AI isn't yet curing cancer or solving climate change as pundits claim.".

That was a jab at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In June, he speculated that with AI-facilitated health tech, "maybe a future version will help discover cures for cancer," Altman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, reported Newsweek .

Benioff also mentioned some research by Gartner on Microsoft Copilot. There's also a Gartner report from April, "The Top 10 'Gotchas' of Copilot for Microsoft 365," that determined at the time that only a quarter of those organizations running Copilot pilot programs have plans for a large-scale rollout. I'd say that's actually a pretty good number, especially for how young this tech is and how slow enterprises often are at adopting it. But Gartner also concluded that the better Copilot becomes, so too will enterprise adoption.

Microsoft might be referencing to a Forrester report that said it showed a long list of bottom-line benefits for small businesses that are using Copilot. The report said that Copilot slightly raised revenue, reduced operating expense, and made hiring new workers more quickly, based on a study of 266 small organizations. Now, we have to mention that this was sponsored by Microsoft. Interpret that however you choose to.

Still, the second point of Benioff's is more valid: the GenAI of today is mind-blowing, yes, but still doesn't sit as a replacement to the worker in many cases. Sure, Google's NotebookLM crafting podcast is some party trick that potentially brings bantering AI-generated hosts with explanations about material-but hard to see exactly how this is going to directly go toward cutting some of the soul-sucking menial labor tasks stuck in most corporate jobs.

Benioff is also spot on that the one area where GenAI does seem to be doing a screaming good job with enterprises is AI agents. That ties in nicely with the Salesforce product he has been hyping of late, Agentforce. A slew of other tech companies and startups are working on AI agent technologies, too-from building use case-specific ones, to offering platforms where businesses can build their own. Just a few examples include OutRival, Atlassian's Rovo AI, and Sierra-the startup founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and Google vet Clay Bavor.

AI agents are also very much becoming part of customer service, from much improved website chatbots to field service guides. Examples include Zingtree, Talla, or Neuron7. Salesforce also has offerings here, too.

AI agents also are making a mark with sales, particularly prospecting, the high-rejection rate cold-calling and emailing that is the bottom tier of every sales organization. Examples include Regie.ai, AiSDR, Artisan, and 11x.ai.

"I think we'll have more than a billion agents running from Salesforce within the next 12 months," Benioff speculated, based, he said, on getting about 10,000 customers at his tech conference to try it.

But again, it is also worth noting that there are many other areas where LLMs already are valued and where, specifically, Microsoft does have game. Software programmers and engineers increasingly use them to help them test and debug or even generate code examples, including with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. Countless startups are offering AI coding assistants as well, like JetBrains and Continue, to name just a couple.

With OpenAI, Microsoft's tentacles into GenAI extend far beyond having Word write documents, having Excel whip up charts, or having Teams transcribe meetings. In fact, the close relation to OpenAI means that its cloud Azure is a popular choice for enterprises that use LLM models in building their own GenAI apps, as well.

While the people literally selling their own AI products by talking up AI are warning that the AI is all hype, it's probably safe to say that AI is indeed much more overhyped.

"It's about managing expectations while harnessing AI's capabilities," Benioff explained.