Salesforce announces an AI-heavy makeover for Slack, with 30 new features

Salesforce, the unreality bundle giant, has been remaking its business astir AI, and astatine a tiny gathering successful San Francisco connected Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his squad unveiled the latest results of those efforts: an updated mentation of Slack, with a plethora of caller AI features. The astir important of these is simply a superior glow-up for its AI agent, Slackbot.

The 30 caller features, which volition beryllium disposable successful the coming months, travel a January update that gave Slackbot agentic capabilities—including the quality to draught emails, docket meetings, and sift done your inbox for circumstantial information.

Perhaps the astir notable diagnostic announced Tuesday is what the institution calls reusable AI-skills—which let users to specify circumstantial tasks for Slackbot that, erstwhile created, tin beryllium applied successful a assortment of antithetic scenarios and contexts. Slackbot comes with a built-in room of AI-skills, Salesforce says, but users tin besides make their ain customized versions.

Once these skills are acceptable up, they importantly trim the enactment an worker mightiness request to do. For example, a idiosyncratic tin trigger a accomplishment utilizing a elemental bid successful Slack — say, “create a budget” for an upcoming lawsuit — prompting Slackbot to propulsion unneurotic each applicable accusation from a company’s Slack channels, arsenic good arsenic immoderate connected apps oregon information sources, to make an actionable plan. The bot volition past automatically acceptable up a gathering to sermon the plan, inviting applicable employees based connected their titles.

Slackbot present besides functions arsenic an MCP (Model Context Protocol) lawsuit — meaning it tin link to and coordinate with extracurricular services and tools. Among those is Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI cause improvement level launched successful 2024. Through that connection, it tin “route enactment oregon punctual questions to Agentforce oregon immoderate cause oregon app successful your enterprise” the institution says, with the cause uncovering the astir applicable and businesslike way for the information, without quality intervention.

According to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and erstwhile main merchandise officer, Slackbot tin besides present transcribe meetings and summarize them. If a gathering subordinate happens to portion out, frankincense missing captious details, they tin conscionable inquire Slackbot to nutrient a recap of the meeting, including immoderate enactment items assigned to them.

The cause tin besides present run extracurricular of Slack and show your desktop activities — Salesforce lists “your deals, your conversations, your calendar, and your habits” arsenic the kinds of information it draws on. Based connected that context, the bot volition marque actionable suggestions oregon drafts follow-ups for captious tasks. Seaman has said that privateness protections are built into this plan and that users person the quality to set permissions arsenic needed.

In short: Salesforce is intelligibly trying to instrumentality Slack beyond its roots arsenic an endeavor connection instrumentality and presumption it arsenic a much versatile level that tin grip a wider assortment of concern tasks. The anticipation seems to beryllium that, by flooding it with AI, Slack tin go an indispensable portion of endeavor users’ halfway concern processes.

Benioff fto his squad locomotion done the large features connected Tuesday but remarked, during his keynote, that the 5 years since Salesforce acquired Slack had been an “incredible journey,” 1 that had delivered “two and a fractional times gross growth.” He added: “We person astir a cardinal businesses moving connected Slack. It’s been a immense maturation story.”