Slack delivers a comprehensive, agent-powered work operating system for every company of any size, in any industry

Slack turns all autonomous agents into teammates, bringing their actions and insights into the flow of work

Customers like RTL, Anaplan, Snyk, Accenture, Slalom, and more are transforming how their organizations work with Slack

Salesforce today announced a series of new Slack innovations that enable organizations to bring their company knowledge, data, agents, apps, and automation into one agent-powered work operating system. 

In one conversational interface, teams can work alongside agents with purpose-built AI, unifying data across Slack and Salesforce.

• Agentforce in Slack: With a new user interface (UI) for agents, teams can now talk to their data, surface insights, and take action on tasks in Slack with Salesforce’s Agentforce Agents.
• Third-party AI agents: AI agents and assistants from partners like Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and more can be deployed in the same trusted, secure environment in Slack.
• Salesforce channels: A new type of channel that connects Salesforce CRM records to channel-based conversations in Slack gives teams a comprehensive space to collaborate on every account and opportunity, increasing alignment to move work forward. Coming soon, Salesforce channels will be embedded in the Salesforce user interface.

New enhancements in Slack also include purpose-built AI functionality across search and automation as well as new solutions-based templates to unlock productivity for every use case and line of business. 

• New Slack AI features: Enhanced capabilities like huddle notes, simplified automation, and improved search allow teams to work smarter, faster, and with greater focus.
• Slack templates: Collections of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows make work in any department and for any task faster and more productive.

Why it matters: Work is broken. Desk workers report spending 41% of their day on tasks they consider low-value, nearly half aren’t able to find the information they need to do their jobs, and there are more apps and disconnected work than ever before. Simply adding AI, with even more apps, into an already inefficient work system will only magnify these challenges. Teams need a better, more efficient way to work together — where agents become teammates, AI is purpose-built and intuitive, and customer data integrates into a single work operating system. 

Go deeper: Teams are improving their productivity by as much as 47% by anchoring their work in Slack’s agent-powered work operating system. With the innovations announced today, customers can centralize everything they need to get work done more efficiently.

Innovation Details

Agents in Slack: Teams can seamlessly work alongside both Salesforce Agentforce agents and third-party agents as they close deals, create campaigns, solve customer problems, and drive projects to the finish line. Users engage with these agents via a new dedicated and secure UI in Slack. 

• Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot) brings AI-powered CRM insights directly into Slack so users can act on customer data faster. Users can ask questions or give instructions in natural language, and they’ll receive trusted responses grounded in both structured CRM data and unstructured conversational data. Agentforce can provide a status update on opportunities and cases, recommend next steps, draft emails and action plans, share those details in a direct message or channel, and more.
• Agents from Agentforce, powered by Data Cloud, can reason, orchestrate tasks, and take action, delivering personalized experiences at scale. For example, Agentforce Sales Coach can autonomously facilitate role-plays within the context of a deal and provide personalized and objective feedback to help a seller improve their skills right in Slack.
• Third-party agents help with tasks so users can focus on the work that matters. Users can build custom agents with purpose-built APIs or install third-party agents from the Slack Marketplace, a hub for Slack apps, agents, AI assistants, and more. Agents and AI assistants available in the Marketplace today come from Slack partners like Adobe Express and Cohere, with more coming soon from Anthropic, Amazon Q Business, Perplexity, IBM, and more. For example:
  • Adobe Express allows users to create on-brand content — like design presentations, media campaigns, social posts, or flyers — from a simple prompt.
  • Amazon Q Business answers questions, provides summaries, generates content, and securely completes tasks based on data and information in the customer’s enterprise systems.
  • Anthropic’s Claude helps create, edit, and summarize content, analyzes data to identify patterns and insights, writes and debugs code, and accelerates research by synthesizing information from multiple sources.
  • Asana surfaces project insights and recommendations, such as status, blockers, next steps, and more, within the context of Slack conversations.
  • Box provides AI-powered content insights that help analyze uploaded account contracts, quickly answer competitive questions from internal documents, and summarize reports.
  • Cohere enhances efficiency with a conversational AI app in Slack that provides content and answers grounded in your proprietary business data.
  • Perplexity searches the web for trusted sources, providing accurate insights for competitive analysis and strategic recommendations.
  • Workday provides employees and managers with an AI assistant to access tasks and insights around financial and HR records such as pay, time and absence, job requisitions, and more.
  • Writer drafts assets, analyzes data, answers questions, and brainstorms new ideas with AI apps tailored to the customer’s data, brand, and workflows.

