Work with AI agents and assistants in Slack
Some apps in the Slack Marketplace are built to include AI agents or assistants. Similar to how you'd send a message to another person or to Slackbot, you can chat with an agent or assistant once its app is installed.
What you need to know
- Apps with agents and assistants can be built by third-party developers or by developers in your organization.
- Apps installed from the Slack Marketplace follow our policies and guidelines, and you can review any app’s privacy policy and security and compliance information from the listing page in the Marketplace.
- By default, members can install apps with assistants or agents, but owners and admins can enable app approval for their workspace or Enterprise organization to approve, restrict, or review apps before they’re installed.
Tip: To view apps installed to your workspace or org, click Tools in the sidebar of Slack on desktop and then click Apps.
Use AI apps
Once you install an AI app, everyone in your workspace or organization can start using it right away. There are two places to interact with agents and assistants in Slack — in split view or from their app’s Messages tab.
Chat in a split view
To simultaneously work in Slack and chat with an agent or assistant, you can start a conversation that will open on the right side of Slack.
- From your desktop, click Agent in the top-right corner of Slack. If there are you multiple agents or assistants available, click More agents to choose the one you want.
- Select a prompt if available, or send a message to get started.
- To view your message history, click the clock icon.
Chat from an app's Messages tab
You can also start a conversation with an agent or assistant from the app's
Messages tab.
- From your desktop, click Tools in the sidebar. If you don't see this option, click More to find it.
- Click Apps, then search for and select an app.
- Click New Chat in the top-right corner, or click the Chat tab to resume a conversation.
- To view your chat history, click the History tab.
Manage agent and assistant display
Owners and admins can hide or show agents and assistants for everyone in their workspace or org. Members can set a preference to determine whether they see agents and assistants at the top of Slack, and decide which ones are visible.
Set your preference
- From your desktop, click your profile picture in the sidebar.
- Select Preferences from the menu, then click Navigation.
- Below App agents & assistants, check or uncheck the box next to Show AI Agents in top bar.
Choose agents and assistants
- From your desktop, click More agents at the top of Slack.
- Click Manage.
- Check or uncheck the box next to an agent to show or hide it.
App security
Apps you add to Slack that include AI capabilities use the AI functionality specific to the third-party service.
- Apps with AI agents or assistants are built with specific scopes and API methods. Before installing an app, it’s important to consider its scopes to understand the actions the app can take, the data the app can access, and what it can do with that data. Owners and admins can enable app approval (for a workspace) or set an app management policy (for an Enterprise organization) to ensure that apps are reviewed before members can install them.
- The data that an AI app in Slack can access depends on its scopes. By default, an app will have access to the data in your messages with the app. To grant it access to data in your channels or direct messages, you can add the app to any conversation.
- In accordance with the Slack app guidelines, no customer data is used or retained to train third-party LLMs. Instead, we use a technique called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) that sends the data necessary for each task to an LLM at the time of inference — no training required. Because this data is sent in the context of a single request, the LLM does not retain any of the data.
- All apps available in the Slack Marketplace are reviewed by our team against our submission guidelines and must adhere to a zero copy and zero LLM training policy.