Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been rebuilding your business around AI, and at a small meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest results of those efforts: an updated version of Slack, with a host of new AI features. The most significant of these is great enthusiasm for its artificial intelligence agent, Slackbot.
He 30 new featureswhich will be available in the coming months, follow a january update That gave Slackbot agency capabilities, including the ability to compose emails, schedule meetings, and scan your inbox for specific information.
Perhaps the most notable feature announced Tuesday is what the company calls reusable AI skills, which allow users to define specific tasks for Slackbot that, once created, can be applied in a variety of different scenarios and contexts. Slackbot comes with a built-in library of AI skills, Salesforce says, but users can also create their own custom versions.
Once these skills are established, they significantly reduce the work an employee might need to do. For example, a user can activate a skill using a simple command in Slack (e.g. “create a budget” for an upcoming event), which causes Slackbot to pull together all the relevant information from a company’s Slack channels, as well as any connected apps or data sources, to create a workable plan. The bot will then automatically schedule a meeting to discuss the plan, inviting relevant employees based on their titles.
Slackbot now also works as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client, meaning it can connect and coordinate with external services and tools. Among them is Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform. launched in 2024. Through that connection, you can “route work or raise questions to Agentforce or any agent or app in your company,” the company says, and the agent finds the most relevant and efficient route for the information, without human intervention.
According to Rob Seaman, interim CEO and former chief product officer at Slack, Slackbot can now also transcribe meetings and summarize them. If a meeting participant gets distracted and misses critical details, they can simply ask Slackbot to produce a summary of the meeting, including any action items assigned to them.
The agent can now also operate outside of Slack and monitor their desktop activities: Salesforce lists “your deals, your conversations, your calendar, and your habits” as the types of data it uses. Based on that context, the bot will make actionable suggestions or follow-up drafts for critical tasks. Sailor has said that Privacy protections are built into this design and users have the ability to adjust permissions as needed.
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Bottom line: Salesforce is clearly trying to take Slack beyond its roots as a business communication tool and position it as a more versatile platform that can handle a wider variety of business tasks. The hope seems to be that by flooding it with AI, Slack can become an indispensable part of enterprise users’ core business processes.
Benioff let his team walk through the key features on Tuesday, but said during his keynote that the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack had been an “incredible ride,” generating “two and a half times revenue growth.” He added: “We have about a million companies running on Slack. It’s been a huge growth story.”
