Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has voiced reservations about the effectiveness of large-scale AI investments being made by some of the biggest players in the tech industry.
During Salesforce’s recent earnings call, Benioff directly questioned whether companies like Microsoft are seeing tangible returns on these substantial investments. His perspective is that Salesforce is prioritizing AI integration within existing products rather than pouring capital into the construction of expensive data centers.
Benioff emphasized Salesforce’s strategy of avoiding projects that would heavily impact the company’s finances but might not yield significant benefits. “We aren’t building huge data centers,” he stated, “We’re not doing some of these kind of engineering efforts that may or may not have some kind of huge payoff, but is going to take down all of our cash and all of our margin for the next several years.” He positioned this approach against the backdrop of major spending by Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
Instead, Salesforce is focused on augmenting its existing product offerings with AI, leveraging the infrastructure investments of others. Benioff highlighted this as a key aspect of the ‘digital labor revolution.’
Amazon, for example, plans to allocate over $100 billion in capital expenditures this year, with the majority directed towards expanding Amazon Web Services and scaling AI infrastructure. Microsoft, which Benioff singled out, intends to spend $80 billion on AI-related infrastructure this year. Benioff expressed skepticism about some of Microsoft’s AI-powered workplace tools, referring to the company as the ‘reseller of OpenAI’ and raising questions about the practical application of their agentic AI offerings.
Benioff’s criticism of Microsoft isn’t new. Last year, he expressed his disappointment with Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, drawing comparisons to the discontinued Clippy assistant.
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s chief communications officer, responded to Benioff’s remarks, suggesting that Benioff’s comments were part of a marketing strategy. Concurrently, Benioff is promoting Salesforce’s own agentic AI offering. He stated that the company’s goal is ‘to be the number one provider of digital labor in the world.’
Salesforce reported $9.99 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, slightly below the consensus estimate of $10.04 billion. The company also provided a fiscal 2026 revenue forecast that fell below Wall Street’s expectations. As a result, Salesforce shares experienced a 5% decline in extended trading.
Microsoft has not yet issued an official statement on the matter.
