Salesforce unveils AIforce platform, CEO Benioff calls Microsoft Copilot ‘the new Microsoft Clippy’

Salesforce dropped its biggest product announcement in years at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on September 15, rolling out a new platform called AIforce that aims to turn the company’s sprawling CRM ecosystem into a plug-and-play layer for external AI tools. CEO Marc Benioff used the occasion to roast Microsoft’s Copilot as “the new Clippy.” Clippy was the animated paperclip that popped up uninvited in Microsoft Office, offering help nobody asked for and answers nobody trusted. Benioff’s point is that Copilot lacks reliable data grounding. What AIforce actually does AIforce is described as a “live interface layer” that bridges Salesforce’s data, workflows, and governance frameworks with outside AI systems. The key selling point: users don’t need to be inside the traditional Salesforce interface to access its capabilities. The platform launched with three core components working in tandem. First, there’s Claudeforce, built in partnership with Anthropic’s Claude AI. It entered public beta with 37 prebuilt sales skills and a zero data retention policy, meaning conversations and queries aren’t stored by the AI model after processing. Second is Slackforce, which connects Sa...