When Work Isn’t Working, Agents Inside Slack Hold the Answer

The way we work isn’t working.

Today’s work environment is a productivity black hole, and the numbers back it up. Employees spend 41% of their time on the “work of work”: time-consuming, low-value activities like searching for information across multiple applications, responding to frequently asked customer questions, or filling out the same old forms over and over again. 

And let’s not forget that workers are wasting countless hours switching between multiple apps instead of concentrating on more strategic parts of their job. The average employee bounces between more than 10 different applications daily and burns 100 minutes just refocusing on the task at hand.

We’re piling more and more productivity apps onto the stack, hoping it’ll make us faster, but it’s only making the maze more complicated. And now AI has arrived on the scene. Already, 94% of employees have some level of familiarity with generative AI tools, according to McKinsey. These are exciting levels of adoption, but as leaders, we need to be thoughtful about how we implement this new technology. If we’re not careful, we’ll simply trade app sprawl for AI sprawl.

That’s where Slack comes in.

Slack solves the application overload and paves the way for AI-powered productivity. From day one, our mission has been simple: Make work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. What started as a collaboration hub has evolved into something way bigger‌ — ‌bringing your people, data, and tools into one conversational space in real time.

Agentic AI takes it to the next level. Think of AI agents as your digital teammates‌: They’re adaptive, autonomous, and ready to take tasks off your plate. We’re at an inflection point with agentic AI, and every leader I speak with knows it. If we want to use AI agents to their full potential, we need a work operating system built for them.

A better way to work

How do we build this future effectively? 

It starts with people. Slack is where humans connect: Employees, customers, and partners exchange more than 5 billion messages per week. These conversations are packed with both structured and unstructured data. Files are shared, decisions are documented, and application data (including 6.4 million Salesforce records flowing in each month). 

This ocean of rich context is what makes Slack the ultimate launchpad for Agentforce’s custom AI agents. Agents become true teammates within Slack — taking direction, executing tasks, and even working autonomously alongside you. People working with agents are 72% more likely to say they feel “very productive” at their jobs. We’re sprinting toward a world where AI agents will be available to fulfill every business need, even ones we can’t imagine yet.  

If the past decade has been dominated by scattered apps and divided attention, the future of work that Slack is ushering in feels refreshingly different: a connected space where interacting with your tools feels as natural as chatting with your team. 

Empowering employees in an agent-powered workplace

Agentic AI will give employees the freedom to level up. That means they can learn new skills‌ — ‌like prompt engineering and mastering collaboration within these new digital teammates‌ — ‌and pursue higher-value, strategic work that’s more fulfilling than the administrative drudgery they’re currently spending their energy on.

To achieve this, organizations must implement user-friendly, intuitive platforms that facilitate conversational human-agent interaction, rather than adding another layer of complexity. And just as important, companies need to build a culture of trust, training, and transparency. Salesforce is leading the way with a secure AI architecture offered through Einstein Trust Layer, clear privacy policies, and thoughtful ethical guidelines for implementing this new technology. 

Businesses need to play their part, too. Only 12% of workers say they’ve been offered extensive AI training by their employers, according to Slack’s Workforce Lab. Companies need to invest in training and development programs designed to build AI literacy across the organization. They also need to establish transparent rules for responsible AI usage‌ — ‌not only for compliance but for building the employee trust necessary for widespread adoption. Sounds obvious, no? Yet 37% of workers say their company has no AI policy. 

And leaders, listen up. If you want your teams to adopt agentic AI, you need to show them how it’s done. Managers should clarify permissions, share how they leverage AI in their work ‌— including specifying which tasks they assign to AI agents — and foster a culture of trust where employees can safely experiment with AI and learn. The impact is clear: Desk workers at companies that have established permissions for AI use are nearly six times as likely to have experimented with AI tools. 

The future of teamwork

Once companies have an agentic work operating system in place ‌— and have empowered their workforces with new skills and clear AI policies‌ — they’ll enable a limitless workforce. Here’s what that looks like across departments:

• Marketing teams can focus on strategy and refinement while agents analyze campaign data and draft messaging.
• Sales teams assign agents to research prospects and summarize meeting notes, so account executives have more time for relationship building.
• Engineering teams can develop more products faster with agents on duty for code reviews or bug identification. 
• Support teams loop in agents to instantly respond to common inquiries, while humans focus on tricky customer escalations.

This isn’t just theory. We’re seeing measurable results from customers like reMarkable and MIMIT Health using Agentforce in Slack. reMarkable built “Saga,” an IT Help Desk agent that zips through routine requests like password resets, significantly speeding up onboarding for new hires. They also launched “Mark,” a customer-facing agent that participated in more than 15,000 conversations in its first few weeks and resolved 20% of inquiries, rapidly improving the team’s Net Promoter Scores. 

MIMIT Health is deploying agents for AI medical transcription, claims optimization, physician onboarding, and appointment scheduling. By automating routine work and reducing administrative burdens, agents help healthcare providers focus on high-value patient care instead of paperwork. 

We know that transformative new technologies perpetually reshape workplace expectations. We’ve seen it before: Mobile banking transformed finance, ecommerce rewrote retail, and now, agentic AI is reshaping work. Employees have come to rely on intuitive, conversational interfaces in their work tools. So why should they expect anything different with agentic AI? 

The takeaway

The future of work isn’t pitting humans against machines. It’s harnessing the power of human-AI collaboration. We’ve explored how navigating the digital labor era requires evolving how we think about work, empowering employees with new skills and trustworthy tools, and leveraging a central work operating system. 

Slack is uniquely positioned as that work OS, tying together people, data, apps, and agents into one intelligent platform. Done right, this goes way beyond supersizing productivity; it’s ushering in a future that allows people to do the most meaningful work of their careers.

Let’s build the future of work we actually want.

Go deeper:

• Learn how Slack’s enterprise search delivers the knowledge workers need, when they need it.
• Read how Agentforce in Slack is powering engineering excellence at Salesforce.