Microsoft vs Google AI vs Salesforce and beyond – how do you pick the right AI assistant for your team? That question is becoming increasingly difficult to answer.
Virtually every tech leader is investing in a proprietary AI toolkit, and each option comes with unique benefits for collaboration, creativity, or even sales management. Adopt the right platform, and the benefits can be massive.
Our own research reveals nearly half of all companies have upgraded productivity with AI, and countless Forrester Total Economic Impact reports suggest AI integrations can deliver triple digit ROI (287% for Azure AI, 397% for Google Vertex, and so on).
So, if you’re looking for the best productivity booster, where do you start?
Microsoft vs Google AI vs Salesforce: An Overview
Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are three clear market leaders in the AI space. Microsoft’s Copilot – now used by 85% of the Fortune 500 and delivering an average 370% ROI for some smaller teams- is transforming workflows worldwide. Embedded into countless Microsoft apps and ready to customize with Copilot Studio, this system is often considered the ultimate AI companion.
Google’s Gemini solution is similar, promising customization through Vertex AI, and instant access via a range of Workspace tools. Developers rave about Gemini’s Code Assist features – reporting 33% faster delivery times on real-world projects.
Elsewhere, Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot, launched in 2024, combines the power of Salesforce’s world-leading CRM with a bot that can handle multi-stage tasks. Einstein Copilot grounds every response in Data Cloud, meaning it’s fluent in leads, cases, orders, and anything else living in CRM. Marc Benioff calls it “the only copilot that truly understands customer relationships.”
Microsoft vs Google AI vs Salesforce: The Ecosystem Factor
For most companies, the biggest factor determining which AI assistant they should be using is the ecosystem they already have. Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Gemini and Salesforce’s Einstein are all plugged into the respective tools and platforms offered by each company.
For Microsoft-focused brands, Copilot is an obvious winner. Copilot lives where knowledge workers already spend their day. Teams can ask Word to draft a proposal, have Excel spot anomalies, and let Teams summarize a 30‑minute meeting into a six‑line action list. Plus, Copilot Studio allows citizen developers to stich capabilities together with custom agents.
For instance, you can create an onboarding agent that reads SharePoint policies, books orientation meetings, then pings HR when equipment ships – while respecting Graph permissions and compliance settings. Google Gemini, on the other hand lives within Google Workspace, Google Search, and countless other tools.
In Docs it drafts marketing copy; in Gmail it triages inboxes; in Meet it generates action items on the fly. Code Assist autocompletes and unit‑tests snippets, while Cloud Assist watches Kubernetes clusters, suggesting cost tweaks automatically.
Because Workspace data is already cloud‑native, Gemini can hop between consumer and enterprise surfaces with minimal friction. Einstein lives for native business and customer data. It pops up in Sales Cloud to prep renewal decks, in Service Cloud to close cases, in Commerce to optimize product pages, and in Slack to auto‑draft channel updates. The Copilot Skills Builder and Agentforce also allow companies to create multi-stage autonomous AI workflows.
Microsoft vs Google vs Salesforce: Core Features
Beyond the different connected ecosystems, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce AI tools do offer a lot of overlapping capabilities. From a model perspective, Microsoft pairs advanced options from OpenAI and Mistral with a growing number of in-house solutions, fine-tuned for long-term memory, security, and fine-grained controls.
Google offers a range of different Gemini versions (from Gemini Flash to Gemini 2.0) intended for different use cases, while Salesforce breeds proprietary models with best-of-breed LLMs. All through companies support customization – with slightly different levels of complexity.
Copilot Studio offers drag‑and‑drop prompts, flow actions, and event triggers. Google enables Gemini customization with developer toolkits to enable end-to-end custom automation. Einstein’s AI development tools, including Agentforce, can easily connect multiple Salesforce solutions with third-party apps and data sources.
All three companies also deliver multimodal capabilities (although Gemini is more multi-modal focused), enterprise-grade security and guardrails, and constant innovation through model updates and feature enhancements.
Performance, Accuracy and Safety
For companies investing in speed and consistency – all three vendors have proven to be strong contenders. In Microsoft vs Google AI tests, certain models, like the o1 reasoning model (created by OpenAI) might perform slower than Gemini’s basic models, but both companies are almost neck-and-neck in terms of reasoning options and speedy responses.
All three models have shown high levels of accuracy in multiple tests. For instance, Gemini 2.5 earned a 52.6% score on the SimpleQA test for factuality, similar to the o1 model in Copilot. Salesforce hasn’t shared many direct insights into AI benchmark test results, but it does give companies access to advanced grounding capabilities with the Einstein Trust layer.
Again, all three companies also offer companies access to enterprise-specific plans that include security, access control, and monitoring tools, for governance.
Pricing Models & Rollout Success
So, in the Microsoft vs Google AI vs Salesforce, which offers the best value for money? That depends. Both Microsoft and Google offer access to a free version of their AI assistants. Premium versions of Microsoft Copilot start at $20 per month for Pro, and $30 per month for Microsoft 365 Copilot. That’s similar to the pricing Google offers for Gemini.
Both companies also allow organizations to access pay-as-you-go models for APIs and agent-based functionality. Salesforce offers various versions of Einstein for different cloud platforms, like Service, Sales, or Marketing, starting at $60 per month. There’s also a $2 per conversation charge for Agentforce agents.
Overall, Einstein might be the most expensive of the three options at a glance, particularly for users tapping into a lot of Salesforce tools, but all three companies have proven to be able to deliver exceptional ROI.
Microsoft vs Google AI vs Salesforce: Which is Best?
Every AI assistant has its own unique strengths, even beyond the connected ecosystem. To break it down into simple terms:
- Microsoft: Is often considered the best option for broad productivity workflows and cross-functional support across MS apps. It offers airtight security, and easy-to-use low-code builder for custom agents. However, it may lack some of the advanced capabilities of solutions like Salesforce Einstein, or Gemini for growing organizations.
- Google: Excels at boosting developer productivity, enhancing search-grounded queries, and rapidly responding to user questions. It’s fantastic for companies either already using Google Workspace or those that want to develop custom bots with minimal upfront investment.
- Salesforce: Delivers the perfect AI solution for sales and customer service teams. It offers unmatched CRM context, industry-specific customization options, and flexible growth opportunities with Agentforce.
You might choose Microsoft Copilot if you want AI in every document, deck, and meeting, Google when you want to develop code faster and minimize cloud costs, and Salesforce when you’re combining AI with end-to-end customer data.
Making the Right Choice for Your Business
Ultimately, the debate of Microsoft vs Google AI vs Salesforce is really just the start. There are countless AI solutions companies can experiment with today – and they all have unique benefits to offer. The best strategy? Look at your existing ecosystem.
Find out which AI solutions naturally align with your digital transformation strategy and business goals, and dive deeper into what each vendor can offer.
If you’re interested in Microsoft, check out our complete guide to Microsoft AI here. Alternatively, find out all about Google Gemini in this guide.
