Salesforce added agentic AI features to Slack, touting the latest version as an "operating system for work" as the company competes for eyeballs in the world of workspace collaboration.
Rob Seaman, chief product officer at Slack, also in an interview addressed a recent controversy over Salesforce's limitation on sharing Slack data with other companies' AI tools.
Features available in Slack now include channel recaps and thread summaries, in which agents gather a digest of what's happened in channels and threads, and AI notes of Huddles meetings. Furthermore, those features can be translated into languages including French, Chinese, Korean and Italian.
Features coming soon in Slack, Salesforce said, include more summaries and writing assistance in Canvas, Slack's workspace. The tools will be able to summarize raw meeting notes into structured updates for a team, pull together ideas to draft project briefs, and create FAQs and other content that is currently manually written by people.
Integrating summaries and recaps is going to be table stakes in the near future for any collaboration tool.
Rebecca WettemannFounder, Valoir
"Integrating summaries and recaps is going to be table stakes in the near future for any collaboration tool," said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent research firm. "The authoring stuff is what's going to be the most interesting to users, but embedding those generative AI capabilities, such as contextual search and summaries, are all important things."
Another feature to come is AI Profile Summaries, which gathers information outside Slack and makes it clickable. Especially in large companies such as Salesforce, this feature can help message recipients understand where unrecognized people are coming from -- even if they don't provide much detail in their Slack profiles.
"We prompt it to be positive," Seaman said. "It can only access public channels, but it's going to write a positive CV, which we found to be way more valuable than just the person's name, the title and what you can find about them … I can get to know somebody, get up to speed and engage with them."
Finally, Slack added its version of enterprise search, a feature popular among content management vendors such as Box. Through APIs, Slack's agents can summarize content and conversations through APIs with enterprise apps such as Microsoft Teams and OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, Jira, Asana and Atlassian.
Slack AI enterprise search concatenates enterprise content from outside systems -- such as Google Docs -- into search results.
Slack API data sharing is a go -- on the Slack Marketplace
Last month, numerous news outlets reported that Salesforce had shut some AI companies out of Slack data-sharing for search. At first, Salesforce offered little information other than referring media to its terms of service.
Seaman said that Salesforce throttled API rate limits for apps outside of its Slack Marketplace app directory to maintain data access permissions. In Slack, private channel membership and people in a multi-person direct message channel can change. Maintaining those permissions -- and other customer-defined data security parameters -- was the root of the change.
That said, Salesforce continues to share Slack data through connectors from companies such as Box and Microsoft on the Slack Marketplace. The company's priority is to vet apps before handing over the keys to Slack data.
"At the end of the day, the data that's in Slack is our customers' data, but it's our job to protect it," Seaman said.
The rollout of the change was rocky. Seaman said he spent much time discussing the reasoning behind the changes with customers.
"I think we could have done a little bit better with the messaging, because there was pushback from the partner ecosystem, and we saw some pushback from the customers," Seaman said. "But as we talk to customers and explain it, they understand and are supportive."
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
