When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicted recently that agents will largely displace enterprise apps as the intelligent engines of global business, Nadella delivered a huge endorsement to the agents-over-all vision that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been evangelizing for the past 6 months.
Nadella made that prediction in a lengthy interview on the BG2 podcast with hosts Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley during a fascinating 90-minute conversation that everyone interested in enterprise tech should watch.
As I see it, Nadella’s forecast about the meteoric rise of agents and the simultaneous shift in significance for enterprise apps provides a huge boost to Salesforce and its new vision for a global economy powered by, around, and with agents. (For more on that, please see “Benioff’s Agentforce Rocks Business World” and “Salesforce Agents Can Slash Some Healthcare Costs by 98%, Marc Benioff Says.”)
Clearly, Nadella’s primary goal in describing to Gerstner and Gurley how the rise of agents will definitely change and perhaps diminish the status of business applications was to position Microsoft as the company best able to lead that revolution. And in some respects, Nadella succeeded by using his appearance on the BG2 podcast to position his company as a player in the explosive realm of agentic AI.
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But at the same time, I believe Nadella’s sharing of his bold perspective will generate more benefit over the next 3-6 months for Salesforce and Benioff than it will for Microsoft. Here’s why:
- Benioff’s relentless evangelism. While every Cloud Wars Top 10 company is racing to articulate an agent strategy built around the creation of new business value for customers, the company that has done the best job of that so far is Salesforce. While its efforts have been both broad and deep — keynotes, global events, the use of its own Agentforce technology to run its entire help.Salesforce.com operations — perhaps the biggest factor has been Benioff’s frequent high-visibility evangelism of not just Salesforce’s capabilities with agents but also his riveting articulation of a global economy propelled to new heights by limitless and highly capable “digital labor.” Yes, a rising tide lifts all boats, but in this case Salesforce’s is defying the laws of physics and has risen even higher.
- Microsoft’s huge investment in Copilots. Microsoft’s early and massive investments in Copilots have clearly been a big winner for the company, its customers, and its partners. But as vigorous as the Copilot market is, agents appear to have even more potential for customers — as proof of that, think about Nadella’s comment that agents will largely supplant enterprise apps as the core intelligence that power the global economy. Can Nadella maintain his massive investments in and focus on Copilots while also building out an agent business that lives up to his belief that agents will take over much of what enterprise apps currently handle?
- Benioff castigates Microsoft as “Hamlet.” Benioff has used X regularly and aggressively to torch Microsoft’s less-than-clear position around its intentions for both Copilots and agents, with this post on X from late October being perhaps the most pointed: “Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode. Let’s be real — Copilot’s a flop because Microsoft lacks the data, metadata, and enterprise security models to create real corporate intelligence. That is why Copilot is inaccurate, spills corporate data, and forces customers to build their own LLMs. Clippy 2.0, anyone? Meanwhile, Agentforce is transforming businesses now. Agentforce doesn’t just handle tasks — it autonomously drives sales, service, marketing, analytics, and commerce. With data, LLMs, workflows, and security all integrated into a single Customer 360 platform: This is what AI was meant to be.”
Final Thought
While there’s certainly more than enough opportunity in the nascent agent market for both Salesforce and Microsoft to be wildly successful, it is during the early days — like the ones we’re currently in for agents — that market leaders claim the high ground and establish themselves as the agenda-setters.
In that context, I found it fascinating to hear Nadella say during that BG2 episode that during his 33 years at Microsoft and in particular during his 11 years as CEO, one sometimes painful lesson the company has had to learn is when to embrace being a fast follower, and when to opt out.
“You shouldn’t do things out of envy,” Nadella told Gerstner and Gurley.
“That was one of the hardest things we’ve learned.”
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