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

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been reshaping 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. Chief among these is a serious revival for its AI agent, Slackbot.

The 30 new featureswhich will be available in the coming months, follows a January update that gave Slackbot agentic capabilities, including the ability to compose emails, schedule meetings, and browse your inbox for specific information.

Perhaps the most notable feature announced on 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 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 developed, they significantly reduce the work an employee may need to do. For example, a user can activate a skill using a simple command in Slack – for example, “create a budget” for an upcoming event – ​​which prompts Slackbot to bring 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 organize 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 and coordinate with external services and tools. This includes Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform launched in 2024. Through that connection, it can “redirect work or ask questions to Agentforce or an 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 now also transcribe and summarize meetings. If a meeting participant happens to drift off and miss crucial details, they can simply ask Slackbot to create a summary of the meeting, including any action items assigned to them.

The agent can now operate outside of Slack and monitor your desktop activities. Salesforce lists “your deals, your calls, your calendar, and your habits” as the type of data it uses. Based on that context, the bot will make actionable suggestions or create follow-up actions for critical tasks. Sailor said that Privacy protection is built into this design and users can adjust permissions as needed.

In short, Salesforce is clearly trying to take Slack beyond its roots as an enterprise communications 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 business users’ core business processes.

Benioff walked his team through key features on Tuesday, but noted 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 companies running on Slack. It’s been a huge growth story.”