Slackbot, the automated assistant built into Slack, the Salesforce-owned enterprise messaging platform, is ushering in a new era of AI agents. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris expects it to become as popular as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The cloud software giant rolled out a new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. The company says this new AI agent version of Slackbot is generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, allowing them to search for information, draft emails, schedule meetings, and more, all within the Slack platform. With your permission, you can also connect to, interact with, and find information in other enterprise products like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive. This allows users to work in several different popular enterprise applications without leaving Slack.
Salesforce and its enterprise software competitors are pouring resources into developing AI products to maintain and even expand market share. The revamped Slackbot was originally announced at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in October, and is just one part of Salesforce’s AI-heavy product plans for the enterprise.
Harris told TechCrunch that the next generation of Slackbot will be completely different from anything that existed before. The company kept the name because it was already well known.
Harris added that Slack typically doesn’t release new features. Instead, Slack typically issues product updates to drive adoption, so Slackbot is very different from past product updates.
“This is a super agent, an agent, an employee agent,” Harris said. “It is powered by generative AI and is highly crafted and curated to be an agent experience that your employees and users will love.”
Salesforce tests new products like Slackbot with employees for several months before releasing them. Harris joked that they like to drink their own champagne first. According to him, Slackbot is the most widely adopted internal tool the company has released.
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“Just looking at the high number of active users is a great sign that we’ve achieved product-market fit,” Harris said of internal hiring. “Recruitment that is not mandatory for companies.”
Harris said this is just the beginning of Slackbot’s second blossoming as an AI agent. In the future, we want Slackbot to be more than just a text-based agent within Slack. In the future, he said he would like to add voice capabilities and the ability for Slackbot to browse the internet with users.
“We are very confident that our investment in Slackbot will be incredibly good not only for Slack, but for the company as a whole,” Harris said.
