Salesforce on Tuesday launched a completely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the corporate's workplace assistant, transforming it from an easy notification tool into what executives describe as a totally powered AI agent able to searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking motion on behalf of employees.
The brand new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the middle of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to finish complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to persuade investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products somewhat than render them obsolete.
"Slackbot isn't just one other copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce."
From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the bottom up
Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the brand new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you recognize, a bit of tricycle, and the brand new Slackbot is like, you recognize, a Porsche."
The unique Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users so as to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering easy notifications. The new edition runs on a completely different architecture built around a big language model and complex search capabilities that may access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations.
"It's two various things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly easy. The brand new Slackbot is brand recent — it's based around an LLM and a really robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines like google and yahoo, third-party enterprise data."
Salesforce selected to retain the Slackbot brand despite the basic technical overhaul. "People know what Slackbot is, and so we desired to carry that forward," Harris said.
Why Anthropic's Claude powers the brand new Slackbot — and which AI models could come next
The brand new Slackbot runs on Claude, Anthropic's large language model, a alternative driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack's business service operates under FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve U.S. federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was "the one provider that might give us a compliant LLM" when Slack began constructing the brand new system.
But that exclusivity won't last. "We’re, this 12 months, going to support additional providers," Harris said. "Now we have an excellent relationship with Google. Gemini is incredible — performance is great, cost is great. So we're going to make use of Gemini for some things." He added that OpenAI stays a possibility as well.
Harris echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's view that giant language models have gotten commoditized: "You've heard Marc speak about LLMs are commodities, that they're democratized. I call them CPUs."
On the sensitive query of coaching data, Harris was unequivocal: Salesforce doesn’t train any models on customer data. "Models don't have any form of security," he explained. "If we trained it on some confidential conversation that you simply and I even have, I don't want Carolyn to know — if I train it into the LLM, there isn’t any way for me to say you get to see the reply, but Carolyn doesn't."
Inside Salesforce's internal experiment: 80,000 employees tested Slackbot with striking results
Salesforce has been testing the brand new Slackbot internally for months, rolling it out to all 80,000 employees. In accordance with Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, the outcomes have been striking: "It's the fastest adopted product in Salesforce history."
Internal data shows that two-thirds of Salesforce employees have tried the brand new Slackbot, with 80% of those users continuing to make use of it repeatedly. Internal satisfaction rates reached 96% — the very best for any AI feature Slack has shipped. Employees report saving between two and 20 hours per week.
The adoption happened largely organically. "I feel it was about five days, and a Canvas was developed by our employees called 'The Most Stealable Slackbot Prompts,'" Gavin said. "People just began adding to it organically. I feel it's as much as 250-plus prompts which are on this Canvas without delay."
Kate Crotty, a principal UX researcher at Salesforce, found that 73% of internal adoption was driven by social sharing somewhat than top-down mandates. "Everybody is there to assist one another learn and communicate hacks," she said.
How Slackbot transforms scattered enterprise data into executive-ready insights
During a product demonstration, Amy Bauer, Slack's product experience designer, showed how Slackbot can synthesize information across multiple sources. In a single example, she asked Slackbot to investigate customer feedback from a pilot program, upload a picture of a usage dashboard, and have Slackbot correlate the qualitative and quantitative data.
"That is where Slackbot really earns its keep for me," Bauer explained. "What it's doing just isn’t just simply reading the image — it's actually the image and comparing it to the insight it just generated for me."
Slackbot can then query Salesforce to search out enterprise accounts with open deals that could be good candidates for early access, creating what Bauer called "a extremely great justification and plan to maneuver forward." Finally, it might probably synthesize all that information right into a Canvas — Slack's collaborative document format — and find calendar availability amongst stakeholders to schedule a review meeting.
"Up until this point, we’ve got been working in a one-to-one capability with Slackbot," Bauer said. "But one among the advantages that I can do now could be take this insight and have it generate this right into a Canvas, a shared workspace where I can iterate on it, refine it with Slackbot, or share it out with my team."
Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer, said the Canvas creation demonstrates where the product is heading: "That is making a tool call internally to Slack Canvas to really write, effectively, a shared document. Nevertheless it signals where we're going with Slackbot — we're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls."
MrBeast's company became a Slackbot guinea pig—and employees say they're saving 90 minutes a day
Amongst Salesforce's pilot customers is Beast Industries, the parent company of YouTube star MrBeast. Luis Madrigal, the corporate's chief information officer, joined the launch announcement to explain his experience.
"As any individual who has rolled out enterprise technologies for over twenty years now, this was practically one among the best," Madrigal said. "The plumbing is there. Slack as an implementation, Enterprise Tools — having the ability to activate the Slackbot and the Slack AI functionality was so simple as having my team go in, review, do a fast security review."
Madrigal said his security team signed off "somewhat quickly" — unusual for enterprise AI deployments — because Slackbot accesses only the data each individual user already has permission to view. "Given all of the guardrails you guys have put into place for Slackbot to be unique and customised to only the data that every individual user has, only the conversations and the Slack rooms and Slack channels that they're a part of—that made my security team log off somewhat quickly."
One Beast Industries worker, Sinan, the top of Beast Games marketing, reported saving "at bare minimum, 90 minutes a day." One other worker, Spencer, a creative supervisor, described it as "an assistant who's being attentive after I'm not."
Other pilot customers include Slalom, reMarkable, Xero, Mercari, and Engine. Mollie Bodensteiner, SVP of Operations at Engine, called Slackbot "an absolute 'chaos tamer' for our team," estimating it saves her about half-hour day by day "just by eliminating context switching."
Slackbot vs. Microsoft Copilot vs. Google Gemini: The fight for enterprise AI dominance
The launch puts Salesforce in direct competition with Microsoft's Copilot, which is integrated into Teams and the broader Microsoft 365 suite, in addition to Google's Gemini integrations across Workspace. When asked what distinguishes Slackbot from these alternatives, Seaman pointed to context and convenience.
"The thing that makes it strongest for our customers and users is the proximity — it's excellent there in your Slack," Seaman said. "There's an amazing convenience affordance that's naturally built into it."
The deeper advantage, executives argue, is that Slackbot already understands users' work without requiring setup or training. "Most AI tools sound the identical irrespective of who’s using them," the corporate's announcement stated. "They lack context, miss nuance, and force you to leap between tools to get anything done."
Harris put it more directly: "If you happen to've ever had that magic experience with AI — I feel ChatGPT is an excellent example, it's an excellent experience from a consumer perspective — Slackbot is basically what we're doing within the enterprise, to be this worker super agent that’s loved, similar to people love using Slack."
Amy Bauer emphasized the frictionless nature of the experience. "Slackbot is inherently grounded within the context, in the info that you have got in Slack," she said. "In order you proceed working in Slack, Slackbot gets higher since it's grounded within the work that you simply're doing there. There isn’t a setup. There isn’t a configuration for those end users."
Salesforce's ambitious plan to make Slackbot the one 'super agent' that controls all of the others
Salesforce positions Slackbot as what Harris calls a "super agent" — a central hub that may eventually coordinate with other AI agents across a corporation.
"Every corporation goes to have an worker super agent," Harris said. "Slackbot is basically taking the magic of what Slack does. We predict that Slackbot, and we're really enthusiastic about it, goes to be that."
The vision extends to third-party agents already launching in Slack. Last month, Anthropic released a preview of Claude Code for Slack, allowing developers to interact with Claude's coding capabilities directly in chat threads. OpenAI, Google, Vercel, and others have also built agents for the platform.
"Many of the net-new apps which are being deployed to Slack are agents," Seaman noted throughout the press conference. "That is proof of the promise of humans and agents coexisting and dealing together in Slack to resolve problems."
