Salesforce Inc. is bringing “digital teammates” to Slack that let companies build and unleash artificial intelligence (AI) agents that roam across workplace conversations, peruse company data and perform actions.
The company on Monday announced Agentforce in Slack, text-specific, context-aware agents within the popular messaging platform that is likely to put Salesforce on a collision course with rivals Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot in the increasingly fierce enterprise AI assistant field.
As part of the rollout, Salesforce unfurled Slack Employee Agent Templates (due June 12) that offer pre-configured starting points for common use cases in answering human resource and IT questions, onboarding instructions for new workers and access and summarizations of CRM data. In support of the agents, the company announced Slack Enterprise Search that enables agents to search across messages, files, and apps, as well as General Slack Topic for agents to better understand and respond within team conversations.
“By deploying purpose-built AI agents with user-level context and native integration on channels like Slack, organizations can more reliably automate internal processes for things like onboarding, help desk support and common CRM tasks,” Pooja Narain, senior director of product management for AI Cloud at Salesforce, said in a blog post Monday.
To allay any concerns around the potential exposure of sensitive information, Agentforce in Slack operates within the same security frameworks as Salesforce and Slack, according to Salesforce. Addressing another sensitive topic, Salesforce stressed the goal of Agentforce agents is to augment, and not replace, knowledge workers.
Salesforce’s latest agentic move is tacit acknowledgment that some general AI assistants struggle with complex, context-dependent enterprise workflows. A more task-specific agent lets enterprises minimize what Salesforce calls “semantic noise,” or distractions that crop up when AI tries to reason across too many possible actions.
Separately, the General Services Administration on Monday said it had agreed with Salesforce to reduce the price of the enterprise version of Slack by 90% per user for federal agencies.
Salesforce, which acquired Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021, is the latest software company to reach a lower-cost purchasing deal with GSA this year. Adobe Inc. and Google inked similar arrangements with the Trump administration after he returned to office. Microsoft and GSA reached a similar deal days before Trump started his second term in late January.
