AI Workflows: What They Are and Why They Matter for Businesses

For business leaders, the drive to boost efficiency remains a constant goal. Whether it’s reducing operational costs or improving customer outcomes, refining workflows can mean the difference between profitability and losing market share to the competition.

Now, companies have a powerful new tool at their disposal: artificial intelligence. By implementing AI workflows, business leaders are beginning to realize significant productivity gains. Highly flexible and adaptive, these workflows rely on AI to take manual, time-consuming tasks off human workers’ plates so they can focus on higher-value work that drives innovation and profitability.

In this guide, we’ll explore AI workflows: what they are, how they function, and the real-world impact they can have on your organization.”

What is an AI workflow?

An AI workflow uses artificial intelligence to automate and optimize sequences of tasks or processes within a business. A Harvard Business Review report indicates that nearly two-thirds of organizations consider AI adoption a key strategic priority. Unlike traditional automation that follows rigid, pre-programmed rules, an AI workflow can learn, adapt, and make decisions based on data. AI workflows make processes smarter, not just faster, by embedding intelligence directly into how work gets done.

Traditional workflows are often linear and rules-based. An artificial intelligence workflow, however, can handle more complex scenarios, understand nuanced information, and even predict outcomes. It’s the difference between a simple checklist and an intelligent assistant that anticipates your needs. This shift is fundamental to modern AI workflow automation, enabling businesses to tackle more sophisticated challenges with greater efficiency.

Here are some common traits of AI workflows:

• Data-driven and contextual. They leverage vast amounts of data to inform actions and decisions, ensuring relevance and accuracy.
• Adaptive to changing input. They can adjust their behavior based on new information or evolving circumstances, maintaining effectiveness over time.
• Reduction of manual work and easing of decision bottlenecks. They take over repetitive tasks and can make informed decisions, freeing up human workers for higher-value activities.
• Triggered by events or conditions, they can initiate automatically based on specific occurrences or predefined criteria, ensuring timely execution.

The core components of an AI workflow

An effective AI workflow combines several technologies and data sources collaborating together. These interconnected elements enable intelligent automation, resulting in practical business solutions.

Key components of AI workflows include:

• AI agents that perform tasks, make decisions, or interact with users and systems, acting as digital labor.
• Machine learning (ML) models for pattern recognition, prediction, and learning from data over time, enabling continuous improvement.
• Natural language processing (NLP) to understand and generate human language, enabling interaction with unstructured data like text and speech.
• Automation triggers and conditions that initiate and guide the workflow based on specific events or data points from various sources.
• Workflow orchestration engines that manage the sequence of tasks, dependencies, and flow of information, a core part of AI workflow management.
• Integrated data sources such as CRMs (like Salesforce), ERPs, databases, email, and chat platforms that provide the necessary context and information for intelligent action.

Platforms designed as agentic operating systems for work, like Slack, provide the environment where these components can come together. They offer the tools and integrations necessary to build, manage, and scale AI workflows effectively, connecting human teams to new digital labor resources.

Slack’s approach to AI workflows

An agentic operating system for work, Slack serves as a central hub where people, applications, data, and AI agents converge. Slack’s approach to AI workflows focuses on making artificial intelligence accessible and actionable within the flow of everyday work. This method embeds intelligence where conversations and decisions happen, making work simpler and more productive.

Here’s how Slack facilitates powerful AI workflows:

• Workflow Builder allows anyone to create custom automations for routine tasks without writing a single line of code, making AI workflow automation accessible to all team members.
• Slack AI provides powerful capabilities like AI-powered search, channel recaps, and thread summaries, surfacing insights and saving valuable time by making information easily digestible.
• Agentforce in Slack enables teams to integrate and collaborate with AI agents as teammates, delegating tasks and augmenting human capabilities for enhanced productivity.

Workflow Builder: automate without complexity

Imagine being able to automate those repetitive, time-consuming tasks without needing a degree in computer science. That’s the power of Slack’s Workflow Builder. It’s a no-code tool that empowers teams to design and implement custom AI workflows directly within Slack. From welcoming new team members to managing approvals, Workflow Builder streamlines processes so your team can focus on more strategic work that drives business value.

Popular workflow templates include:

• Onboarding messages to automatically welcome new hires and provide essential information and resources.
• Meeting prep and follow-ups to send reminders, agendas, and action item summaries to keep everyone aligned.
• Helpdesk routing to triage support requests and direct them to the right team or individual efficiently.
• Project status updates to collect and share progress reports automatically, ensuring transparency.
• Auto-responses in channels to provide quick answers to frequently asked questions, saving team members’ time.

The true strength of Workflow Builder lies in its ability to connect with the tools your team already uses. With over 2,600 app integrations, including deep connections with Salesforce, you can build workflows that span across your entire tech stack. That means data can flow seamlessly, and actions can be triggered in other systems, all orchestrated from within Slack. This is a key aspect of effective AI workflow management, ensuring that automation works with your existing ecosystem.

Slack AI: supercharge knowledge access

Slack AI transforms how you access and use knowledge within your organization. It offers AI-powered search that goes beyond simple keyword matching, understanding intent and context to deliver relevant answers from across your Slack messages, files, and even connected applications. Plus, features like channel recaps and thread summaries condense information, so you get the gist without information overload. This is crucial—according to Slack’s 2023 State of Work survey, 27 percent of employees consider time spent in meetings and responding to emails to be the biggest obstacle to their productivity.

