Microsoft and Salesforce clash as autonomous agent race heats up
10/24/2024 17:11
The battle between Salesforce and Microsoft over AI-powered autonomous agents has been especially pronounced, in part because the companies have clashed publicly but also because of the trove of enterprise data both have access to.
Digital agents powered by artificial intelligence have emerged as the latest battleground for major technology firms.
As the number of companies seeking to streamline business operations with the advanced tech grows, the competition between Microsoft (MSFT) and Salesforce (CRM) has been especially pronounced.
On Monday, Microsoft became the latest company to jump into the agent race, launching 10 autonomous agents as part of a suite of enterprise tools unveiled at its AI Tour event. Touting the feature as “the new apps,” Microsoft hailed its ability to simplify enterprise tasks, saying initial pilots showed a 90% reduction in lead times and a 30% reduction in administrative work.
“The impact of this is tremendous,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking in London. He added, “We now have at-scale evidence of how these tools are fundamentally changing, … increasing value, and reducing waste.”
The announcement came just weeks after Salesforce announced the buildout of its own autonomous agents through the Agentforce platform, underscoring the AI-driven opportunity companies see in enterprise.
Hailed by Salesforce as the third wave in the AI revolution, customized agents enable companies to move beyond traditional chatbots that answer to pre-programmed responses to digital assistants that can reason, tackle multiple tasks at the same time, and make judgments based on a broader set of data.
Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih said the use cases are especially abundant in customer relations management, where agents can handle everything from product returns to crafting sales pitches.
“It goes from being a single step prescribing, almost micromanaging what the AI should do versus asking the agent to figure out what it needs to do,” Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance (video above).
Other companies have touted their own specialized use cases for AI agents.
Cloud software provider ServiceNow (NOW) has announced plans to integrate AI agents into its human resources and IT platform. Dating app Grindr is working on an AI-agent wingman that would seek out relationship prospects and help set up dates. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) helps clients develop their own agents for internal use, including legal work.
And in a recent podcast interview, Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang envisioned a future where 100 million AI agents would be deployed within the company.
“Our inbox is going to be full of directories of AIs that we work with,” he said. “AIs will recruit other AIs to solve problems. AIs will be in Slack channels with each other and with humans.”
However, the battle over autonomous agents has pit Salesforce and Microsoft against each other in particular, in part because the companies have clashed publicly but also because of the trove of enterprise data both have access to. CEO Marc Benioff has repeatedly likened Microsoft’s Copilot to Clippy, its doomed Office assistant from the 1990s, once listed as one of Time’s 50 Worst Inventions.
At its Dreamforce event last month, Shih doubled down on the criticism, without naming Microsoft directly, while touting the Agentforce platform.
“This is the difference between a DIY science project versus a real enterprise-grade agent you can confidently deploy into production,” Shih said. She added that Salesforce agents showed 33% greater accuracy and “two times greater relevance” than competitors, according to customer benchmarks.
Earlier this week, Microsoft said agent deployment in companies like McKinsey & Company and UK-based Pets at Home have already been shown to cut down on time spent processing time-consuming work, including data entry.
With the wider release of Agentforce set for Oct. 29, Shih emphasized that these agents are not meant to replace human workers but assist them so that “humans can start at higher level.”
Shih expects Salesforce’s advantage to grow too as the battle for digital assistants heats up because of its ability to connect individual clients’ data through Data Cloud, and the safety layers in place for Agentforce.
She said human interaction with digital assistants will “grow exponentially.”
“I think it's similar to asking the question maybe in 1998 of, in the future, how many other interactions will be through the internet or some sort of digital medium,” Shih said. “I very much believe that agents will play that role in the future. Agents will become the apps that all of us interface with.”
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