Slack acquires Robots & Pencils’ Missions to make it easy for non-tech teams to streamline work

We built Slack’s platform to make it easy to bring all the tools you need to do your job into your team’s conversations. Ninety-four percent of our paid customers already take advantage of apps and integrations in Slack, whether it’s by making use of any of the 1,500-plus apps in our App Directory, or by building their own integrations customized to their team’s specific needs. But if you need to build a custom integration and you’re not a developer, you might not know where to start. This is why Slack is acquiring Robots & Pencils’ Missions, a tool that makes it easy for anyone to automate routine processes and tasks in Slack.

We’ll be building on the Missions technology to enable those charged with increasing their team’s productivity — from marketing and sales ops to business analysts — to automate routine work, without ever having to write code. By streamlining these common tasks, your team is freed up to do more creative and strategic work.

For example, imagine a world in which you can use Missions and Slack to:

• Streamline the process of onboarding a new employee to the company, guiding them through tax documents to sign, guides to read, and people to meet (at Slack, we’ve even used it to create a gamified product tutorial for new employees)

 

 

• Build a simple internal ticketing flow to triage incoming employee requests (like securing AV support for an internal event, or a request to turn up the office temperature)

 

 

• Manage candidate approvals and rejections between recruiting and the relevant hiring managers

 

 

“The Missions team has built on Slack for a long time, and they are deeply familiar with our product and our customers’ needs,” said Brian Elliott, Slack’s general manager of platform. “Together, we’ll be able to unlock the power of the platform for a whole new set of Slack users, and ultimately help teams get work done more quickly.”

Missions is already used by companies across all kinds of industries, from large enterprise organizations to local businesses (for example, Santa Barbara-based Bartron Real Estate Group uses it to streamline their new listing protocol and launch and sell listings at a much more rapid and profitable rate).

“We built Missions because we care about helping people work together across all parts of a business, not just within IT,” said Missions co-founder and CEO Mike Brevoort. “We’ve believed for a long time that the collaboration hub model is the future of work, and by joining Slack, we’re able to massively scale up this vision and our impact on teams at work.”

Over the next few months, we’ll be hard at work integrating Missions technology into our platform. During this transition, we’ll support existing Missions customers free of charge, and we’ll have more to share about how you can take advantage of Missions technology on Slack later this year.

For more information about how our acquisition of Missions fits into our developer roadmap, head over to the Slack Platform blog