As part of the big push put behind Slack and Slackbot by Salesforce earlier this week, one of the key messages being heard over and over again is the size of the Slack footprint, with business users far outnumbering those so far clocked up for Agentforce. So, following diginomica's eternal maxim that customers want to hear from other customers, what do a couple of big Slack users think of the enhancements announced this week?
First up Mr Beast. Salesforce has been seen in public a lot in the company of Mr Beast of late, since CEO Marc Benioff got behind a partnership around SuperBowl advertising earlier this year. Mr Beast himself, Jimmy Donaldson, is quick to point out that the firm has been a Slack user for a long time:
It's kind of a no brainer. I can open up on my phone and just look to my company Slack right here. We have multiple different business, from our CPG companies to our production company etc, and to be able to just swap between all of them really quickly [is useful].
My favorite thing as an owner is, honestly, you have the feature where it just pulls up all my unread messages, and then I just hit, 'mark as red'. Sometimes I'll wake up and there'll be 50 or 60 messages, especially if I wake up at noon because of a late day of shooting. If you think about it, but you could save 10-15 minutes, not having to go over every channel. It just pops them all up. You're just prompted to just search through everything.
Safe to say then that Mr Beast is a fan. Donaldson continues:
I'm not aware of any other app that I could run my company on [where] I could basically just go, 'Hey, give me a summary of how this video is going', and it actually chats and gives me a summary. It will save me an hour, but it's like five minutes here. Next thing you know, four or five hours, just because these little things add up, and it's kind of a no-brainer.
As to that SuperBowl commercial, that was a project made easier to set up through use of Slack tech, he says:
[We] made this commercial that was almost a little confusing. It's [me] walking through vaults, and I'm like, 'Here's a million dollars. It's hidden behind these vaults', and there's random things hidden...if you solve all these different [clues].
But the crazy part is, even though millions of people were trying to crack this puzzle on a daily basis, it took over a month [to develop] the puzzle. We worked with some of the best puzzle experts on the planet. We spent half-a-year designing,, literally the most hardcore [thing] ever. Imagine 100 different steps and how it all ties together. Then we put all the clues embedded in the commercial, so there's these giant sub-Reddits and Discord threads that people, PhD level geniuses, would get together in a group of 10 and be like, 'Hey, if we solve it, we'll split the million dollars 10 ways'.
It was "pretty cool" seeing people every day try to solve it, he adds, although it took time to find a winner:
Just recently, someone finally cracked the code. We gave them a million dollars.
What's all this got to do with Slack? Well, apart from the obvious collaboration and ideas tracking capabilities, Slack played its part in delivering the winning solution, says Donaldson:
We embedded a bunch of the clues into Slackbot, so people had to go and use Slack to win the million dollars. Once you solved all 100 clues, they gave you digits, and it was basically the first person to Slack me the hidden code who won the million dollars. After a month, someone sent it to me. It's pretty crazy, so I hope we can do that every year and just make it like a Super Bowl scavenge for people because it's pretty fun.
So, a winning gimmick, empowered by Slack. Of course, not everyone has a million dollars to give away. On a more day-to-day level of 'keeping the lights on' and enabling growth, Engine is a travel and spend management platform, primarily servicing the SMB space in the US. Founder and CEO Eli Wallen has a team of around a thousand people (and counting - 400 newcomers on board last year) to manage and has been a user of Slack since he set up the firm. Of late, Engine has been an early pilot user of Slackbot and moving into the agentic AI age:
We built our first agent in twelve days. We called it the EBA engine virtual agent, and it now services over 50% of our cases. We have over a million travelers, over 30,000 businesses that use us in over 50% of our travel cases, the Salesforce agent services without any human intervention.
So we've adopted this very aggressively. It was early on, and it really has changed the trajectory of our business. We're going through some pretty rapid growth.
One customer-facing way in which Engine is using agents is on the on voice side, he adds:
It is our voice interface with customers. They call in and what we used to do, we used Q&A team and we listened to one in every 100 calls. We tried QA and [on the back of that] did some coaching. Now we can literally have sentiment analysis and QA on a 100% of our calls. So today, I could find out what the worst call was, what we need to work on the most, what we did well with, and and it gives that training and that cycle time and the order that we can see that in much better
Another role for Slackbot is helping onboard new staffers, he says:
It's incredibly hard to scale that fast in a remote environment. You don't have a massive pace, so you have a few veterans that know everything, and you get all these new people. One way that we're leveraging Slackbot is new folks come in, and, they essentially have that that co-worker that has all the knowledge base of the business, at their fingertips.
So historically, most of your [human] veterans would get questions all day long, 'How do I do this? Where do I go for this?', and so on and so forth. Slackbot has been literally an irreplaceable tool, to help wrap those folks up in our knowledge base because Slack literally has all of it.
There are other ways that Slack can be used to nurture newcomers, he adds:
When you've been here for a while, you learn the business. [When] you have all the context, you can answer anything. But when you're new...
Sales reps use Slackbot when they're pitching customers, says Wallen by way of showing how important context is:
A lot of times, there's a lot of nuance. Travel is complex. There's a lot of players. There's a lot of competition. And when we ask [prospects], 'Who do you currently use?', we can literally, in the side chat, say,'Tell me about this company'...Slack gives us a full download and, essentially, a battle card to basically position us and and help with the deal.
Our newer sales reps that don't know all the competition or don't know all the nuance of all of our products, it's kind of a real time, immediate interface where you can get questions answered that the customers are asking, if the rep doesn't know. So, it's really helped us ramp reps, not just as an internal knowledge base, but also all of the competitor intel, the new products that we maybe launched, and this can help help assist in those deal closes, which has been terrific.
Slack is also good for helping Wallen to keep on top of what's going on across the company:
I travel a lot. We're a travel company, and we have offices all over the US. Whenever I'm on the road, a lot of times the planes don't have Wi Fi. I think we all have have experienced that. So, [I can ask Slack], 'What did I miss? Tell me the most important things that I missed', rather than clicking into 30 or 40 channels and trying to go through all the threads and see where everything is. It literally gives me a summary of those things. So that's incredibly powerful. When you walk the road or away from the desk, you can actually get some summaries quickly. [Having] the TLDR of the entire business for me is nice, with a thousand people, you know, chatting back and forth every day.
Getting used to the new world of work offered by Slack can take time to get used to Wallen suggests:
I think it seems it takes a while. Like, a lot of people aren't used to having something that has all the information at their fingertips at all times, that's constantly being updated through conversations that we're having in general.
But he concludes:
