With 10+ million daily active users, Slack is where more work happens every day, all over the world

Editor’s Note: 
As you may have heard, Slack is now a part of Salesforce! This means some of the information below is dated, but we wanted to keep it around for historical context and other good reasons. For more details on Salesforce’s acquisition of Slack, read the official announcement. 

 

With our fifth birthday just around the corner, Slack now has more than 10 million daily active users (DAUs) around the world, further solidifying our leadership position.

This growth is largely driven by demand at every level: By increasing transparency across teams and whole organizations, Slack makes it much easier to achieve the kind of alignment that makes people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. People experience their work becoming connected to that of their colleagues, whether they’re on the other side of the building or the other side of the world.

Slack also brings people, data, and applications into a single place where people can effectively work together, find important information, and get more out of the software they use every day through integrations with Slack. In addition to the more than 1,500 apps in our directory, and integration partnerships with companies including Google, Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Atlassian, there are hundreds of thousands of customer-created custom Slack applications and integrations in active use.

We are grateful for the customers who have put their trust in Slack to help them transform their organizations and be more productive. Slack is uniquely supporting teams at scale; it is used by 65 of the Fortune 100, and we’ve expanded our impact in these organizations by adding hundreds of thousands of new users within them since last year.

But it’s not just these large enterprises that are changing the way they work. The number of paid customers worldwide has grown by more than 50% over the past year and now tops 85,000. These include organizations with tens of people alongside those with tens of thousands, and they span nearly every kind of work: accountants, customer support reps, engineers, lawyers, journalists, dentists, chefs, detectives, executives, scientists, farmers, hoteliers, salespeople, and all kinds of other people use Slack to coordinate election coverage, diagnose network problems, review code, negotiate budgets, plan marketing campaigns, approve menus, review job candidates, and organize disaster response teams, along with countless other tasks.

As more industries use Slack, so do more geographies. With availability in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, and Japanese, Slack’s growth is increasingly global. More than half of Slack’s DAUs are outside of the United States, in 150-plus countries. In Japan, our second-biggest market and one of our fastest-growing, Slack is helping leading companies like Musashi to improve efficiency, transparency, and culture:

Time saved and connections made at Musashi

Musashi is a global manufacturing company headquartered in Toyohashi, Japan, that has been producing and supplying car and motorcycle parts to automobile manufacturers for 80 years. The company, which has more than 16,000 employees globally, is embracing Japan’s Work-Style Reform, which aims to improve work environments and increase productivity. As one of multiple related initiatives, Musashi introduced Slack company-wide in 2018. By connecting Slack to multiple internal systems, Musashi aims to reduce IT costs and save time—in fact, the company expects that adopting Slack will reduce overtime work, meeting time, and the time required for all kinds of requests and approvals by 50%. “By utilizing Slack,” says Musashi’s senior executive officer, Takashi Soda, “we are creating a working environment with high transparency where we can realize flat, open, speedy communication, allowing us to motivate each other by connecting people to people and people to systems.”

Slack is also breaking down silos at large organizations with our Enterprise Grid offering. Grid user growth has been particularly high in regulated industries such as health care, financial services, and professional services. And market-leading companies like Intuit are using Grid to unite thousands of employees in every department, along with their business tools:

Wall-to-wall collaboration and automation at Intuit

At leading technology company Intuit, a global workforce of 9,000 employees spread across nine countries regularly uses Slack. The platform has helped Intuit connect many of its tools in one place: Customer service workflows are more streamlined, seasonal onboarding is automated through various integrations, and a custom Learning Bot provides contextual learning so that new members of the customer care team can help customers more efficiently. “Our teams tell us they’re working together and solving problems much faster,” says Pam Whitmore, Intuit’s group manager of business systems, IT, “because although they are spread across the globe, Slack makes it like you’re in the same room.”

Slack works well for dispersed teams because it brings the right people, conversations, and tools into one place. This helps organizations get work done, but it also helps them cultivate and maintain a collaborative company culture—as the employees across trivago’s four European corporate offices can attest:

A better employee experience at trivago

Search site trivago is a gateway to more than 2.5 million hotels and other accommodations in over 190 countries, and the company thrives on an authentic, trust-based, entrepreneurial culture. To ensure that its 1,500 employees are productive and engaged, trivago’s Organizational Solutions team rolled out Slack in 2016 to replace the company’s many disparate communication tools, uniting teams and locations. Slack has played a big role in improving employee experience, from better collaboration to spontaneous innovation. For example, a custom bot called Leo asks weekly questions to measure employee sentiment about the organization and its culture, and those responses are used to address and get ahead of issues. Slack even helped employees in Düsseldorf, Germany, help others during Hurricane Ophelia in October 2017—the #duss-news channel quickly transformed into a rideshare network, helping about 100 stranded employees get home.

 

When we say that Slack is a collaboration hub, we don’t just mean messaging—it also includes bringing our customers’ many business systems, data, and applications into one place, along with relevant conversations and context, thanks to our partners and developers. These apps and integrations help companies like Lyft increase visibility across teams and close deals faster:

Greater transparency and faster sales at Lyft

While Lyft is well known for consumer ride-sharing, its Lyft Business division is also becoming the ground transportation partner of choice for thousands of organizations. Using Troops, an integration that connects Salesforce and Slack, Lyft Business sales reps update deal stages and a pipeline dashboard right in Slack. The benefits here are twofold: A rep doesn’t have to update each individual deal in Salesforce, and key stakeholders get better visibility into pipeline and customer data. And for the sales leadership team, Slack has freed up valuable time while increasing executive insight into key partnerships and focusing their attention where it’s most needed. “Slack is business done right,” says area vice president Benjamin Sternsmith. “When you have collaboration happening in one spot, leadership doesn’t need to be copied on an email. You can hop into a Slack channel, cruise along with the project, and jump in where needed.”

 

There’s a movement afoot, an evolution in the way that people are working together. Our vision of this evolution is a world where organizational agility is easy to achieve, regardless of an organization’s size. As a result of better alignment and adaptability, less effort and energy are wasted, and the human beings on those teams are able to fully utilize their intelligence and creativity in pursuit of a shared purpose.