Salesforce CEO Benioff Calls Microsoft Copilot ‘Repackaged ChatGPT’

'Salesforce now can operate a company on our platform–and I don't think you’re going to find that on Microsoft's website,' Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says.

Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff continued his attacks on artificial intelligence rival Microsoft during the vendor’s latest quarterly earnings call, calling Microsoft’s Copilot AI offerings a rebranding of generative AI offered by Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

“In many ways, it’s just repackaged ChatGPT,” Benioff said on the call. “You can really see the difference where Salesforce now can operate a company on our platform–and I don't think you're going to find that on Microsoft's website. … Go ahead and try to find this running on Microsoft.com.”

CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.

Benioff said the San Francisco-based customer relationship management (CRM) vendor’s Agentforce AI product on the Help.Salesforce.com portal and other parts of the company will “deflect between a quarter and a half of our annual case volume, and in optimistic cases, probably much, much more.”

The help portal handled 60 million sessions and more than 2 million support cases a year.

Salesforce Q3 2024

Brian Millham, Salesforce president and chief operating officer, illustrated the partner opportunity with the vendor in the AI era during the call. Millham said that global partners were involved in 75 percent of Agentforce deals in the quarter and nine of Salesforce’s top 10 wins in the quarter.

More than 80,000 system integrators have completed Agentforce training, Millham said. Hundreds of independent software vendors (ISVs) and technology partners are building and selling agents.

Accenture–No. 1 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–has leveraged Agentforce for improving sales operations and bid management for its 52,000 global sellers, he said.

“Our partners are also becoming agent-first enterprises themselves,” he said.

200 Agentforce Deals

On the call–covering the three months ended Oct. 31–Benioff said the current AI era is about empowering digital labor with autonomous AI agents.

“Salesforce has become, right out of the gate here, the largest supplier of digital labor,” Benioff said. “This is just the beginning. … We have 135,000 customers. And those 135,000 customers have now been endowed with Agentforce. It's in every single one of those implementations today. It's just a switch that needs to get flipped on.”

Agentforce became generally available (GA) Oct. 24 and has already delivered 200 deals, Benioff said. He described a pipeline of “thousands” of future transactions and hailed AI as a possible solution to stagnating labor worldwide.

“This is really a moment where productivity is no longer tied to workforce growth,” he said. “This is intelligent technology that can be scaled without limits. And Agentforce represents this next evolution of Salesforce.”

Use cases for Agentforce so far include solving customer issues, processing qualifying leads, closing deals, creating and improving marketing campaigns and more, he said. Salesforce is hiring between 1,000 and 2,000 more salespeople to help bring Agentforce to the masses.

Agentforce is grounded on 740,000 Salesforce documents and 200 to 300 petabytes of data, he said. “That gives us this … almost unfair advantage with Agentforce because our agents are going to be more accurate and the least hallucinogenic of any because they have access to this incredible capability.”

Benioff called Salesforce “the largest supplier of enterprise AI in the world” with 2 trillion transactions a week with its Einstein AI product. Benioff said that Salesforce AI bests competitors’ offerings because of the unified code tying its offerings together. Competitors have different systems and applications running independently, interfering with AI results.

“This is a bold leap into the future of work where AI agents–with humans–unite to transform all of our customer interactions,” he said.

Growth Throughout The Portfolio

Millham said on the call that the vendor saw the number of $1 million-plus wins with AI during the quarter more than tripled year over year.

Data Cloud was part of eight of Salesforce’s top 10 wins in the quarter. Salesforce customers are processing 767 trillion records every month, he said.

Salesforce’s Sales and Service clouds each saw double digit growth in the quarter. Commerce Cloud powered close to 50 million orders on digital storefronts during Cyber Week holiday sales.

Salesforce powered nearly 60 billion AI-powered product recommendations, a 21 percent increase year over year, he said. More than 56 billion messages were sent with Marketing Cloud. Service Cloud helped customers field and resolve 3.8 billion cases.

Annual spend on Slack AI grew nearly 50 percent quarter over quarter, with Slack AI summarizing more than 600 million messages since its release, saving users a collective 1.1 million hours. Slack was included in more than a third of Salesforce deals greater than $1 million.

When asked on the call by an analyst whether Agentforce’s $2 per conversation is acceptable to customers, Millham said, “Our customers really understand the costs of their labor right now, and when we can deploy agents to help them manage their interactions with their customers, the pricing conversations are significantly easier.”

Q3 In Detail

Salesforce reported $9.44 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 8 percent year over year. As part of that revenue, Salesforce subscription and support revenue during the quarter was $8.88 billion, up 9 percent year over year.

The vendor’s current remaining performance obligation (cRPO) was $26.4 billion, an increase of 10 percent year over year. RPO was $53.1 billion, up 10 percent year over year. Salesforce Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver said that Agentforce’s recent availability means it was not “a material contributor to cRPO” during the quarter.

Salesforce’s operating cash flow for the quarter was $1.98 billion, up 29 percent year over year. Free cash flow was up 30 percent year over year to $1.78 billion.

Salesforce expects between $9.9 billion and $10.1 billion in the fourth fiscal quarter–representing growth year over year between 7 percent and 9 percent.

The vendor raised its fiscal year revenue guidance to between $37.8 billion and $38 billion. This represents growth of between 8 percent and 9 percent. Salesforce still expects full fiscal year subscription and support revenue growth of about 10 percent year over year.

Weaver said that during the quarter, Salesforce’s core clouds and subscription revenue helped drive sales. The vendor saw deceleration in license revenue growth for MuleSoft and Tableau.

Health, life sciences, manufacturing and automotive were among the better performing industries, with retail and consumer goods not performing as well.

Salesforce’s stock was about $365 a share after market close Tuesday, up about 10 percent.