Work smarter and faster than ever before with agents and AI innovations in Slack

Time is our most valuable asset, yet employees spend nearly a third of it on low-value tasks. According to a Gartner survey, 47% of knowledge workers struggle to find the information that they need to do their job effectively. Adding more AI and apps to an already inefficient work system can often hinder productivity instead of boosting it. What teams really need is a more efficient way to collaborate with AI, where people and digital agents work seamlessly together through a user-friendly, conversational interface.

At Dreamforce, we introduced three powerful AI updates designed to save you and your team time, no matter what the work day may bring. These updates empower you to quickly find and act on information from your CRM, third-party agents and your company knowledge, all in one agent-powered work operating system.

• Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot) in Slack: This conversational AI agent for Salesforce brings your AI-powered CRM insights directly into Slack so that users can act on customer data faster. 
• Third-party AI agents in Slack: Integrate your favourite AI agents and assistants from companies such as Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity and more. 
• New Slack AI features: We’re making work even more efficient with search results that include files and apps; transcription and note-taking for huddles; and an AI-powered Workflow Builder. Combined, they help you to extract even more value from the collective knowledge shared in Slack.

Quickly surface and act on CRM insights with Agentforce in Slack 

No one knows the details of your customers better than your CRM. What if you could get the specific account information that you’re looking for by asking simple questions? And then take action on that information instantly?

Expected to launch early next year, Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot) will bring your CRM-based agent directly into Slack. Through a new dedicated user interface (UI) in Slack, you’ll be able to engage with Agentforce just like you would with a teammate: ask questions, give instructions and expect responses informed by customer data from your CRM and conversational data in Slack. 

For example, a sales prospecting team can dig into Salesforce records without leaving their channel and get a summary of opportunities and cases, along with recommended next steps. From there, Agentforce can write outreach emails and share the drafts with individuals or channels. Armed with the most accurate information and recommendations, team members can quickly take action and focus on building strong, lasting customer relationships.

Additionally, every Salesforce Agentforce agent, powered by Data Cloud, can reason, orchestrate tasks and take action, delivering personalised experiences at scale directly in Slack. For example, Agentforce Sales Coach can help a seller to improve their skills, right in channel, by creating role-playing scenarios within the context of a deal and providing personalised and objective feedback. 

Agentforce in Slack will be available in early 2025 for customers with access to Agentforce and a Slack licence. Can’t wait to start using Agentforce in Slack? Get in touch with your account team to join the beta this autumn.

Let third-party agents take care of your day-to-day work so you can focus on what matters most 

Agentforce is invaluable when you’re working with CRM data, but what about the rest of your work that needs to be done? Now in Slack, no matter whether you’re building campaigns, solving customer problems, putting together presentations or driving projects to the finishing line, agents are working alongside you to help get your to-dos to ‘done’. 

Right from the same dedicated UI in Slack where you find Agentforce, you can talk to third-party agents and assistants to get help with drafting content, surfacing market research, or retrieving and summarising files. Today we have several out-of-the-box AI apps ready to use and download from the Slack Marketplace – such as Adobe Express and Cohere – with many more on the way, such as Anthropic’s Claude, Glean, You.com, IBM and Perplexity. You can also build your own custom agents in Slack with purpose-built APIs. 

Slack conducts a preliminary quality and security review before third-party agents can be published to the Slack Marketplace. Companies building third-party agents for the Slack Marketplace must agree to abide by Slack’s app guidelines, which include prohibitions on using Slack data to train LLMs and requires companies to share important security and compliance details about their apps. Additionally, Slack owners and admins can control which agent apps can be added to their workspaces. For more on policies and permissions around third-party agents, refer to this article.

Third-party agents are now available to download from the Slack Marketplace for customers on paid Slack subscriptions.

Unlock the full potential of your company’s knowledge with all-new Slack AI capabilities

In addition to activating the customer data in your CRM and getting assistance from third-party agents, your organisation needs to be able to act on the trove of information that’s natively in Slack. The more teams work in Slack, the richer that collective knowledge becomes, adding up conversations and data from past projects and decisions. Imagine if you could instantly find exactly what you needed from this wealth of information.

That’s why earlier this year, we introduced Slack AI, a simple, intuitive and trusted AI experience that helps you to instantly tap into a company’s knowledge base in Slack. Slack AI answers your questions, summarises channels and threads, and provides daily recaps of channels. Since its release, customers have summarised over 600 million messages and saved 1.1 million hours – giving them time back to focus on more meaningful work.

Now we’re helping you to work even smarter:

• Slack AI search surfaces results that include information from files and apps for richer, more relevant answers. Before, you could ask Slack AI a question, such as ‘What is Project A1?’ and get a concise answer based on conversations that you have access to. Now Slack AI will generate even smarter answers using information tucked away in files shared in direct messages or channels that you already have access to. This includes canvases, transcripts from clips, documents from connected apps such as Google and Microsoft files and more.
• Slack AI huddle notes capture key points and action items so that you can focus on moving work forwards. Next time you sync live in a huddle, you can turn on Slack AI huddle notes to capture highlights from the huddle, drawing from what is shared over audio and in the huddle message thread. When the huddle ends, Slack AI creates a canvas with notes, action items and shared files, along with an auto-generated transcript. Everyone in the channel or message where the huddle started can view these AI-powered notes, so the whole team can stay in the loop and quickly take action after the call. 
• AI Workflow Builder generates commonplace workflows with simple natural-language prompts to easily automate routine tasks. Now you can simply type a prompt, such as ‘Remind my team to send project updates every Monday at 09:00 GMT’ and watch as Slack AI and Workflow Builder generate a workflow that you can edit before publishing. And with a new ‘summarise channel’ step, users can create a workflow that publishes recurring summaries of – and in – their chosen public channels.

We designed Slack AI to be simple and intuitive, but we also focused on building it to be secure and private. Slack AI keeps all your data within Slack’s trusted boundary – with large language models (LLMs) hosted directly in Slack-controlled virtual private clouds (VPCs) – and Slack does not train LLMs on customer data. Slack AI upholds the same security practices and compliance standards that customers have been able to expect from Slack. And for extra control and governance, Slack admins and owners can choose to disable specific Slack AI features. To learn more about how Slack AI works, take a look at this article.

These new Slack AI features are now available to all Slack AI customers. Slack AI is available as a paid add-on for all paid Slack subscriptions. 

Slack is the most natural place for agents and AI

With Slack and the power of agents, harness all your CRM data and company information and get help with your daily work with the same ease as turning to a teammate for help – making Slack the ultimate destination for conversational AI. You can address all your business needs throughout the day with agents and AI directly in your flow of work, and trust that your data is safe and secure. 

And this is just the beginning. As we continue developing Slack as the agent-powered work operating system, we’re building towards a future where humans and all agents can work securely side by side, augmenting one another, so that you can focus on the work that matters most.

Contact sales to learn more, or watch our latest webinar on all of our AI innovations.

Disclaimer: The preceding information is intended for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, and not as a binding commitment. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any Slack products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack, and are subject to change.