Cloud software giant Salesforce is restructuring its business around AI, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team announced the latest result of that effort: an updated version of Slack with a host of new AI features. Chief among them is the serious growth of Slackbot, an AI agent.
The 30 new features, which will be available in the coming months, follow a January update that brought Slackbot agent features, including the ability to draft emails, schedule meetings, and curate your inbox for specific information.
Perhaps the most notable feature announced on Tuesday is what the company calls reusable AI skills, which allow users to define specific tasks for Slackbot that, once created, can be applied to 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.
Establishing these skills will greatly reduce the amount of work your employees need to do. For example, users can trigger a skill with a simple command in Slack (for example, “create a budget” for an upcoming event). This allows Slackbot to gather all relevant information from your company’s Slack channels and connected apps and data sources to create actionable plans. The bot then automatically sets up a meeting to discuss the plan and invites relevant employees based on their job titles.
Slackbot can now also act as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client. This means you can connect and work with external services and tools. That includes Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform, launched in 2024. Through that connection, the company says it can “route tasks and questions to Agentforce and internal agents and apps,” allowing agents to find the most relevant and efficient path for information without human intervention.
Slackbot can now also transcribe and summarize meetings, according to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and former chief product officer. If a meeting participant happens to lose focus and miss important details, simply ask Slackbot to create a meeting summary with assigned action items.
The agent now works outside of Slack and can monitor desktop activity. Salesforce lists “transactions, conversations, calendars, and habits” as the types of data it uses. Based on that context, the bot drafts actionable suggestions and follow-ups for important tasks. Seaman said the design has built-in privacy protections and allows users to adjust permissions as needed.
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So Salesforce is clearly looking to move Slack beyond its roots as an enterprise communications tool and position it as a more versatile platform that can handle a wider variety of business tasks. The hope is that with the heavy adoption of AI in Slack, Slack will become an integral part of the core business processes of enterprise users.
Benioff walked his team through key features on Tuesday, but during his keynote he said the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack have been an “incredible journey” and resulted in “2.5x revenue growth.” He added: “We have about a million businesses running on Slack. This is a huge growth story.”
