Salesforce has unveiled the newest version of Slack, which comes with a whole host of new AI features to add to its ever-growing catalog. Naturally, many of these tools are embedded into Slackbot, which the company had already pledged to turn into a “personalized AI companion.” The new features include the stuff you’d expect, such as transcription, note taking and deep research, as well as integrations with the rest of the Salesforce family. But it’ll also get “reusable skills,” which sound a lot like automations, where a team can define a task from start to finish, and then the bot will run it whenever it’s called for.
In fact, there’s a big focus on sharing and co-developing tools within organizations, so if you find a prompt that actually gets useful data out of Slackbot, you can share that with your team. And Slackbot will now analyze how you work as it attempts to discern your preferences, workflows and shortcuts. Which, if you read it in one way, sounds as if it’s actively looking to work out how to do your job so it can just replace you. Of course, that probably won’t happen, right? Right?
Salesforce is also using these new Slack tools as a way to gently upsell small businesses toward its bigger products. New Slackbot is equipped with “native customer management,” reading your channels, learning what goes on, and keeping your “deals, contacts and call notes up to date automatically.” In its release, it even says that growing firms can “start simple inside Slack, scale up to Salesforce when ready.” Similarly, every Salesforce customer will now be getting Slack bundled in, to help ensure all of your relationships and work remain in the same place under Slackbot’s helpful eye.
