Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Says Microsoft Copilot Has Disappointed Many Customers (theverge.com) 52
Marc Benioff said Microsoft's Copilot AI hasn't lived up to the hype. The Salesforce CEO said on the company's second-quarter earnings call that its own AI is nothing like Copilot, which he said was unimpressive. From a report: "So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilot because they're not getting the accuracy and the response that they want," Benioff said. "Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI."
Microsoft Copilot integrates OpenAI's ChatGPT tech into the company's existing suite of business software like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that comes with Microsoft 365. Launched last year, Copilot is meant to help companies boost productivity by responding to employee prompts and helping them with daily tasks like scheduling meetings, writing up product announcements, and creating presentations. In response to Benioff's comments, Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate vice president for AI at work, said in a statement to Fortune that the company was "hearing something quite different" from its customers.
Microsoft Copilot integrates OpenAI's ChatGPT tech into the company's existing suite of business software like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that comes with Microsoft 365. Launched last year, Copilot is meant to help companies boost productivity by responding to employee prompts and helping them with daily tasks like scheduling meetings, writing up product announcements, and creating presentations. In response to Benioff's comments, Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate vice president for AI at work, said in a statement to Fortune that the company was "hearing something quite different" from its customers.
easy AI button (Score:4, Interesting)
we are looking for the easy button that lets us fire every one and profit.
In other news, speculating .... (Score:2)
A big CRM company similar to SalesForce, but not Salesforce introduces its own AI add in for its environment for 2025....
Microsoft's AI displaced
Zarro boosts found. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Zarro boosts found. (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much what you'd expect.
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The bold vision [salesforce.com] is chatbots that you can use to keep customers away from more expensive and useful customer service; plus some tools to help sales minions generate spam email more efficiently.
Pretty much what you'd expect.
Honestly, if done correctly this could be a boon for customer service.
Imagine a world where you could reach a person who already had some idea as to what your issue was and had the information in front of them to be able to assist you in fixing it.
Why yes, I do believe in faeries, why do you ask...
In all seriousness, I've seen a few of the systems designed to do just that, replace the front line CSMs with a chat bot that will do the grunt work like customer ID verification, account retrieval, getti
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Copilot is meant to help companies boost productivity by responding to employee prompts and helping them with daily tasks like scheduling meetings,...
Man, I've always needed so much help scheduling meetings. This truly is a brave new world...
Re:Zarro boosts found. (Score:4, Informative)
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Actually I would've loved an AI to schedule meetings for me back when my meetings were all in person. Trying to schedule a meeting with 6+ people from different floors/buildings in a large corporation with hundreds of conference rooms of varying sizes across multiple neighboring buildings was a nightmare. Especially when you got the inevitable message back saying that they forgot to add a conflict to their calendar that they were already committed to. A chatbot could've made that a ton easier.
I've done it. We used Microsoft Exchange and had rooms set up as resources. You could see when employees and rooms had nothing scheduled, and select those times. We still have that. It really depends on what software your company utilizes.
Re: Zarro boosts found. (Score:3)
That's not entirely incorrect, but I prefer to call it Drupal for Dumbshits.
Re: Zarro boosts found. (Score:2)
One thing it could potentially do is improve search.
Salesforce's search was abysmal so they made a new search that is only bad and named it Einstein. It's still quite worthless, however.
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You don't think that business copy writes itself do you? Somebody with no gag reflex has to write all that executing synergy alignment core strength metacarpal self-stimulating inspiration themselves. Such people are expensive and their talents are in high demand in other industries.
Salesforce is EVIL (Score:1)
My favorite AIChat followup response (Score:2)
Oh, yes, and that additional thing I missed in the list the first time I responded, whoopsie!
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Thank you, CuriousButterfly, for your support and evangelism! Your check is in the mail.
Sincerely,
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce Inc.
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GenAI depends on mass economy to improve. OpenAI has it. Ali has it. The rest don't.
It doesn't matter what is better today. What matters is what is used more as that's what decides what is better tomorrow.
What did they expect? (Score:3)
Say it isn't so (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft ... disappoints ... no, please say it isn't so.
John Mulaneys comedy set at Dreamforce (Score:5, Funny)
is making the news rounds today as he took the oppurtunity to take the piss out of the crowd, we could use more of this imo.
“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die. So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’”
“You know in your goddamn bones that a bunch of you are working on products that are just OK, but you have to vamp and make up terms to make it sound more awesome than it is"
When another attendee mentioned that their title was “VP of customer success,” he fired back: “Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”
“Some of the vaguest language ever devised has been used here in the last three days,” Mulaney continued. “The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.”
