Salesforce announces an AI-heavy makeover for Slack, with 30 new features

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been reshaping its business around AI, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team revealed the latest results of those efforts: an updated version of Slack, with a host of new AI features. The most important of these is the serious lighting of its AI agent, Slackbot.

The 30 new features, which will be available in the coming months, follow a January update that gave Slackbot agent capabilities — including the ability to write emails, schedule meetings, and filter your inbox for specific information.

Perhaps the most notable feature announced Tuesday is what the company calls AI-reusable skills — which allow users to define specific functions for Slackbot that, once created, can be used in a variety of situations and situations. 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 developed, they greatly reduce the amount of work that may need to be done. For example, a user can activate a skill using a simple command in Slack – say, “create a budget” for an upcoming event – which prompts Slackbot to pull together all the relevant information from the company’s Slack channels, as well as any connected apps or data sources, to create an actionable plan. The bot will then automatically set up a meeting to discuss the plan, inviting relevant employees based on their topics.

Slackbot now works as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client – meaning it can connect and link to external services and tools. Among those is Agentforce, Salesforce’s agent development platform launched in 2024. With that connection, “it can direct work or send questions to Agentforce or any agent or application in your business” says the company, where the agent gets the most important and efficient way of information, without human intervention.

According to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and former chief product officer, Slackbot can also record meetings and summarize them. If a meeting participant happens to disconnect, thereby losing important information, they can simply ask Slackbot to issue an update of the meeting, including any action items assigned to them.

The agent can now work outside of Slack and monitor your desktop activities – Salesforce lists “your deals, your conversations, your calendar, and your habits” as the types of data it pulls from. Based on that context, the bot will make actionable suggestions or drafts for tracking important tasks. Seaman said privacy protections are built into the design and that users have the ability to adjust permissions as needed.

In short: Salesforce is clearly trying to take Slack beyond its roots as a business communication tool and position it as a flexible platform that can handle a variety of business functions. The hope seems to be that, by imbuing it with AI, Slack can become an integral part of the business processes of business users.

Benioff let his team run through the big features on Tuesday but noted, during his keynote, that the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack has been “an incredible journey,” delivering “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.”