Slackbot transforms into AI agent as Salesforce pushes enterprise automation forward

Slackbot is an AI agent now | TechCrunch

Slackbot, the automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned corporate messaging platform Slack, is entering a new era as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will be as viral as OpenAI's ChatGPT. The cloud software giant rolled out the new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent version of Slackbot, which is generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, can find information, draft emails, and schedule meetings, among other things, all within the Slack platform, according to the company. It can also connect to, and interact with, other enterprise products like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive to find information if it's granted permission. This allows users to work across a handful of different common enterprise applications without leaving Slack. Salesforce, and its enterprise software competitors, are pouring resources into the development of AI products in a bid to preserve, and even grow, their market share. The remodeled Slackbot, which was originally announced at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference in October, is just one piece of Salesforce's enterprise AI-heavy product plan. Harris told TechCrunch the next-gen Slackbot is completely different than what existed before; the company kept the name because it is already well known. Harris added that Slack doesn't generally release new features. Instead, Slack typically issues updates to the product to help drive adoption, which makes Slackbot quite different from past product updates. "It is an agent, it is a super agent that is your employee agent," Harris said. "It's powered by generative AI, and it is something that is highly crafted and highly curated to be an agentic experience that employees and users love." Salesforce tests new products, like Slackbot, with its employees for months before they release them -- Harris joked they like to drink their own champagne first. Slackbot has been the most adopted internal tool they've released, he said. "Just seeing the sheer active user count is a great sign we have hit on product-market-fit," Harris said about internal adoption. "Adopted not mandated in corporations." This is just the beginning of Slackbot's second bloom as an AI agent, Harris said. In the future, they want Slackbot to move beyond just a text-based agent only in Slack. He said they want to add voice capabilities in the future and the ability for Slackbot to browse the internet alongside its users. "I am very confident that investing in Slackbot is not only good for Slack, it will be incredibly good for the entire company," Harris said.

Your Slackbot just got a huge AI agent upgrade - what it can do now (starting today)

Salesforce made Slackbot generally available.Slackbot is an AI agent for work built in Slack.Business+ and Enterprise+ customers can access it. Slack is often a hub for all of your organization's communications, which includes documents, presentations, reports, lists, and more. This often makes it challenging to find what you need and, therefore, accomplish the task at hand. With Slackbot, Salesforce aims to simplify navigation of conversations on the platform. On Tuesday, Salesforce unveiled the new Slackbot, which is now available to the general public. It utilizes the context of your conversations, files, channels, and more to answer questions about your workflow and even take action on your behalf, such as scheduling meetings, from just a single text prompt. Also: 6 Slack tips I swear by to turn a chaotic workspace into a well-oiled machine The company emphasizes that the experience is meant to be intuitive, with no training required and just a simple conversation needed to get started, such as, "What did we decide about the Q4 budget?" Slackbot is meant to populate a curated answer that goes beyond a typical search result. Also: Why AI agents failed to take over in 2025 - it's 'a story as old as time,' says Deloitte Slackbot was also designed to adapt to your preferences and communication style, creating a more personalized experience. Beyond personalized responses, Slackbot can take action, such as finding time on your calendar and scheduling meetings, or drafting meeting notes, project briefs, and other documents, according to the company. Also: The best video conferencing software: Best solutions for remote work, productivity, and high-quality streams To help locate information that extends beyond Slack, users also have the ability to connect it to Salesforce data and engage in conversations regarding those metrics as well. As a result, briefings or other materials can reflect both client conversations and actual data points. As this experience deals with sensitive conversations and data, Salesforce reassures users that it has "enterprise-grade trust," with Slackbot only being able to access content with the permission it is granted and data staying protected "in accordance with Slack's security and compliance standards." Slackbot is rolling out to Business+ and Enterprise customers starting today.

