Key Highlights:
- Starting tooday, Salesforce has started rolling out a new AI-powered Slackbot to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers this week.
- The upgraded Slackbot can find information, draft emails, schedule meetings, and complete tasks without leaving Slack.
- Slackbot can now also connect with services like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive, helping users work across apps seamlessly.
Slack has been a staple for many who work in a corporate or hybrid work setup. I personally use Slack to communicate with teams that I am working with. Since I am a longtime user of Slack, I know—and I’m guessing you know too—that the messaging platform has its minimalist Slackbot. All this time, it lived inside Slack, offering answers to users’ queries and helping them in the right direction.
Slackbot enters AI era with the latest update rolling out today, says Salesforce
However, it seems Salesforce, the company behind Slack, isn’t quite happy with the basic stuff Slackbot has been doing all this time. The company has now announced that, with a new update rolling out today (January 13), Slackbot will enter an AI era, which Salesforce believes will change how people work inside Slack altogether.
As reported by TechCrunch, Salesforce has started rolling out the new AI-powered Slackbot to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers. Not to mention, the claims around the update are big. As part of the massive AI refresh, Slackbot will now be able to actively help users find information, draft emails, schedule meetings, and complete tasks without leaving Slack. The company wants to eliminate the back-and-forth hopping between apps while conversations within teams are still live.
What’s interesting is that this supercharged version of SlackbotSlackbot AI agent can connect to different apps. Meaning, it can interact with enterprise services like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive, as long as users grant permission. That means employees can pull files, check details, or retrieve information across platforms without breaking their workflow.
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An AI agent that can ease your workplace headache
Speaking with the news outlet about the update, Salesforce CTO Parker Harris says, “It is an agent, it is a super-agent that is your employee agent. It’s powered by generative AI, and it is something that is highly crafted and highly curated to be an agentic experience that employees and users love.” Salesforce also reports that it internally tested the next-gen Slackbot within its teams.
As you may know, Slack doesn’t really release new features quite often. But this one, according to the CTO, is just the beginning of Slackbot’s second bloom as an AI agent. Looking ahead, Slackbot could be much more than just a text-based AI agent living inside Slack. The company has hinted at adding voice capabilities in the future, along with the ability for Slackbot to browse the internet alongside its users. So, if you use Slack, there are plenty of features incoming—that’s for sure.
