If you use Slack, you’re about to have an AI colleague you just can’t avoid. Salesforce, the parent company of Slack, announcement On Tuesday, it turns Slackbot, previously an app that could execute simple commands, into a full-fledged AI agent that will use your chat and work information to adapt to your needs. That’s what you want, right?
The basic selling point of the Slackbot AI is that it is fully integrated into your workspace. “Slackbot is your deeply personal AI agent for work, built natively into Slack for every employee, with no setup or training required. What sets it apart is simple: Slackbot starts with your context. And that context is what other tools lack,” the company said in a blog post announcing the update. This means it is able to compose emails for you, search for events on your schedule, and extract information from your chats and channels, among other things.
It can also interact with other products, including Microsoft Teams and Google Drive, which is certainly important if you want it to have any use in most workspaces, where Slack is purely a communications tool and the actual work happens off-platform. According to Slack, these integrations will allow users to work on multiple apps without leaving Slack.
This also means that Slackbot sees a lot of your work. According to SlackSlackbot is “informed by your messages and files”, but “it only sees what you can see, always respecting the permissions already in place”. Can anyone else see what you and your Slackbot see? This is not disclosed. As you may or may not know, Slack allows admins to request access to direct messages sent to a Slack instance and provides a lot of additional visibility into user activity.
Slack also promises that Slackbot will eventually be able to work with other AI agents, like Agentforce, Salesforce’s flagship product, and will theoretically allow you to work with multiple agents to complete work while communicating entirely through Slackbot. There are surely some features there. Harvard Business Review A recently published study reveals that AI agents are much better at internal processes than at customer-facing work. It is therefore possible that Slackbot could capitalize on this trend. Alternatively, it might be more hype than help, and you’ll spend your days trying to configure Slackbot to do things that you would have already completed if you had just started doing the task on your own.
You will soon know what future we live in. According to Slack, the new Slackbot is available today for most Business+ and Enterprise+ customers.