Salesforce Introduces Slack AI, Slack Lists, and Slack Automation Capabilities

Salesforce today launched Slack product innovations that bring artificial intelligence, automation, and knowledge sharing into its intelligent productivity platform.

Slack AI capabilities include the following:

• Channel recaps, to instantly deliver highlights and status reports on any channel, extract key themes from feedback channels, and more.
• Thread summaries, to catch up on long discussions, whether their team is swarming on an incident, going back and forth on next steps, or brainstorming ideas.
• Search answers, to deliver conversational data and all the context it holds from expertise and experiences across the organization. Users can simply ask a question and search will not only return results with relevant messages, files, and channels, but share an AI-generated summary too.

Slack's new automation capabilities include the following.

• A new and improved Workflow Builder with connectors from companies like Google, Atlassian, and Asana so users can integrate multiple tools in a single workflow using a few clicks. Workflow Builder also extends to Salesforce Flow for users to customize their Slack workflows with admin-approved Salesforce automations.
• The ability to build and deploy custom apps, hosted in Slack, that integrate internal systems or enable more advanced custom business logic. Slack will take care of hosting. Developers can extend business logic from their custom apps to Workflow Builder, where users can discover and use them in their own automations.
• A new dedicated hub where users can get started with templates, access recently run workflows, and explore workflows being used across their organizations. They can repurpose automations used by other teams too, making copies of the workflows and customizing the rest in Workflow Builder.

The Slack lists functionality lets users do the following:

• Track projects, such as developing new products or marketing campaigns. Users can assign owners, update status, and discuss task details in one place.
• Manage launches by tracking dependencies and monitoring progress in Slack. When teammates are mentioned, they will be alerted the same way they receive all Slack activity.
• Review approvals and requests with Workflow Builder. As requests come in, users can assign them, discuss with the requestor, and close them out when they're finished.

"At Slack, we're taking a collaboration-first approach to delivering an intelligent productivity platform in the age of AI and automation," said Noah Desai Weiss, chief product officer of Slack, in a statement. "We are focused on providing customers with a simpler, more delightful, and more efficient set of tools so every person can do the best work of their lives."