Why We’ve Built the Future of CRM in Slack

Salesforce has helped thousands of companies grow and build stronger customer relationships. Now, as AI promises a revolution of its own, how should the way we work with CRM evolve too?

Think about this reality: A seller mentions in Slack that a prospect was hesitant about moving forward with a deal. That insight — the tone, the timing, the team’s read — lives only in that conversation. Meanwhile, the CRM, where the customer data lives, sits in a silo: secure, essential, but often isolated. 

We’ve long accepted that people must act as the manual bridge between the two, losing speed and focus every time they switch tabs. But for AI, this gap is even more critical; without the customer data and the conversational context behind it, AI is only ever working with part of the picture.

We believe there’s an easier way: Work should be conversational. That’s why we are reimagining the Salesforce experience in Slack — so CRM works where you do, and AI agents gain the full context they need to anticipate needs, take action, and work with you as teammates.

How Slack supercharges Salesforce with the power of context

When you unify customer data and conversation, you unlock your company’s most valuable asset in the AI era: context.

Every day, Slack users send over 1 billion messages, serving as the collective brain for your company and adding context to the customer activity logged in your CRM. That’s why we call Slack the “Searchable Log of All Context and Knowledge.” While Salesforce records capture what happened, conversations in Slack reveal the nuances behind why and how. Together, they create a fuller picture of every customer and project.  

Pairing data with context makes teams efficient, spending less time toggling back and forth between programs and more time getting things done. But it also lays the foundation for something even more transformative: agentic work at scale. 

With visibility into your data from Salesforce and discussions from Slack, AI agents like Slackbot and Agentforce can handle CRM tasks, proactively surface risks, and take informed action. And with AI agents working right alongside people in Slack, your teams can focus more on strategy and strengthening customer relationships instead of manual data entry. It’s what elevates AI from being a commodity tool to an effective digital teammate that truly understands your business.

This grounds our philosophy as we reimagine the Salesforce experience in Slack.

1. Context is everything: An agent is only as effective as the data it reads from. By grounding agents in both enterprise data from Salesforce and real-time discussions from Slack, they anticipate needs and take action that’s relevant to your specific business reality.
2. Speed is a product of proximity: By bringing business intelligence into Slack, we turn conversations into results. Teams no longer need to waste time switching back and forth between CRM and communication.
3. Conversation is the new modality: People think in sentences, not forms. When a sales rep says, “The customer wants to move faster,” an AI agent can autonomously update the close date, adjust the forecast, and notify the team.

 

What Slack and Salesforce together look like in action

Grounded in these principles, we’ve brought this vision to life for several core functions, transforming how businesses grow in the age of AI.

Sales: We enable teams to manage deal cycles without leaving the conversation. From generating pre-meeting briefs with AI agents to spinning up dedicated Salesforce channel deal rooms for strategic work across functions, we are removing the administrative heavy lifting. This keeps reps focused on what actually closes deals: relationships.

IT service: We’ve replaced the friction of static ticketing portals with conversational resolution. Employees can resolve routine issues like onboarding processes or hardware requests by asking a question in Slack. For complex issues, human experts and AI agents “swarm” the problem in real time, with customer history and team discussion unified in one place. Issues that used to take days can now get resolved in minutes.

Analytics: Data matters most when decisions are being made, so we bring analytics out of separate tabs and directly into the conversation. Instead of visiting a dashboard, teams query data in natural language within a channel. Tableau in Slack provides visual, explainable AI insights instantly, turning data from a static report into an active part of the discussion.

What’s next

This foundation is already transforming how teams work, and we’re accelerating with new innovations that help companies take action faster.

• Slackbot: The new Slackbot, now generally available, is your personal AI agent for work. It understands your work across Slack and Salesforce, answering questions about your accounts, opportunities, cases, and more, with context from your conversations.
• Salesforce approvals in Slack: Coming soon, we’re bringing approvals directly into the conversation to eliminate the bottleneck of separate inboxes. Teams can review and approve discounts, contracts, and milestones without leaving Slack, keeping deals moving at the speed of decision, not of email.
• Customer management in Slack for small business: Also coming soon, for growing companies, we’re delivering AI-powered customer management that’s simple to start and scales as they grow. Teams can track leads, manage deals, and stay organized from day one, with AI-driven insights, automated tasks, and Salesforce capabilities ready to scale alongside them.

The companies that win in the AI era won’t necessarily be the ones with access to the most cutting-edge models. They’ll be those that are able to connect all their business context and data to make AI truly useful — so every decision is grounded in the full picture, conversations replace clicks, and insights instantly lead to action. This is the reality we’re creating, and it’s already transforming the way thousands of teams work.

This article may include references to services or features that are still in development and are unreleased. Customers should make their purchase decisions based on fully released and available features.