Salesforce releases updated Slackbot powered by Anthropic's AI model

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff delivers the keynote address at the start of the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco on Oct. 14, 2025. Salesforce is bolstering its Slack app with generative artificial intelligence to help users find relevant information and sort through the mountains of communication chaos. After announcing plans in October to bring generative AI to Slackbot, its virtual assistant, Salesforce said on Tuesday that it will become available to Business+ and Enterprise+ Slack subscribers. "Because it lives inside Slack, Slackbot understands your conversations, files, channels, and the people you work with," the company said in a blog post. "It only sees what you can see, always respecting your permissions and access controls." Slackbot can find data in Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, Box, Atlassian's Confluence and other services. It's using Anthropic's Claude model, though Salesforce is testing alternatives, co-founder and technology chief Parker Harris told CNBC. While the artificial intelligence boom has lifted the fortunes of tech companies ranging from chipmakers like Nvidia and Broadcom to internet giant Google, Wall Street has remained skeptical of how Salesforce and other enterprise software companies will fare, and whether some of them will ultimately be displaced. Salesforce's stock price is down 18% in the past year, compared with the the Nasdaq's 24% gain over that stretch. Harris said that large language models, and the many popular coding agents that are now running atop them, are not disrupting cloud software. And services like OpenAI's ChatGPT aren't hooked into corporate systems. "People who say, 'oh I could vibe code up Slack and Salesforce now, and my AI is just going to do it all for me' are crazy," said Harris, who's been focusing on Slack in recent years. Salesforce bought Slack for $27.1 billion in 2021, by far its largest purchase on record.

Your Slack Is Infected With an AI Agent Now

If you use Slack, you're about to get an AI coworker who you just can't avoid. Salesforce, Slack's parent company, announced Tuesday that it is turning Slackbot, previously an app capable of executing simple commands, into a full-blown AI agent that will use your work chat and information to tune itself to your needs. That's what you want, right? The basic sales pitch for the AI Slackbot is that it is fully integrated into your workspace. "Slackbot is your deeply personal AI agent for work, built natively into Slack for every employee, with no setup or training required. What makes it different is simple: Slackbot starts with your context. And that context is what’s missing from the other tools out there," the company said in a blog post announcing the update. That means it's able to draft emails for you, find events on your schedule, and pull information from your chats and channels, among other things. It can also interact with other products, including Microsoft Teams and Google Drive, which is certainly important if you want it to have any sort of utility in most workspaces, where Slack is solely a communication tool and actual work happens off-platform. Per Slack, these integrations will allow users to do work across apps without leaving Slack. That also means Slackbot is seeing a whole lot of your work. According to Slack, Slackbot is "informed by your messages and files," but "it sees only what you can see, always respecting the permissions already in place." Can anyone else see what you and your Slackbot see? That isn't disclosed. As you may or may not know, Slack allows administrators the ability to request access to direct messages sent within an instance of Slack and provides a whole lot of additional visibility into the activity of users. Slack is also promising that Slackbot will eventually be able to work with other AI agents, like Salesforce's flagship Agentforce, and will theoretically let you work across multiple agents to complete work while communicating entirely through Slackbot. There's surely some functionality there. Harvard Business Review recently published research that found AI agents are much better at internal processes than customer-facing work, so it's possible that Slackbot could capitalize on that trend. Alternatively, it might be more hype than help, and you'll spend your days trying to configure Slackbot to do things that you would have already finished if you had just started doing the task on your own. You'll get to find out soon which future we're living in. According to Slack, the new Slackbot is available to most Business+ and Enterprise+ customers starting today.

"Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant - it's the front door to the Agentic Enterprise" - Salesforce's new superpowered AI is now open to all

Salesforce has revealed its Slackbot AI tool is now generally available to users, promising a new age of productivity and efficiency. First announced at Dreamforce 2025, Slackbot is now available to all Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, bringing together not only Slack and Salesforce data, but third-party apps and services such as Google Drive and your calendar app. The company says Slackbot can offer an important advantage to users as it does not simply offer basic suggestions or assistance, but fully understands their conversations and the context in which they happen, and has the ability (and permissions) to scan across systems to get the information needed right away. "Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant. It's the front door to the Agentic Enterprise, powered by Salesforce," noted Parker Harris, Co-Founder, Salesforce & Chief Technology Officer, Slack. "This brings AI that is grounded in your company's data, workflows, and Slack conversations, right into the flow of work. It is the crucial step to realizing the future we've been building toward -- bringing Agentforce 360 to life with an intuitive, conversational interface, and elevating every human with enterprise-grade AI." This vision means Slackbot is set to become another member of your team, not just a simple AI agent, but one with access to the context around messages, which understands your files, channels, and even your co-workers - and can be quickly activated and contacted with just a click in Slack. Salesforce says the tool can be useful across a wide range of tasks, from simple questions such as "find me the file Steve sent me about the Q4 results" or "give me an update on Project Phoenix". But due to being connected with third-party systems, Slackbot can also help you find time to schedule a meeting with your team, set reminders of critical deadlines, or bring up any missed priorities from the actions list created after your last status call. This can also be useful when connected with your Salesforce data, as teams can access background information on a customer to help prepare for a pitch or sales call, or spot any account issues and prepare next steps when needed. Salesforce says Slackbot is rolling out now, and will only expand and get smarter as more systems are integrated with it in the future - we'll look forward to hearing more soon.