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New Slack AI features: Teams can work smarter and faster by accessing an intuitive, purpose-built AI experience built natively in Slack. Since the release of Slack AI, customers have summarized more than 600 million messages, saving a collective 1.1 million hours across users. 

• Slack AI huddle notes capture key takeaways and action items so users can focus on the work at hand and keep moving. When Slack AI is invited to a huddle, it uses real-time audio and messages shared in the huddle thread to organize a transcript and notes with citations, action items, and files shared into a canvas. Anyone in the channel or direct message where the huddle started can view the AI-powered notes, allowing the whole team to stay in the loop and take action, even if they missed the meeting.
• AI Workflow Builder generates workflows with simple conversational prompts so users can easily automate their tasks. Now, users can type out a prompt like “send a welcome message to teammates that join a channel” and Slack AI and Workflow Builder will automatically generate a workflow — no manual work required. With a new “summarize channel” step, users can create a workflow that publishes recurring summaries of — and in — their favorite channels. 
• Slack AI search now surfaces results with file and app knowledge so users can get richer and more relevant answers. Previously, users could ask questions in their own words in the Slack search bar and get a concise answer based on conversational data in Slack. Now, Slack AI will also generate answers from files uploaded and shared in Slack, canvases, transcripts from clips, documents from connected apps, Google and Microsoft files, and more. Slack AI uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to generate answers, with results that are unique to the user performing the search and only pull from messages or files that the user has access to in Slack.

Customer data remains in Slack’s closed environment and is not used to train large language models (LLMs). 

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Salesforce channels: Teams can stay aligned and move work forward quickly in a unified experience that bridges Salesforce CRM data and customer-centric conversations in Slack.

• Salesforce channels securely bring CRM data from Salesforce records — including opportunities, cases, custom objects, and more — into corresponding Slack channels so users can track progress, share knowledge, and support customers. Users can also securely edit and update their CRM data right in Slack, eliminating the need to duplicate information in multiple systems.
• With Slack AI conversation summaries in Salesforce channels, users can also quickly catch up on key highlights about a single customer across other related Salesforce channels within the Salesforce account hierarchy. For example, while in an account channel, an account director can use Slack AI to get up to speed on discussions about their customer in a related opportunity channel, or get visibility into ongoing conversations about that customer’s support case in a related case channel.
• With metadata automatically mapped between Slack and Salesforce, Salesforce channels adhere to the record permissions that are assigned to a user in Salesforce, allowing that user to only see and edit data in Slack that they’re also allowed to in Salesforce.
• Coming soon, Salesforce channels will be embedded in Salesforce’s user interface. For example, a service agent won’t have to leave Salesforce to talk to a product expert working in Slack, and the entire conversation remains tied to the record.
• Companies will also be able to access Salesforce channels in Salesforce Starter Suite, allowing small businesses to connect Slack to a simplified, easy-to-use CRM to speed up decision-making and collaborate around customer data.

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Slack templates: Teams can standardize how work gets done and improve time to value with pre-configured collections of Slack’s productivity tools for every line of business or use case.