Near the end of his performance, Mulnaey thanked the room for “the world you’re creating for my son where he will never talk to an actual human again. Instead, a little cartoon Einstein will pop up and give him a sort of good answer and probably refer him to another chatbot.”
“We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other,” he said. “It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”
Of course it did - it's even written in the advert (Score:4, Insightful)
If you go to GitHub, it says "Code 55% faster with Copilot".
55%? Really? Is anyone impressed by this pitch?
55% is piss-poor for something that's supposed to be the greatest, most epoch-defining technology since the wheel was invented. Hell, I can code 55% faster simply by not drinking a beer at lunchtime.
And so if you consider that all companies tend to oversell their products, if Microsoft felt the need to stay this reasonable with Copilot's promises, it means its actual real-world performances but be really, properly shit.
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If you go to GitHub, it says "Code 55% faster with Copilot".
The problem is the faster does not mean better. I can do many things faster but not necessarily better. I can mow my lawn much faster if I didn't maintain my lawnmower. Or sharpen my motor blade every few years. Or cleaning up the clippings. Or bother edging.
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Or bother edging.
Indeed, if you do that each time you mow your lawn, I imagine it takes you some time.
Re:Of course it did - it's even written in the adv (Score:4, Informative)
Granted I have also seen it go haywire and write 100%/50% wrong code that at first glance looks plausible... Those can become the time sucks and are where I worry that newer engineers are going to fall into huge pitfalls. I can easily see some more junior engineers in a huge rush just accepting what copiliot suggests and then making a PR. But, that's what PR review is for right? Catch the stupid before it gets into the code base.
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Our team uses Micronaut/Kotlin for our services with Spock/Groovy for testing.
I can't tell easily if these are real things or this was just an AI generated sentence :-)
But, that's what PR review is for right? Catch the stupid before it gets into the code base.
That's what they're for... but it's not what they actually do. People rush on the code reviews. I see so many obvious bugs being passed on through. A code review should take at least as much time as the actual coding, but who's got time for that? Some peopel just look for obvious syntax errors (that the compiler already did), some only look to see that their favorite API is being used, and in a ten person team mayb
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But, that's what PR review is for right? Catch the stupid before it gets into the code base.
That is most certainly not what code reviews are for. They're supposed to catch honest oversights - or hard-to-see bugs - that a professional may have missed after having done their best to produce good code. They're not meant to turn AI-generated shit into gold.
I for one have better things to do than clean up bad code when I do reviews. When I see that kind of code - machine- or human-generated - after the 3rd line, I simply reject the change and tell whoever did it to do better and resubmit.
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No, that is ABSOLUTELY NOT WHAT PR REVIEW IS FOR and my goodness it's terrifying that you'd suggest it.
Code review isn't there so someone can just shit out stuff that in your own words might be 100%/50% wrong, not give a fuck, write no tests
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If you go to GitHub, it says "Code 55% faster with Copilot".
55%? Really? Is anyone impressed by this pitch?
55% is piss-poor for something that's supposed to be the greatest, most epoch-defining technology since the wheel was invented. Hell, I can code 55% faster simply by not drinking a beer at lunchtime.
And so if you consider that all companies tend to oversell their products, if Microsoft felt the need to stay this reasonable with Copilot's promises, it means its actual real-world performances but be really, properly shit.
"Code" 55% faster. Cleanup and fixes will take about 75% longer than if you coded it yourself, but we'll just ignore that part.
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55% as a number is chosen because it looks like somebody did some math. Possibly even they did research, and have some scientists on staff. But no, 55% is just a number picked out of someone's ass because it sounds better than "50%"...
The audience isn't questioning the numbers and may be bad at them. Quick test: if "code one third faster" sounds like it's faster, why does "code half faster" sound like you're going slower?
Every freaking code assistant tool that has failed in the past was marketed with "c
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But no, 55% is just a number picked out of someone's ass because it sounds better than "50%"...
My point was, if AI was all it's cracked up to be, Microsoft would claim 500% - perhaps yielding an actual 300% real-world performance boost. That would be impressive.
55%, 50%, whatever variation around that figure is pathetic no matter how Microsoft arrived at it. With all the billions they poured into their sugar baby OpenAI, if this is all they have to show for it, they should be ashamed.
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That does seem pretty unimpressive. ChatGPT can write "// implementation to be added" at least ten times as fast as I can.
And? (Score:4, Insightful)
Price too high, too soon (Score:3)
Microsoft released an integration with Office before it was ready for prime time, and decided to charge $30 per user per month. For that price, customers will expect a major improvement in productivity. What they got instead was a fancy toy that does some interesting things, but doesn't fulfill promises that warrant that level of monthly cost. Maybe in 5 years it will be worth it, but certainly not yet.