Salesforce makes revamped Slackbot generally available - SiliconANGLE

Salesforce Inc. today launched a significantly enhanced version of Slackbot, the artificial intelligence assistant embedded in Slack. The company first debuted the upgrade at its Dreamforce 2025 conference in October. Slackbot originally focused on relatively simple tasks such as displaying notifications. The new version significantly expands the range of use cases that the tool can automate. According to Salesforce, one of the main ways Slackbot will save time for users is by reducing the amount of effort required to find business information. A worker can upload a lengthy marketing strategy document to the tool and ask it to extract specific data points or generate a high-level overview. According to Salesforce, Slackbot can also retrieve information scattered across multiple files. For example, a user could ask the tool to summarize a set of customer feedback spreadsheets shared by colleagues. Slackbot can enrich the data that it finds in Slack with details from external applications. The tool integrates with Salesforce, Google Drive, Box and several other services on launch. Before pitching a new product to an important client, a salesperson could have Slackbot pull account health details from Salesforce's customer relationship management platform. The tool can not only retrieve information from existing files but also create new ones. According to Salesforce, Slackbot is capable of generating content such as meeting notes and employee onboarding guides. Additionally, it can use a worker's calendar software to automate scheduling tasks. Slack Chief Technology Officer Parker Harris told CNBC that Slackbot is powered by Anthropic PBC's Claude series of large language models. The most capable LLM in the lineup, Claude 4.5 Opus, debuted in November. It set records across more than a half dozen benchmarks at the time of its release, including two that measure LLMs' ability to power AI agents. AI agents are a major focus of Salesforce's development roadmap for Slackbot. According to the company, future iterations of the tool will integrate with Agentforce, a set of automation features embedded in its cloud platforms. Agentforce enables companies to build custom AI agents that speed up tasks such as creating sales presentations. If an organization deploys multiple AI agents in its Salesforce environment, workers have to find the one most suited for the task they wish to speed up. Future iterations of Slackbot will automatically find the best tool for a given chore, which will enable it to function as a single pane of glass. Salesforce says that the tool will support not only Agentforce but also third-party AI agents. Slackbot uses a set of AI safety features called Slack AI Guardrails to reduce the risk of hallucinations. The technology also mitigates prompt injection attacks, phishing links and other cybersecurity risks. "Salesforce is customer zero for Slackbot, and I see how AI can fundamentally change the way we work," said Andy White, the senior vice president of business technology at Salesforce. "Our teams are saving several hours per week that were previously spent hunting down information, finding context, and getting answers." Slackbot is included in the Business+ and Enterprise+ tiers of Slack.

Slack's automated bot is getting an upgrade into an AI workplace helper

If you're a Slack user, you're probably familiar with Slackbot as a good-natured -- if annoying -- assistant that delivers notifications, reminders, and keyword-based automatic responses within the workplace chat app. But for organizations with paid Slack plans that have AI features enabled, Slackbot is receiving a bit of a brain transplant. The company has rebuilt the humble bot as an AI agent that can help bring you up to speed on workplace discussions and priorities, pull in data from other software your organization has integrated with Slack, help draft reports and Slack canvas documents, and even help schedule meetings with your colleagues. It's part of a push by Salesforce-owned Slack to move from being simply a tool for chatting with colleagues to a hub for coordinating with both humans and bots. Slack already supports more than 2,600 third-party apps, and the new Slackbot is expected to increasingly integrate with specialized AI agents and software tools. "The way that we think about Slack today is as the conversational interface, if you will, for what we call the agentic enterprise, where humans and agents are all working fluidly and seamlessly together to get work done," says Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer and interim CEO.

