Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff shot back at the dominant AI narrative, proclaiming autonomous agents as the future of artificial intelligence, instead of how the technology is actually presented through chatbots such as ChatGPT.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently spoke about the trajectory of AI. He expressed his dissatisfaction with all that fuss surrounding these large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and thinks the AI industry may at last have crested their obsession with these models, and the thing going forward will be autonomous agents.
On The Wall Street Journal podcast, Benioff shared his views, talking about the fact that even though there has been much fanfare around AI tools such as ChatGPT, most of the potential of AI is its ability to create autonomous agents that can do things independently. Has the AI taken over? No. Has AI cured cancer? No. Is AI curing climate change? No. So we have to keep things in perspective here, he said. His criticism also extends to popular culture depictions of AI, warning that contemporary capabilities are often confused with the extraordinary – frequently apocalyptic – embodiments of the tech in movies. He said, “But we are not at that moment that we’ve seen in these crazy movies—and maybe we will be one day, but that is not where we are today.”
Highlighting Salesforce’s commitment to advancing AI, Benioff introduced Agentforce, a suite of AI tools designed to automate tasks such as customer service and marketing. He expressed unprecedented enthusiasm for this development, stating, “I would just say I’ve never been more excited about anything at Salesforce, maybe in my career.”
In contrast, Benioff has been forthright in his derision of Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, comparing it to the earlier but less successful effort, Clippy. He said that this has not delivered on the transformative impact that everybody had hoped for and was “a disappointment” and “a disservice to the whole industry.”
What the arguments by Benioff call for is a critical juncture in the AI industry, taking it forward as a transition from chatbots and into more evolved autonomous agents. His viewpoint encourages reviewing traditional AI strategies, thereby underlining innovation with practical applications and tangible outcomes in AI.
