Google Gemini gets Marc Benioff’s stamp of approval

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he was “absolutely blown away” by Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini Live.

Marc Benioff gave Google’s AI voice assistant, Gemini Live, his stamp of approval.

“Just downloaded Gemini Live, and I’m absolutely blown away,” he wrote in an X post on Sunday.

The Salesforce CEO said that the voice assistant had “zero latency,” referring to the time it takes to get a response from the AI-powered tool, and called it the “future of consumer AI.”

“Incredible work, @sundarpichai,” Benioff wrote, tagging Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “Truly groundbreaking. Try it immediately.”

The Salesforce CEO has been sounding off on social media about his experience with the latest suite of AI tools available to businesses and consumers.

In recent months, Benioff has repeatedly panned Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, calling it “disappointing” and likening it to the company’s discontinued Microsoft Office digital assistant, Clippy.

“Microsoft has really disappointed so many of our customers,” Benioff told B-17 Ashley Stewart of Copilot. “They’ve really done it by delivering a level of hype around their AI solutions.”

In response, Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer of AI at Work, told B-17, “History tells us that when competitors talk about you, it’s because they’re behind.”

“You have to have that strategic patience — no matter what’s happening — to just focus and execute. That’s what we’re trying to do as a company,” Spataro added.

Google released a smartphone app for Gemini Live on Apple’s App Store on Thursday, just a few months after the virtual assistant was made free for users. The move came days after Apple released the iPhone 16 in September, which was built to handle Apple Intelligence.

With Gemini Live, users can interact with an AI chatbot through a natural conversation: A user asks a question verbally and the AI responds.

When B-17 asked Gemini why San Francisco is so foggy, for example, the AI responded conversationally: “It’s a combo of things — the cold water off the coast, the warm air from inland, and the shape of the bay. Basically, the cold ocean air meets the warm air, and it creates this thick fog that gets trapped in the bay. You could say it’s San Francisco’s calling card — you know you’re there when you see it!”

Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT also have mobile apps where users can interact with an AI chatbot.

“Ah, the famous San Francisco fog,” ChatGPT’s chatbot starts when B-17 asked the same question about SF’s climate. “It’s mainly because of the unique geography and climate. The cold ocean water from the Pacific meets the warmer air from the land. This causes condensation, which forms fog. Plus, the coastal mountains and the bay shape and trap the fog, making it a regular visitor. It’s all part of the city’s charm!”

Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini work similarly and they are all prone to limitations like hallucinations or producing inaccurate results. According to Axios, ChatGPT works for most tasks, Gemini can access more timely information, and Copilot is most suited for productivity tasks.

During Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in September, Benioff told Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that he uses ChatGPT “mostly as my therapist.”

Benioff said in a September interview with venture capitalist David Sacks that he believes AI has reached a point where it is indistinguishable from human customer service workers.

“We are already at the point. We already have that live,” Benioff said. “We’re really getting to, like, another level of capability, and I think that’s it’s pretty impressive.”

Benioff and a spokesperson for Google did not respond to a request for comment.