- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in an interview that tech companies’ investments in AI are excessive and that he would leverage their investments to help his own customers.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff questioned Big Tech’s massive artificial intelligence spending, and said his company is better off using the tech that rival companies have poured billions of dollars into.
During a podcast interview with journalist Kara Swisher, Benioff said the billions of dollars tech companies have invested in AI technology could cost them.
“I think they’re going to keep spending, and it’s going to be expensive for them, and it’s going to drive their margins down,” he said during the podcast. “I’m going to take advantage of their spending to make my products better and lower-cost and easier for my customers.”
Companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon are set to spend about $200 billion on their AI investments this year, Bloomberg reported. And in the next five years, Big Tech’s spending on fixed assets, or capital expenditures that include AI data centers, could hit $1 trillion, according to Bernstein analysts.
Benioff called the massive wave of investment “excessive” and a “race to the bottom,” and said he’d rather stay out of it. The way his company has “architected” its platform, he added, has helped it avoid too much AI spending.
“We do things a little differently, the way we train, the way we write the software,” Benioff said during the podcast. “And also we tend to use other people’s data centers, so we will use Amazon and Google and others and not rely on too much of our own hardware—although we have some, it’s not our philosophy.”
Salesforce didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for further comment.
Benioff has a history of criticizing competitors’ AI products, especially Microsoft Copilot, which he called “Clippy 2.0” in reference to the virtual assistant (in the form of an animated paper clip) that Microsoft discontinued in the early 2000s. He has also called Microsoft’s AI software disappointing.
“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 earlier this year.
The Salesforce CEO has previously criticized AI as a whole, saying that while the technology is exciting it is overhyped.
“AI isn’t yet curing cancer or solving climate change as pundits claim, but our current AI tech does have immense power to drive meaningful improvements in many areas over our life as a ‘co-intelligence,’” Benioff wrote in an October post on X.
Meanwhile, Salesforce has moved to incorporate AI into its own products, including through “Agentforce,” its suite of AI agents for enterprise customers launched earlier this year.
Speaking with Swisher, Benioff said Agentforce has helped clients save on costs, including publishing company Wiley, which, he said, has been able to avoid hiring temporary sales and service workers by using Agentforce.
“They’re not doing that this year, because we’ve provided them with digital labor that we call Agentforce, and that gave them the ability to start selling and servicing without hiring more people,” he told Swisher.
But while Benioff has continued to warn about AI, he called Google’s Gemini “the future of consumer AI,” in a November post on X.
“When I’m not using Salesforce’s Agentforce, I’m using Gemini,” he told Swisher on the podcast.
