Recent platform updates make it easy to work with AI agents that understand your team's context and get things done faster.
The future of work is here, and it's agentic. AI agents are essential for getting things done efficiently, but in order for them to be effective, they need context. The richest context comes from the everyday conversations happening within your team.
Think about it: Your team's most valuable insights, decisions and ideas are often shared in discussions. This conversational data is a goldmine, yet it's frequently locked away, difficult for people to search and impossible to access for tools designed to help.
We recently announced the next evolution of the Slack platform, giving partners and developers the tools that they need to build powerful AI apps and agents. These are securely connected to the rich, customer-owned and customer-controlled conversational data in Slack.
Both the new Real-Time Search (RTS) API and new Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provide secure, flexible and agent-ready access to conversational data. This rich context empowers agents to move beyond generic responses, enabling context-aware, user-specific conversations. AI becomes more relevant, more accurate and far more powerful in boosting productivity.
Leading companies - including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Writer, Dropbox, Notion, Cognition, Vercel and Cursor - have built new AI and agent app experiences using these innovations. Look for these powerful apps and agents coming soon to the Slack Marketplace.
Slack is the natural home for modern AI apps and agents
The average enterprise juggles over 1,000 applications, leading to employees wasting countless hours copying, pasting and context switching, draining productivity by up to 40%. It's a frustrating reality for users, and it results in nearly half of SaaS licences going unused.
But what if there was a better way? Imagine a seller simply asking an agent to update CRM records, an employee resolving an IT issue without filing a ticket, or a marketing leader analysing campaign performance without pulling a single report.
By unifying your tech stack with AI apps and agents in Slack, you're not just making work easier for your teams, you're maximising the return on your entire IT investment. That's why Slack is the 2% of your IT budget that amplifies the other 98%.
* Unlock unstructured data: Enhance your AI agents with access to your team's discussions and files (with permissions, of course), giving you personalised, relevant insights directly in Slack. Teams save an average of 97 minutes per week using existing data intelligently and securely.
* Accelerate decision-making: Connect all app data, such as Agentforce Sales, Asana or Workday, with Slack conversations to provide complete context, enhancing search and AI for faster insights and action. This results in 37% faster decision-making across teams and 36% faster responses to customers.
* Boost productivity: Build your AI and agents directly into Slack, unifying your tech stack. This means fewer clicks, less wasted time and more focus on work, all from the place where your conversations are already happening.
* Drive app adoption: Bring all your apps and agents where you and your team already work, enabling them to use all their tools in a single place.
* Stay secure and compliant: Keep your data protected with enterprise-grade security, robust privacy features and granular permissions, providing a secure foundation for collaboration.
"The best work happens when context and execution aren't separate. With Notion AI and Slack together, teams can turn every conversation into action."
Erica Anderson, Chief Revenue Officer, Notion
Powering trusted, context-aware AI
We know one size does not fit all. That's why the Slack platform is built for flexibility and extensibility, allowing you to integrate all your apps, data and agents. Our platform enhancements power agentic AI, making it easy for developers and partners to build powerful, custom agents tailored to your unique needs. These agents securely access rich, contextual conversational data directly within Slack, significantly boosting productivity. With built-in security, we are dedicated to safeguarding your Slack data and providing the tools that you need to develop robust AI apps and agents with secure access and retrieval on your terms.
The Real-Time Search (RTS) API and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provide secure data access on your terms for developers and third parties:
* The RTS API gives apps real-time access to one of your company's most valuable assets: the rich, conversational data within Slack. By surfacing the most current discussions, files and channels, the RTS API empowers AI to act on information in context. It unlocks your organisation's collective intelligence, securely connecting agents to conversations that were once trapped in silos. Crucially, the RTS API is designed with enterprise security at its core. Tools interact with conversational data without needing to bulk-download it or store it elsewhere, respecting existing access permissions and retrieving only the specific messages or files relevant to a query. The result: AI agents get the precise, contextual information that they need - nothing more, nothing less.