Slack Introduces Agentic AI: How the New Slackbot Automates Your Workflow

Slackbot's responses are grounded in the enterprise's conversational data Slack has worked the entire last year on upgrading its enterprise-focused communication and collaboration platform with agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. One of the biggest announcements was made in October 2025, when the Salesforce-owned company revealed its plans to evolve Slack into a personal agent that works on a conversational interface. Put simply, the company wanted to turn Slack into an AI-powered experience where the entire conversational data could be accessed with a simple question. That experience, packed into the new Slackbot, is now generally available. Agentic Slackbot Is Finally Here In a press release, the company announced that the agentic AI-powered Slackbot will be available to Business+ and Enterprise+ subscribers via a phased rollout starting today, January 13. The rollout will continue throughout January and February, so some regions might have to wait before they get access to the agentic capabilities. Those familiar with the platform will know that the Slackbot has been a part of Slack ever since its inception in 2014. However, so far, it has existed as a basic chatbot. But the new upgrade converts it into a personal agent that draws its intelligence from the organisation's conversational data that is available to an employee via personal chats or the channels and groups they are a part of. This was first announced in October 2025. How the New Slackbot Automates Your Workflow Powered by the Agentforce 360 platform and undisclosed AI models, the new Slackbot can answer user queries, organise work, create content, schedule meetings, and take action. Since the responses are grounded in the conversational data, the company claims that the chatbot is accurate and context-aware. So, users do not need to feed it documents or information that is already present in Slack for it to generate insights, presentations, or more. Additionally, the Slackbot can connect to Salesforce data and third-party tools (applicable to companies that use these platforms to store enterprise data). A Slack spokesperson exclusively told Gadgets 360 that the Slackbot can integrate with third-party tools and data hubs via its enterprise search and real-time application programming interfaces (APIs). "At launch, Slackbot will connect to enterprise search connectors like Google Drive, OneDrive/SharePoint, Confluence Cloud, Jira Cloud, Box, Microsoft Teams, Asana, GitHub and Dropbox," the spokesperson added. Gadgets 360 also asked if Slack will be training its AI models on user data. The company exclusively told us that it "does not train or fine-tune its AI models on customer data. Slackbot uses retrieval-augmented generation to access only the information needed for a specific request, at the moment it's made, and customer data is never used to train large language models." Some of the companies already using the agentic capabilities of the Slackbot include Beast Industries, reMarkable, Xero, Mercari, Engine, and Slalom. Salesforce is also internally using the AI-powered chatbot.

Salesforce integrates Anthropic's AI into an advanced version of Slackbot

Salesforce has announced a new version of Slackbot, its virtual assistant built into Slack, now equipped with generative capabilities thanks to the Claude model developed by Anthropic. The upgrade enables the tool to answer users' questions by drawing on data in Slack as well as other connected services such as Google Drive, Box, Confluence and Salesforce, while respecting the access rights in place. Aimed at Business+ and Enterprise+ subscribers, the enhanced Slackbot is designed to compete with the artificial intelligence tools already offered by Microsoft and Google. Internally, the tool is already said to be widely adopted, according to co-founder Parker Harris, who says he uses it daily to prepare for meetings. The assistant was designed to prevent executives, such as CEO Marc Benioff, from turning to external AIs like ChatGPT to handle internal documents. The initiative comes as Salesforce seeks to reassure investors about its AI strategy, with its shares down 18% over a year, bucking the Nasdaq. Harris dismisses the idea that AI assistants could replace tools like Slack, pointing to their lack of direct connections to companies' internal systems. Rapid adoption of the new Slackbot could also strengthen Slack's place within Salesforce's cloud offering, one of the group's most dynamic businesses. Finally, the rollout of this Slackbot coincides with changes at the top of the company: Denise Dresser, Slack's former CEO, has joined OpenAI, while Rob Seaman is serving as interim head. Customers such as publisher Engine already report significant productivity gains thanks to the assistant, which in particular helps prevent important messages from being missed at the end of the day.