Microsoft, Salesforce Compete for Sales, Service AI Agents

A month after Salesforce announced its AI agent technology and its CEO Marc Benioff criticized Microsoft’s AI efforts, Microsoft announced 10 new AI agents that can take care of tasks like sales, finance, and customer service.

AI agents are different from chatbots in one key way: they can act on an organization’s behalf instead of simply reciting information. So they can help process orders, for example.

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The tech has been in private preview since May and the agents will become available in public preview next month, per a press release.

Microsoft noted that McKinsey & Company is creating an AI agent to help onboard clients, with a pilot showing that the agent decreased admin work by 30%.

Microsoft’s decision to publicly preview its AI agents follows Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff calling Microsoft’s Copilot AI “disappointing.” He compared its staying power to that of Clippy, an infamous office assistant Microsoft ended in 2007.

Copilot is Microsoft’s AI assistant that integrates with popular Microsoft products, like Word and Excel.

“I don’t think Copilot will be around, I don’t think customers will use it,” Benioff said earlier this month.

Microsoft, meanwhile, says two out of five Fortune 100 companies have used Copilot, meaning that “tens of thousands of people” have interacted with it. Microsoft counts McDonald’s and biotech company Amgen as some of its AI clients.

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