Salesforce announces an AI-driven update to Slack, with 30 new features

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been reshaping its business around artificial intelligence, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest result of those efforts: a refreshed version of Slack, with a slew of new AI features. Chief among these is the serious glow of its AI agent, Slackbot.

The 30 new features, which will be available in the coming months, come on the heels of a January update that gave Slackbot proxy capabilities — including the ability to draft emails, schedule meetings, and sift through your inbox for specific information.

Perhaps the most notable feature announced Tuesday is what the company calls Reusable AI Skills, which allow users to assign specific tasks to Slackbot that, once created, can be applied in a variety of different scenarios and contexts. Salesforce says Slackbot comes with a built-in library of AI skills, but users can also create their own custom versions.

Once these skills are set up, they significantly reduce the work an employee may need to do. For example, a user can activate a skill with a simple command in Slack — for example, “create a budget” for an upcoming event — prompting the Slackbot to gather all relevant information from the company’s Slack channels, as well as any connected apps or data sources, to create an actionable plan. The bot will then automatically set up a meeting to discuss the plan, and invite relevant employees based on their positions.

Slackbot now also acts as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client – ​​meaning it can connect to and coordinate with external services and tools. Among those platforms is Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform launching in 2024. Through this connection, it can “route work or ask questions to Agentforce or any agent or application in your organization,” the company says, with the agent finding the most relevant and efficient path to information, without human intervention.

According to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and former chief product officer, Slackbot can now also transcribe and summarize meetings. If a meeting participant happens to go out of the area, and thus miss important details, they can just ask Slackbot to produce a summary of the meeting, including any action items assigned to them.

The agent can now also work outside of Slack and monitor your desktop activities — Salesforce lists “your deals, conversations, calendar, and habits” as the types of data it relies on. Based on this context, the bot will make actionable suggestions or formulate follow-ups for important tasks. Seaman said that privacy protections are built into this design and that users have the ability to modify permissions as needed.

In short: Salesforce is clearly trying to move Slack beyond its roots as an enterprise communication tool and position it as a more versatile platform that can handle a wide range of business tasks. The hope seems to be that by infusing it with artificial intelligence, Slack can become an indispensable part of core business processes for enterprise users.

Benioff let his team walk through the key features on Tuesday, but during his keynote he noted that the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack have been an “amazing journey,” one that has delivered “2.5 times revenue growth.” “We have about a million companies running on Slack,” he added. “It’s been a tremendous growth story.”