Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff blasts Microsoft's Copilot: 'It just doesn't work'
28 points
11 hours ago
| 9 comments
| fortune.com
| HN
wkat4242
8 hours ago
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Which copilot does he talk about? The bing one, the M365 one, the GitHub one, the studio, the sales version that integrates work Salesforce bwaaaah. Microsoft marketing is a total confusing mess as always.

And I agree with him regarding copilot for M365. It's really been rushed to market. it's good for a few things and really bad at other things it promises especially in excel.

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thedougd
8 hours ago
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M365 copilot is a poor product in search of a use. I expected it to be my assistant. So far I’ve found that it can’t do any of the things I would ask of an assistant. It cannot create calendar entries. It cannot identify (correctly) who reports to me or give me a list of email addresses for employees of a particular organization unit. So far I’ve found it okay at summarizing things, but not reliably. Of a large email chain it only summarized the most recent few emails.
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wkat4242
7 hours ago
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Yes indeed. And meeting notes are full of errors. Also because the transcription really sucks with non-native speakers. I'm often surprised the notes even make sense when I read the transcript garbage.

The problem is that people are already relying on it. Several times a day I get copy pasted meeting minutes with the "generated by AI, check for accuracy" disclaimer still on it. But the user just dumped it onwards.

This is not how this should work. The user responsible for the minutes should check the notes themselves and then send them on. They still save time by not having to write them from scratch.

But of course people are lazy and when the incorrect minutes lead to the inevitable confusion they just shrug and quote that disclaimer. NO, you're responsible even if you've used the AI. Really ticks me off. These minutes are often for people that couldn't attend the meeting so they have no way to "check for accuracy".

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emptiestplace
1 hour ago
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I agree that people should care about what it is producing on their behalf, but as long as it looks like something, it's probably gonna fly—someone actually taking the time to read it is more of a hypothetical anomaly anyway.

I suspect the real problem is much more fundamental: the vast majority of work we do is bullshit, and nobody gives a fuck about any of it.

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zdware
9 hours ago
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This is the same company that put out a local dev server for their frontend stack and let it rot into an unusable buggy mess 2 years later. They are planning to re-introduce it in 2025.

Ive been using MS copilot successfully for Apex (Salesforce's backend language) and JavaScript. I would trust Microsoft over Salesforce any day for dev tools.

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karlgkk
6 hours ago
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apex is a child’s toy language designed to do simple form building applications. It’s no surprise that LLMs excel in writing it
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sagman
2 hours ago
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He's right. I asked Microsoft Copilot what Salesforce does but it could not explain
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m463
1 hour ago
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Isn't salesforce what microsoft does? like deprecate win 10 to force sales of win 11?
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linotype
4 hours ago
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Salesforce owns Slack, a competitor to Microsoft’s Teams.
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razakel
26 minutes ago
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Which is also a horribly bloated mess that doesn't really do anything you can't accomplish with IRC.
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indigodaddy
8 hours ago
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MS Copilot was pretty great up until the last few weeks when they rolled out a totally new version, that is indeed, vastly inferior to the previous product. Too bad they didn’t leave well enough alone.
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breadwinner
11 hours ago
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Microsoft has blown their AI advantage. Perplexity.ai is what Bing could have been.
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m463
1 hour ago
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Never underestimate the advantages microsoft has.
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shadowvoxing
4 hours ago
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You.com is pretty great too. It has greatly reduced my need for Google.
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RHSeeger
10 hours ago
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Co-pilot as in github copilot, available in IntelliJ? Because I find that to be pretty fantastic.
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CitrusFruits
10 hours ago
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They have an additional suite of products piggy backing off of GitHub co-pilot's success sharing the "Copilot" branding.
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wkat4242
8 hours ago
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Yeah it's such a confusing jumble. The Microsoft people we work with even get confused about which feature is in which copilot. And they keep changing stuff around. Until last week the copilot button in windows 11 worked fine with business M365 accounts but now you get a screen saying you must have a personal account.

They're so hell bent on rushing this to market that they don't know what they're doing anymore.

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wodenokoto
8 hours ago
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What OpenAI might call a gpt, or others a chatbot, Microsoft calls a copilot.

And all their copilot offerings are named copilot, and sometimes you are lucky enough that there’s a second word in the product name to differentiate it from the other products.

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lovethevoid
10 hours ago
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Copilot as in Microsoft Copilot
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xpl
10 hours ago
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> In the interview, Benioff also hyped up Salesforce’s new AI product, Agentforce
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dangus
6 hours ago
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You'd think they could have asked their AI to come up with a better name than that.
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Sabinus
10 hours ago
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A bit difficult to take this commentary entirely seriously when salesforce has launched a competing product, but I do broadly agree that Microsoft's AI offerings so far have been underwhelming.
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spacecadet
9 hours ago
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This. Onion, 2024, "CEO of competing product blasts competitors products as garbage!"
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m463
1 hour ago
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"The onion movie is garbage" - rotten tomatoes
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