Salesforce Inc.’s Slack is getting its AI makeover.
Joining a long list of popular tech products like iPhone and ServiceNow vertical apps, the collaborative service is being infused with generative AI features.
“Work is broken. The sheer amount of information is hard to track,” James Lancaster, vice president of product management at Slack, said in an interview. “We are bringing [AI] agents into Slack.”
Days after parent company Salesforce plunged deeper into AI, Slack on Monday announced Agentforce in Slack and third-party AI agents from the likes of Adobe Inc., Workday Inc., Box Inc. and Asana Inc. The idea is to create a “conversational interface” where teams of employees can work alongside agents with purpose-built AI, unifying data across Slack and Salesforce.
Slack, which competes with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Cisco Webex, has its sights on a job force where desk workers say they spend 41% of their time on low-value tasks and half are unable to find the information they need to do their jobs. Slack processes about 4.7 billion messages a week, and 3 million workflows run on it each day. Some 6.4 million Salesforce records are shared with Slack monthly.
With its new AI functions, Lancaster said, customers can centralize everything they need to get work done more efficiently.
Slack unveiled three pillars to the plan:
Agentforce in Slack. Sporting a new user interface for agents, teams can talk about their data, surface insights and act on tasks in Slack with Salesforce’s Agentforce Agents.
Salesforce channels. A new type of channel that connects Salesforce CRM records to channel-based conversations in Slack provides teams with a comprehensive place to collaborate on every account and opportunity. New Slack enhancements include purpose-built AI functionality across search and automation as well as new solutions-based templates to boost productivity.
New Slack AI features. Upgrades to huddle notes, simplified automation and improved search let teams work “smarter, faster and with greater focus,” Lancaster said. Slack templates appear in the form of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists and automated workflows.
Slack made its announcement amid research that shows nearly 80% of companies are using or planning to use generative AI to improve productivity.
“Successfully adopting generative AI requires a collaboration space where teams, data and AI converge, enabling insights from all applications and the ability to create custom workflows,” Irwin Lazar, principal analyst at Metrigy, said in an email. “Slack’s latest AI innovations increase the power of generative AI across notes, chats, files and apps, creating new potential for innovation and productivity in the AI era.”