Harris described a future where Slackbot becomes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client, capable of leverage tools from across the software ecosystem — just like how the developer tool Cursor works. "Slack will be an MCP client, and Slackbot might be the hub of that, leveraging all these tools out on the earth, a few of which might be these amazing agents," he said.
But Harris also cautioned against over-promising on multi-agent coordination. "I still think we're in the only agent world," he said. "FY26 goes to be the 12 months where we began to see more coordination. But we're going to do it with customer success in mind, and never reveal and speak about, like, 'I've got 1,000 agents working together,' because I feel that's unrealistic."
Slackbot costs nothing extra, but Salesforce's data access fees could squeeze some customers
Slackbot is included at no additional cost for patrons on Business+ and Enterprise+ plans. "There's no additional fees customers should do," Gavin confirmed. "In the event that they're on one among those plans, they're going to get Slackbot."
Nevertheless, some enterprise customers may face other cost pressures related to Salesforce's broader data strategy. CIOs may even see price increases for third-party applications that work with Salesforce data, as effects of upper charges for API access ripple through the software supply chain.
Fivetran CEO George Fraser has warned that Salesforce's shift in pricing policy for API access could have tangible consequences for enterprises counting on Salesforce as a system of record. "They may not give you the option to make use of Fivetran to copy their data to Snowflake and as a substitute should use Salesforce Data Cloud. Or they could find that they are usually not capable of interact with their data via ChatGPT, and as a substitute should use Agentforce," Fraser said in a recent CIO report.
Salesforce has framed the pricing change as standard industry practice.
What Slackbot can do today, what's coming in weeks, and what's still on the roadmap
The brand new Slackbot begins rolling out today and can reach all eligible customers by the top of February. Mobile availability will complete by March 3, Bauer confirmed during her interview with VentureBeat.
Some capabilities remain works in progress. Calendar reading and availability checking can be found at launch, but the power to really book meetings is "coming a couple of weeks after," in accordance with Seaman. Image generation just isn’t currently supported, though Bauer said it's "something that we’re in the long run."
When asked about integration with competing CRM systems like HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce representatives declined to offer specifics throughout the interview, though they acknowledged the query touched on key competitive differentiators.
Salesforce is betting the long run of labor looks like a chat window—and it's not alone
The Slackbot launch is Salesforce's bet that the long run of enterprise work is conversational — that employees will increasingly prefer to interact with AI through natural language somewhat than navigating traditional software interfaces.
Harris described Slack's product philosophy using principles like "don't make me think" and "be an excellent host." The goal, he said, is for Slackbot to surface information proactively somewhat than requiring users to hunt for it.
"One among the revelations for me is LLMs applied to unstructured information are incredible," Harris said. "And the quantity of value you have got when you're a Slack user, in case your corporation uses Slack — the quantity of value in Slack is unbelievable. Since you're talking about work, you're sharing documents, you're making decisions, but you possibly can't as a human undergo that and really get the identical value that an LLM can do."
Looking ahead, Harris expects the interfaces themselves to evolve beyond pure conversation. "We're type of saturating what we will do with purely conversational UIs," he said. "I feel we'll begin to see agents constructing an interface that most closely fits your intent, versus attempting to surface something inside a conversational interface that matches your intent."
Microsoft, Google, and a growing roster of AI startups are placing similar bets — that the winning enterprise AI might be the one embedded within the tools employees already use, not one other application to learn. The race to turn into that invisible layer of workplace intelligence is now fully underway.
For Salesforce, the stakes extend beyond a single product launch. After a bruising 12 months on Wall Street and protracted questions on whether AI threatens its core business, the corporate is wagering that Slackbot can prove the alternative — that the tens of thousands and thousands of individuals already chatting in Slack each day just isn’t a vulnerability, but an unassailable advantage.
Haley Gault, the Salesforce account executive in Pittsburgh who stumbled upon the brand new Slackbot on a snowy morning, captured the shift in a single sentence: "I truthfully can't imagine working for one more company not accessing a lot of these tools. That is just how I work now."
That's precisely what Salesforce is counting on.