• Users can choose a specific solution for a common project or program, like managing a project, collecting feedback, and triaging help requests, from the Templates hub in their Slack workspace. With one click, Slack will generate a new channel specific to that use case, complete with a templated canvas, list, and automated workflow so teams can jump right into work.
• Templates streamline getting work started with guidance on best practices, including the structure and framework for common tasks. Channels are pre-built with specific naming prefixes, canvases have pre-configured formatting with pre-populated data, lists come with auto-created required fields, and workflows come ready with predetermined steps.
• For example, marketing teams can launch campaigns faster by kicking off a channel that includes a standardized brief in a canvas, a project plan in a list, and an automated workflow for weekly status updates.

The Salesforce perspective: “Slack’s agent-powered work operating system is redefining what it means to work smarter, not just differently. We’ve moved beyond collaboration; every day, millions of teams are leveraging purpose-built AI, with customer data, automation, and now agents seamlessly integrated into the flow of work. This isn’t just about getting work done. It’s about unlocking new productivity levels to drive results and move business forward for every team and department. In today’s increasingly complex work environment, true productivity requires a work operating system built for the future of work — and that is Slack.” – Denise Dresser, CEO, Slack 

We’ve moved beyond collaboration; every day, millions of teams are leveraging purpose-built AI, with customer data, automation, and now agents seamlessly integrated into the flow of work.

Denise Dresser, CEO, Slack 

Reactions to the news: 

• “Every employee at RTL has a task or process that generative AI can help with, which is why Slack AI has been crucial for helping our teams get work done more efficiently. For example, we are expecting to save 16,000 hours this year with the ability to catch up on conversations and get daily recaps. We look forward to seeing generative AI become even more ingrained into the way we collaborate in Slack and are sure that we’ll drive even more productivity than ever before.” – Frank Penning, CIO, RTL
• “With Slack AI, the Anaplan sales team can easily stay up-to-date in account channels and find the information they need, right when they need it — saving thousands of hours annually across the team.” – Bill Schuh, Chief Revenue Officer, Anaplan
• “We’re excited that Slack users will soon be able to leverage Cohere’s frontier enterprise-grade AI models directly within the platform to enhance their work. Whether it’s sourcing information, drafting content, or summarizing documents, Cohere’s highly secure AI technology within Slack enables businesses to supercharge productivity and efficiency with their workforce. We look forward to this collaboration helping customers transform their work.” – Saurabh Baji, SVP of Engineering, Cohere
• “The ability for teams to work together efficiently, with conversations grounded in customer data, is a game changer and an incredible advantage for our business. By being able to stay better aligned around the customer, our teams will be able to deliver more value for customers.” – Ariel Sakin, VP of Corporate Information Systems, Snyk
• “Salesforce channels bring customer data closer to decision points. Our Salesforce account teams can now access Salesforce customer data – across deals, cases, and projects – at their fingertips, streamlining their workflow, improving efficiency and helping our  distributed teams deliver for our clients more effectively.” – Stephanie Sadowski, Sr. Managing Director and Lead, Accenture Salesforce Business Group
• “The new template solution is a game-changer because it brings together Slack’s most powerful features, from channels to workflows, so our teams can get started on work so much faster. It pulls in the best practices of Slack, all in one place and is a time-saver.” – Christine McHone, Tech Industry Leader, Slalom
• “Metrigy research data shows that almost 80% of companies are using or planning to use generative AI to improve productivity. Successfully adopting generative AI requires a comprehensive work operating system where teams, data, and AI converge, enabling insights from all applications and the ability to create custom workflows. Slack’s latest AI innovations increase the power of generative AI across notes, chats, files, agents and apps, creating new potential for innovation and productivity in the AI era.” – Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Availability: 

• Third-party agents are available now in the Slack Marketplace, with more coming soon.
• Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot) in Slack will be available in beta in October 2024.
• Slack AI is available now as a paid add-on for all paid Slack plans.
• Salesforce channels are available to Slack Sales Elevate customers now and will be included in Salesforce Starter Suite in the coming months.
• Slack templates will be available in October 2024.

Explore more:

• Read more about Slack product innovations at Dreamforce

The above is intended for informational purposes. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack and are subject to change.