Slack unveils innovations for the Agentic Era at Dreamforce

This year at Dreamforce, it’s all about agents. Slack and Salesforce are changing how we do our jobs by 'taking the work out of work', bringing digital agents and purpose-built AI into the world’s leading conversational work operating system, Slack.

To succeed in the era of agent-powered work, every organisation needs a work operating system – a conversational platform that brings your people, data, apps and agents together in a dedicated space. At Dreamforce, we’ll be taking the stage to share how you can collaborate with agents, boost productivity with AI and automatically bring Salesforce CRM into Slack, your comprehensive work OS.

'Slack’s agent-powered work operating system is redefining what it means to work smarter, not just differently,' said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack. 'We’ve moved beyond collaboration; every day, millions of teams are leveraging purpose-built AI, with customer data, automation and now agents seamlessly integrated into the flow of work. In today’s increasingly complex work environment, true productivity requires a work operating system built for the future of work – and that is Slack.'

Here’s a sneak peek at the innovations that we’re announcing at Dreamforce that will help make work simpler, more pleasant and more productive in the agentic era.

Slack is the conversational interface for humans working with agents

Imagine a reality where you can talk to your CRM and ask it to update an account record or reply to a service case. That is possible with Agentforce, a set of Salesforce tools to create and customise agents, along with a suite of agents across the Customer 360.

Because Slack is a work OS that integrates with all your enterprise tools, from apps to autonomous AI agents, teams can collaborate effortlessly with Agentforce agents to get work done faster. These agents work alongside you as you close deals, create campaigns, manage customer service cases and more through a dedicated user interface (UI) in Slack. You can easily interact with these agents using natural language to ask questions or issue commands.

Take Agentforce in Slack. You can ask Agentforce questions directly in Slack, and you’ll receive trusted answers based on your CRM data in Salesforce and your conversational data in Slack. Agentforce can update you on opportunities, suggest next steps, draft emails and create action plans – and then you can share these insights directly in Slack channels or messages.

All Agentforce agents can reason, orchestrate tasks and help deliver personalised experiences for teams across your organisation in Slack. For example, Agentforce Sales Coach can autonomously facilitate role-plays within the context of a deal and provide personalised and objective feedback to help a seller improve their skills.

Our work OS accommodates third-party agents and assistants, too. You can communicate with third-party agents and assistants in the same dedicated UI in Slack to get help with drafting content, surfacing market research, and retrieving and summarising files.

You also have the option to build custom agents with purpose-built APIs and install third-party agents from a growing list of AI-powered applications from the Slack Marketplace, a hub for Slack apps, agents and AI assistants. Applications currently available include Adobe Express, Cohere and Writer. Coming soon, you’ll have access to Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity and more.

Bringing all of these agents into Slack’s work OS means that every team has them by their side throughout the day to help with any task at hand, giving teams more time to focus on high-value activities that help deepen customer relationships and grow revenue.

Third-party agents are available now in the Slack Marketplace, with more coming soon. Agentforce will be in beta in Slack in October 2024.

Work smarter and save time with simple, powerful AI

AI is fundamentally changing how we work. In fact, 80% of desk workers using AI say it improves their productivity. Since the release of Slack AI, our internal data shows that customers have summarised more than 600 million messages, saving a collective 1.1 million hours across users. Those productivity gains are the concrete outcome of having an AI-powered work OS. And we’re continuing to develop more generative AI capabilities in Slack that help teams work smarter and faster.

One of our latest capabilities is Slack huddles notes. The next time you join your team for a huddle, you can use AI to capture key takeaways and action items so you can stay focused on the work at hand and tackle next steps. It works like this: when you bring Slack AI into a huddle, it creates a summary and notes in a Slack canvas, with citations, action items, shared files and a transcript from your conversation’s audio track and messages shared in the huddle. Everyone in the channel has access to these notes.

We’re also introducing an approachable way to use Workflow Builder, our no-code workflow building tool. Users can set up time-saving automations simply by using conversational prompts, such as 'set up a reminder to ask my team for updates every Monday at 09:00'. In seconds, Slack AI and Workflow Builder will generate a workflow that you can refine and edit before publishing.

Lastly, we’ve enhanced Slack AI’s search so you can generate richer and more relevant answers to your queries. In addition to sifting through conversations shared in your messages and channels, search will also find answers from uploaded documents, canvases, transcripts from clips, and other files and apps that you have access to in Slack.

Slack AI is available now as a paid add-on for all paid Slack subscriptions.

Drive better business outcomes by bringing your Salesforce data to Slack

Slack is where work happens for millions of people every day. It’s where your team is having important conversations about your customers. But to keep pace with rising customer expectations, teams need to be able to work together efficiently, with a complete, shared understanding of the customer across conversations and CRM. Bringing Salesforce CRM data into the Slack work OS is a powerful way to drive better alignment and faster decision-making.

Enter Salesforce channels, a new type of Slack channel that brings CRM data from Salesforce records – including opportunities, cases and custom objects – into Slack. When every discussion and decision is tied to a record, teams can make data-informed decisions faster. For instance, account teams can use these channels to get an overview of their customer, strategise on how to navigate complex issues, and manage requests and approvals more efficiently with partners from legal and finance departments.

Salesforce channels also eliminate the need to jump between Slack and Salesforce because you can access and update your customer data directly in Slack. And with Slack AI summaries, you can get the latest highlights from team discussions about your customer happening across your Salesforce channels. Soon, these channels will also be available in the Salesforce UI, empowering teams to work together and stay on the same page wherever they’re working.

Small businesses will be able to use Salesforce channels with Starter Suite in the coming months. The suite also includes pre-built templates and ready-to-use Salesforce CRM tools designed for growing businesses’ unique needs. These solutions integrate seamlessly into Slack’s work OS, equipping small businesses to easily organise data, manage customer relationships and gain valuable insights into their business.

Salesforce channels are available to Slack Sales Elevate customers today and will be included in Salesforce Starter Suite in the coming months.

Implement and scale projects and programmes with Slack templates

Whether you’re rolling out Slack across your entire enterprise or starting small with a couple of teams, the key to speedy implementation and long-term success is maintaining standardisation in your processes. We built Slack templates into the work OS to make it easy for your teams to hit the ground running.

Coming soon, templates will help teams work faster on all types of work, including managing projects and triaging help requests. Templates are curated by use case, with pre-configured channels, canvases, lists and workflows based on your business problem. These out-of-the-box solutions offer turnkey setup with the framework for common tasks, making it effortless to start a project.

In one click, anyone will be able to create a structured channel for their work that comes with consistent formatting, pre-filled details for lists and canvases, and pre-created workflows. Let’s say you’re relaunching your website – you can access everything you need to kick off your work, including a dedicated channel, project overview, centralised tracker and weekly update summaries and status alerts. And when you layer on AI, apps and data in these channels, teams will be working at their full productivity potential.

Slack templates will be available in October 2024.

If you can’t make it to Dreamforce, join us on LinkedIn live for the Slack keynote to get a deeper look at demos, examples of how our customers are using Slack to do their best work and announcements for innovations to come. You can also watch our keynote later on Salesforce+.

The above is intended for informational purposes. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack and are subject to change.