Salesforce Unveils Slack Innovations

Salesforce today ahead of its Dreamforce conference in San Fraancisco later this week unveiled several Slack updates that enable organizations to bringtheir 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 artificial intelligence, unifying data across Slack and Salesforce. The new elements in Slack include the following:

• 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. Users can ask questions or give instructions in natural language, and they'll receive 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.
• Third-party AI agents: Users can build custom agents with purpose-built APIs or install third-party agents from the Slack Marketplace from Slack partners like Adobe Express and Cohere, with more coming soon from Anthropic, Amazon Q Business, Perplexity, IBM, Asana, Box, Workday, Wrirter, and more.
• Salesforce channels that bring CRM data from Salesforce records, including opportunities, cases, custom objects, and more, into corresponding Slack channels. Users can edit and update their CRM data right in Slack, and with Slack AI conversation summaries in Salesforce channels, users can also catch up on key highlights about a single customer across other related Salesforce channels within the Salesforce account hierarchy. With metadata automatically mapped between Slack and Salesforce, Salesforce channels adhere to the record permissions assigned to users in Salesforce. 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.
• Templates with guidance on best practices, including the structure and framework for common tasks. 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.
• Purpose-built AI functionality across search and automation.
• New solutions-based templates for every use case and line of business.
• Huddle notes that capture key takeaways, action items, real-time audio, and messages shared in the huddle thread with citations, action items, and files shared into a canvas.
• Improved search with Slack AI that now surfaces results with file and app knowledge 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).
• Collections of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows for any department or task.
• AI Workflow Builder with simple conversational prompts. 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. With a new summarize channel step, users can create workflows that publish recurring summaries.

"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," said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack, in a statement.