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Slackbot's agentic AI makeover gives users their copilot
Slack's chat assistant morphs into an agent.
Don't call it a copilot, Salesforce says, but here it is: A reimagined Slackbot, the agentic AI assistant for Slack users that was previewed at Dreamforce, has begun a phased rollout to groups of Slack users.
With supporting integrations, the agentic AI-powered assistant will be able to analyze a user's data to answer plain-language queries, similar to its Microsoft Copilot counterpart, which can also be connected to Slack. Like Microsoft Copilot, Slackbot is designed to save time and reduce the drudgery of everyday tasks and reports that require gathering data, from basic HR vacation policy queries to complex annual reports.
Early internal use cases at Slack include gathering data for annual employee reviews, narrowing customer lists to target specific customer groups for sales and promotions, and more across finance, marketing and engineering, according to Slack executives.
Ideas for use cases spread throughout the company via prompt-sharing in groups and messaging as employees discover them, said Rob Seaman, chief product officer and interim CEO at Slack. In the case of early customer Beast Industries, the parent company for influencer MrBeast, one use case was setting up onboarding documents for new employees.
"I just onboarded a new director in my department, and I told Slackbot to write a whole onboarding welcome package in Canvas based on all the most recent projects in the last two to three months," said Luis Madrigal, CIO at Beast Industries. "Within less than 15 seconds, I had a full onboarding document. I continue to be amazed by the way that the company continues to leverage it and the use cases that we continue to find, up and down the chain, from entry-level staff all the way to the senior and executive level."
At its launch, Slackbot can read video, presentations and images, but it cannot output to those formats. That is something Slack "is looking at" adding, said Amy Bauer, director of product management at Slack. In a similar vein, Slackbot can now read calendar data, but not create and book meetings; that functionality will be added soon, she said.
Keeping Slack as its own entity
Slack, which is owned by Salesforce but operates as its own entity, remains a popular collaboration tool among a wide swath of developers who aren't necessarily connected to the Salesforce mothership, said Rebecca Wettemann, founder of Valoir, an independent technology analyst firm. Salesforce would like to hold on to those users who stayed on after Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield left in January 2023, a little more than two years after Salesforce bought his company.
Providing those users with their own Slackbot development and automation suite is part of Salesforce's strategy to retain existing Slack users from before the merger -- and to challenge Microsoft Teams in the collaboration market.
"What Salesforce has recognized is that there is a valuable developer community there that is really, really critical for future battles against Microsoft," Wettemann said. "Embracing this Slackbot approach -- developing AI capabilities outside of Agentforce, talking about the Slack platform as a place for AI to live -- is an important part of them continuing to engage both the customer base and community."
It's a balancing act, as Salesforce also wants to convince more of its users to deploy Slack. As with Tableau, Salesforce must cater to loyalists while also demonstrating to the Salesforce faithful how a tightly integrated collaboration platform can automate the work of sales, marketing, service and e-commerce -- or, as Benioff once called Slack, "the new interface for Salesforce."
Seaman said that there are more than a million Slack developers. Integration partners will be able to connect Slackbot as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for AI agents in the future. For now, developers have Enterprise Search connectors for Slackbot to access third-party data, in addition to a few other connectors such as the aforementioned calendar integration.
The updated Slackbot is free to Slack Business+ and Enterprise+ subscribers.
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.
