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Salesforce, Slack’s owner, claims that its much improved Slackbot will become your “indispensable colleague” and “ultimate teammate”. The bot now boasts over 30 new abilities, with Slack EVP & GM Rob Seaman highlighting ten during a media briefing:
Seaman promised that these will “cement Slackbot from a simple helper that helps you find information and synthesise information to the ultimate teammate – which is something that is collaborative where you’re working with your colleagues, that harnesses the power of these newest frontier models and makes every single employee more productive”.
There are thousands of agents deployed across Slack, Seaman explained, but few companies are using them to their full ability.
It’s a repeat of what we saw when SaaS emerged and organisations pursued “best-of-breed tools [and] actually created a challenge for their employees, where employees are constantly context switching and hunting for the right tool to use in the particular moment. And this creates a productivity drain on individuals. It creates a mental drain on individuals.”
This, he suggested, “creates a big coordination tax that really slows companies down in ways on all employees”. With the new Slackbot, Salesforce believes organisations can offer “all of their AI agents right there with their employees where work is actually happening”.
In short, it will give those employees access to every frontier AI system that their organisation has invested in, but thanks to knowing the context, the business strategy and the employee themselves, it can provide access to the right tools at the right time.
We won’t attempt to detail every new skill in this updated Slackbot, instead focusing on those that Seaman flagged during his pre-briefing session.
“Slack is inherently a multiplayer environment, and we have the ability [to] up the overall AI fluency of a company through social proof and sharing. And so we are giving ability to share prompts throughout Slack.”
“We are giving the ability for people to talk to Slackbot rather than typing to Slackbots, which is super exciting. So [you] are going to be able to talk to Slackbot just like you would pick up your phone and talk to your kids or your partner.”
This is a biggie, with Seaman explaining that with the new Slackbot you can say:
“I don’t actually care about the amount of time that you take to do this. I want you to exhaustively research how this particular thing happens, happened over the past, and what learnings I may be able to get from it.
“And don’t just look at our Slack. Look at our Google Drive or our OneDrive that’s connected, and also look at the web as well. I really want a deep, deep, deep understanding of this particular topic to help inform how I’m going to do this work moving forward.”
As the previous quote rather gives away, Slackbot can now search the web too.
“It also has memory,” said Seaman. “For those of you that use AI in your personal lives, one of the more powerful things is when it can remember you across sessions, or it can remember your preferences. And so Slackbot is getting sharper every single time that you use it now.”
“We’re also adding the ability for Slackbot to be a personal note taker for your meetings,” said Seaman, “so it can transcribe meetings and take notes with full business context.”
Unlike a third-party app such as Otter, though, “you can interact with it and actually have it join what’s happening in the meeting with information that exists in your Slack… like go off and do research. If somebody shares a URL or talks about an article you may not have seen before, rather than you not being present and going off and reading that thing, you can have Slackbot do that for you in the midst of the meeting.”
“We’re also adding reusable skills and schedulable skills so teams can standardise AI tasks,” said Seaman. “So as an example, if you want to have a standardised way that all of your sales reps update their forecasts every single Tuesday morning, you can build that skill as a company and then share it out to all your sales reps, and it’ll be a skill that’s in their Slackbot that can run every single Tuesday morning.”
“Now [Slackbot] can route work or prompt questions to any agent or app that’s in your Slack,” said Seaman. “Every single employee… no longer has to think about which [AI agent] to go to. At that moment, they can just turn to Slackbot and say, ‘Hey, I have this particular sales strategy thing that I want to get accomplished’, and [Slackbot] will actually figure out what MCP server tool and agent it needs to call to get it done.
“It may pull in an Agentforce agent from Salesforce, or it may choose to pull in a linear agent to actually create a ticket. That’s the power of having this registry of MCP tools and Slackbot able to… determine which tool and agent in the moment makes the most sense.”
Not only will Slackbot be able to listen to audio for meetings, said Seaman, “but it can take a look at your desktop and screen-read and actually, again, join that with the context that exists in Slack and help you get tasks accomplished as an individual.
“So you see an email pop up on your screen. You’re like, okay, Slackbot, can you take a look at that email and help me draft a response? Slack can do that now, and I think this [doesn’t] just increase the power of Slack, but I think it increases the capability of every single employee that’s using it.”
We’ve left perhaps the biggest for last: Slackbot’s integration with Salesforce.
“We built an entirely new native CRM in Slack in conjunction with our teams at Salesforce,” Seaman explained, “so that small businesses that sign up for Slack [can manage] their customer relationships natively in Slack, and they can do that using the most powerful CRM in the world, Salesforce, but they almost don’t even know that it exists.”
This, perhaps, is where things become a little hazy: we will need to see how it works in reality. However, Seaman claims that it’s “an ambient thing that happens, and they just continue conversations with Slackbot and start managing their customers in a very, very fluid way”.
Nor will this be limited to small businesses: large teams can access Salesforce in a similar way. “So this has been one of the biggest unlocks for us as a company, here at Salesforce, and it’s really helping us turn Slack into the system of engagement,” said Seaman.
“We believe that will become the system of engagement for every single company that’s out there, and we think it’s where humans and agents are going to work together in the most productive way. And Slackbot is the anchor tenant of that, that becomes the the ultimate teammate, if you will.”
If your business is signed up to Slack’s Business+ or Enterprise+ plans then you should be able to benefit from the new Slackbot with immediate effect. Users of the Pro or Free plans won’t have access to the agent.
