Salesforce announces an AI-heavy makeover for Slack, with 30 new features | TechCrunch

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been remaking its business around AI, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest results of those efforts: an updated version of Slack, with a plethora of new AI features. The most significant of these is a serious glow-up for its AI agent, Slackbot.

The 30 new features, which will be available in the coming months, follow a January update that gave Slackbot agentic capabilities — including the ability to draft emails, schedule meetings, and sift through your inbox for specific information.

Perhaps the most notable feature announced Tuesday is what the company calls reusable AI-skills — which allow users to define specific tasks for Slackbot that, once created, can be applied in a variety of different scenarios and contexts. Slackbot comes with a built-in library of AI-skills, Salesforce says, but users can also create their own custom versions.

Once these skills are set up, they significantly reduce the work an employee might need to do. For example, a user can trigger a skill using a simple command in Slack — say, “create a budget” for an upcoming event — prompting Slackbot to pull together all relevant information from a company’s Slack channels, as well as any connected apps or data sources, to create an actionable plan. The bot will then automatically set up a meeting to discuss the plan, inviting relevant employees based on their titles.

Slackbot now also functions as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client — meaning it can connect to and coordinate with outside services and tools. Among those is Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform launched in 2024. Through that connection, it can “route work or prompt questions to Agentforce or any agent or app in your enterprise” the company says, with the agent finding the most relevant and efficient path for the information, without human intervention.

According to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and former chief product officer, Slackbot can also now transcribe meetings and summarize them. If a meeting participant happens to zone out, thus missing critical details, they can just ask Slackbot to produce a recap of the meeting, including any action items assigned to them.

The agent can also now operate outside of Slack and monitor your desktop activities — Salesforce lists “your deals, your conversations, your calendar, and your habits” as the kinds of data it draws on. Based on that context, the bot will make actionable suggestions or draft follow-ups for critical tasks. Seaman has said that privacy protections are built into this design and that users have the ability to adjust permissions as needed.

In short: Salesforce is clearly trying to take Slack beyond its roots as an enterprise communication tool and position it as a more versatile platform that can handle a wider variety of business tasks. The hope seems to be that, by flooding it with AI, Slack can become an indispensable part of enterprise users’ core business processes.

Benioff let his team walk through the major features on Tuesday but remarked, during his keynote, that the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack had been an “incredible journey,” one that had delivered “two and a half times revenue growth.” He added: “We have about a million businesses running on Slack. It’s been a huge growth story.”