* The MCP server takes it a step further by simplifying and standardising how large language models (LLMs), AI apps and agents discover contextual information and execute tasks on behalf of Slack users, reducing complexity for developers. With its unified communication layer between the LLM and Slack, the server establishes a universal way for AI systems to connect to data sources and tools. Fragmented integrations are replaced with a single, consistent protocol that adheres to the user's specific permissions. Developers don't have to write code to define every possible task that an agent can perform or implement complex, service-specific integrations for each LLM or external service.
In addition, the Slack platform continues to advance the fundamental building blocks available to admins and developers with new innovations:
* Slack work objects: Developers can now build apps with dynamic, interactive previews directly within Slack. Work objects standardise how third-party data appears, providing detailed information, images and documents in Slack and eliminating the need to switch applications. This deep integration gives AI agents greater context, improving their ability to find information and act quickly and accurately. We launched partner integrations with Google Drive, OneDrive, Asana, PagerDuty, Box and Highspot in August.
* Enhanced developer toolkit: Developers have everything they need to build and customise Slack for their business. From apps and agents to automated workflows, new capabilities include AI best practices, prebuilt Block Kit Tables and updated resources such as the CLI for Bolt apps. These upgrades streamline the entire development life cycle, from the first line of code to the finished end-user experience, making it easier than ever to build for the agentic era.
"Businesses today conduct their most important conversations across multiple Slack channels, creating a wealth of institutional knowledge that hasn't been accessible to AI assistants like Claude. Slack's Real-Time Search API changes that - Claude can now draw context from your team's actual discussions to provide answers grounded in your real work, then deliver those insights directly back into your workflow. This integration enables Claude to provide trusted intelligence that's aligned with how your team actually operates."
Scott White, Head of Product, Claude
Powerful AI apps you can use in Slack
The best way to see the power of the latest platform innovation is through the incredible apps that our partners are already building. They're using these capabilities to deliver powerful AI applications and agents that live natively in Slack, bringing intelligence directly into your workflow.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's ChatGPT app for Slack uses our new RTS API so you can use ChatGPT directly inside Slack. By combining real-time collaboration with the power of ChatGPT, teams can surface insights about conversations, draft posts and replies, and take action faster.
OpenAI Codex
Codex lets you start contributing directly from team conversations in Slack - just tag @Codex in a team channel or thread. It automatically gathers relevant context from the conversation, chooses the right environment and answers with a link to the completed task in Codex cloud. From there, you can merge its changes, continue working or pull the task down to your local environment via the IDE extension to keep working.
Claude
Anthropic's Claude for Slack lets teams collaborate with Claude through direct messages or @mentions in channels, with access to web search, data connections and document analysis. By connecting Slack data to Claude, users can search across workspace channels, messages and files for deeper insights - bringing AI directly into their workflow.
Google Agentspace
Google Agentspace, now part of Gemini Enterprise, is a single, secure platform to build, manage and adopt AI agents at scale. It connects data across productivity tools to turn organisational knowledge into insights and actions. The Agentspace integration with Slack's RTS API enables seamless information flow, letting users access insights through Agentspace agents in Slack or by querying live Slack data through Agentspace.
Perplexity
Perplexity is redefining search as a conversational, transparent discovery experience. By connecting to Slack through the MCP server, it can ground queries in the context of your team's conversations. This helps you to surface answers that aren't only accurate but also directly relevant to your work.
Dropbox Dash
Dropbox Dash uses our RTS API to deliver instant insights across both Slack and Dropbox Dash. This gives you immediate access to your content while making sure that all permissions and security remain intact. Instead of dealing with the friction of switching between apps, you can stay focused on what matters most: doing your best work.
Notion
The Notion AI Slack app allows you to ask questions about threads, conversations or updates that you might have missed. Using the RTS API, Notion AI can search for content across public and private channels and DMs (with appropriate permissions) so that your work in Notion reflects the most current conversations happening on Slack.
The future of work is here
The success of AI depends on its seamless integration into human workflows. Our latest Slack platform innovations create the secure, data-rich environment necessary for AI agents to become trusted companions. We're making it simple for customers and partners to build their AI solutions directly into Slack so that work is more connected, intelligent and productive than ever before. Learn more about the Slack platform or head to the Slack Marketplace to find vetted, third-party AI apps today.
