Salesforce, the cloud software giant, is reshaping its operations around artificial intelligence, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest results of those efforts: an updated version of Slack, with a slew of new AI features. The most important of these is a serious shine to the AI agent, Slackbot.
THE 30 new featureswhich will be available in the coming months, follow a January update that gave Slackbot agent capabilities — including the ability to compose emails, schedule meetings, and search your inbox for specific information.
Perhaps the most notable feature announced 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 environments. Slackbot comes with a built-in library of AI skills, Salesforce says, but users can also create their own custom versions.
Once these skills are in place, they greatly reduce the amount of work that an employee may need to do. For example, a user can trigger a capability using a simple command in Slack — say, “create a budget” for an upcoming event — prompting Slackbot to gather all relevant information from a company’s Slack channels, as well as any connected apps or data sources, to create an actionable plan. The bot will then automatically organize a meeting to discuss the plan, inviting relevant employees based on their titles.
Slackbot now also works as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client — meaning it can connect and coordinate with external services and tools. Among them is Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform launched in 2024. Through this connection, it can “route work or ask questions to Agentforce or any agent or application in your business,” the company says, with the agent finding the most relevant and efficient path for information, without human intervention.
According to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and former chief product officer, Slackbot can also now transcribe meetings and summarize them. If a meeting participant happens to drop out without important details, they can simply ask Slackbot to produce a summary of the meeting, including any assigned action items.
The agent can also now work outside of Slack and monitor your desktop activities — Salesforce lists “your offers, your conversations, your calendar, and your habits” as the kinds of data it pulls. Based on this context, the robot will make suggestions or follow-up plans for critical tasks. Naval he has said this Privacy protections are built into this plan and that users have the ability to adjust permissions as needed.
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In short: Salesforce is clearly trying to move beyond Slack’s roots as an enterprise communication tool and position it as a more flexible platform that can handle a wider variety of business tasks. The hope seems to be that by infusing it with AI, Slack can become an integral part of enterprise users’ core business processes.
Benioff let his team walk through the highlights on Tuesday, but noted during his keynote that the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack has been an “incredible journey,” one that has seen “two and a half times revenue growth.” He added: “We have about a million businesses running on Slack. It’s been a huge growth story.”