How Slack AI boosts workflows:

• Finds info across tools, inboxes, and messages, breaking down silos and providing a unified view of organizational knowledge.
• Summarizes key updates for async team members ensuring everyone stays informed, regardless of their schedule or time zone.
• Reduces time spent switching contexts by bringing information and answers directly into the flow of work where decisions are made.
• Supports real-time decision-making by providing quick access to relevant data and insights when they are needed most.

By intelligently surfacing information and summarizing conversations, Slack AI helps reduce the cognitive load on individuals. Instead of wading through endless messages or searching multiple systems, teams can get the insights they need, when they need them. This allows for more focused work and faster, more informed decisions, making every artificial intelligence workflow more effective and impactful.

Agentforce in Slack: delegate work to AI agents

The next evolution in AI workflows involves AI agents—digital entities capable of understanding requests, performing tasks, and even collaborating with human team members. Agentforce in Slack brings this power directly into your workspace. Think of these agents as specialized teammates who can handle routine processes, analyze data, and provide support, allowing your human talent to concentrate on complex problem-solving and innovation. This is where the concept of digital labor truly comes to life, augmenting your team’s capacity.

What can Agentforce do:

• Draft emails or responses based on context from conversations or CRM data pulled from Salesforce.
• Summarize deal statuses from Salesforce channels, providing quick updates for sales teams without manual compilation.
• Extract insights from conversations identifying key decisions, action items, or sentiment from channel discussions.
• Recommend next actions based on project progress, customer interactions, or identified patterns.
• Handle repetitive tasks independently such as data entry, scheduling basic meetings, or generating routine reports.

By delegating tasks to AI agents through Agentforce, teams can offload the busywork that consumes valuable time. The goal is to augment human capabilities, not replace them, fostering a true human-AI teaming environment where everyone can contribute their best work.

Where AI workflows fit: real-world use cases

AI workflows aren’t confined to one department or industry. They can be adapted to optimize processes across the entire organization. From streamlining IT support to enhancing sales productivity and simplifying HR operations, AI workflow automation offers tangible benefits. Let’s look at a few examples of how different teams can leverage Slack’s capabilities.

IT and Support

Using a combination of Slack AI for intelligent search and Workflow Builder for automating responses and ticket routing, IT and support teams can significantly reduce resolution times. For instance, an AI workflow can analyze an incoming support request in a channel, search knowledge bases for solutions, and if a known fix exists, provide it instantly. If not, it can route the ticket to the appropriate specialist with all relevant context, ensuring faster and more accurate support.

Sales and marketing

Sales teams can leverage Agentforce in Slack to stay on top of their pipeline. Imagine an AI agent that monitors Salesforce channels for deal updates, summarizes key changes, and flags opportunities needing attention directly in sales team channels. Marketing teams can use AI workflows to automate lead routing from various sources directly into specific Slack channels for follow-up, or even use agents to draft initial campaign performance summaries based on integrated analytics data, freeing up time for strategic planning.

HR and people ops

Onboarding new employees can be a complex, multi-step process. With Workflow Builder, HR teams can create an AI workflow that automates sending welcome messages, distributing necessary documents, scheduling introductory meetings, and assigning initial tasks, all within Slack. This ensures a consistent and engaging experience for new hires while freeing up HR personnel for personalized interactions and strategic workforce development.

How to get started with AI workflows in Slack

The idea of implementing AI workflows might sound daunting, but getting started can be simpler than you think. You don’t need to change everything overnight. The key is to start small, identify areas where automation can provide quick wins, and gradually build from there. Slack is designed to make this journey accessible, empowering your teams to embrace the future of work.

Here’s a simple approach:

• Identify 1–2 repeatable processes in your team or department that are time-consuming or prone to manual error. These are prime candidates for your first AI workflow.
• Choose a Workflow Builder template or start from scratch to automate these initial processes. Focus on simple tasks like notifications, data collection, or approvals to build confidence.
• Add Slack AI to your workspace to immediately benefit from enhanced search and summarization capabilities, making information more accessible for everyone and improving daily productivity.
• Experiment with Agentforce on routine tasks by connecting an AI agent to a specific channel to handle simple requests or data retrieval, learning how human-AI teaming can work for you.

As you explore, remember that resources are available. The Slack Help Center offers detailed guides, and our blog frequently features tips and best practices for leveraging automation and AI. The goal is continuous improvement and learning, not instant perfection.

Slack: The AI-powered OS for work

AI workflows represent a fundamental shift in how work gets done. Slack, as the agentic operating system for work, is at the forefront of this transformation. We provide the platform where human ingenuity and artificial intelligence collaborate seamlessly, driving productivity and innovation across your organization.

With Slack, you can:

• Simplify automation with intuitive tools like Workflow Builder, making AI workflow automation accessible to everyone, regardless of technical skill.
• Unify tools and teams by bringing people, platforms like Salesforce, and AI agents together in one collaborative space, breaking down silos.
• Surface the right info at the right time through Slack AI, ensuring decisions are informed, contextual, and timely.
• Power decision-making across your organization by providing context, insights, and the ability to act quickly and decisively.

Ready to see how AI workflows can transform your business? Explore Slack AI capabilities or see Slack in action to discover how our platform can help you unlock new levels of efficiency and collaboration. The future of work is agentic, and it starts with Slack.