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Everything from Microsoft is release before it's really ready. Remember MFC? Looks on the surface like it's an object oriented programming framework, until you look at the actual code and realize that it's not even up to novice level understanding of OOP.
To be honest here, I've long suspected that a lot of shit customers have to deal with from Microsoft were created by interns. And this is not even far off, because the new style "apps" shipped with the first Windows 8 were indeed written by summer interns
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I do remember MFC well, and I chose it over Borland's OWL _because_ it was a flattened, lighter-weight architecture than OWL. With OWL there were many things you couldn't override easily, such as the behavior of file browser dialog boxes or button designs, despite the so-called promise of overrideability offered by inheritance. Too many of the methods and properties were marked "sealed" (or some such).
Yes, Windows 8 was half-baked. But that's not typical for Microsoft. Generally speaking, they release high-
Mildly curious about this. (Score:3)
In response to Benioff's comments, Jared Spataro, Microsoft's corporate vice president for AI at work, said in a statement to Fortune that the company was "hearing something quite different" from its customers.
I'd be curious to see which customers have been telling him something quite different. I know I'm not all-seeing, but I interact with a lot of computer users fairly regularly and have never heard anyone say anything nice about Copilot. The nicest thing anyone has said is that they found a way to make it not annoy them quite so much. That doesn't strike me as particularly favorable.
Or, was he meaning that most don't say they're "disappointed," but in fact become much more vitriolic in their comments?
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I would guess that MS does not take into account survey bias. When creating a survey about a product or service, people in the industry know that two groups are overly represented: those who worship the product and those who abhor the product. The middle is underrepresented.
I was more going after the fact that Copilot is either a semi-comparable replacement for the previous search system, or far, far worse, depending on how its used. I haven't spoken to anyone that's fond of it, even for simple things. And those who were expecting great things of it are even more let down.
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For me, it's not so much about annoyance, as it is about trust. For example, Copilot for Outlook offers to summarise emails I've not read. It sounds tempting...but I just do not trust it not to miss out on crucial points that I need to know in order to respond effectively. It can summarise, but it can't synthesise. It has no broader context of my interactions with a person to know that something they said in this email needs to be read in light of something they said to me on a call and what this other pers
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For me, it's not so much about annoyance, as it is about trust. For example, Copilot for Outlook offers to summarise emails I've not read. It sounds tempting...but I just do not trust it not to miss out on crucial points that I need to know in order to respond effectively. It can summarise, but it can't synthesise. It has no broader context of my interactions with a person to know that something they said in this email needs to be read in light of something they said to me on a call and what this other person wrote in a progress note. So I don't trust it to get it right.
If we're speaking trust, I also have trust issues with it, but different. I know that every time I consent to one of these AIs summarizing, helping, answering questions, whatever, I'm turning over training data that is, absolutely, going to be used to replace humans in a job somewhere. Probably, slowly, working towards replacing me. If I were closer to retirement, I may play the game, but I have enough years left to want to retain a little control over my workflow. Handing that control over, even briefly, t
Salesforce has disappointed every customer (Score:2)
I guess Microsoft is behind the curve again!
What we've seen (Score:2)
Yes, but not better.... (Score:2, Funny)
I think Marc is acting like an ex... (Score:2)
Marc and Iger from Disney have been besties. Disney was heavily invested in Marc's options, particularly Slack. If you don't know, Disney while using this package suffered a massive embarrassing leak, so going forward they are partnering with Microsoft. I don't think Marc is happy about this.
And given how most these guys in Marc's position are hyper competitive narcissists, I think he's trying to throw shade on Disney's new bestie.
Having said
And this surprises nobody (Score:2)
Early releases always disappoint
Given the extreme hype and rush to introduce products, it will be a LONG time before really useful AI stuff is available
Meeting transcripts (Score:3)
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The absolute best thing about Copilot is recording meetings in Teams and generating transcripts, then having Copilot sum up the meeting and the action items.
We tried exactly that. It didn't have any idea what anyone was talking about, or why.
Now... I grant that our meetings involve moving from topic to topic fairly quickly down a list of projects, and sometimes bouncing back as someone does a "keep going while I look that up" and "okay, I got the results on that last thing". Us humans handle that smoothly. Copilot didn't understand a damned thing that was happening. The only way to get anything halfway decent out of it was to telegraph "now we are talking
Has not disappointed me (Score:1)
It is just as crappy as I expect a Microsoft product to be. My expectations have been fully met.
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I see some gibbering MS fanboi with mod-points has his delusions insulted.
Salesforce is scared (Score:2)
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