- Salesforce wants you to think of Slackbot as just another college that does your heavy lifting
- It can listen in on meetings and proactively raise relevant recommendations for you
- It gets its data from Slack, Salesforce tools and third-party integrations
Salesforce has announced a 'new Slack' where its embedded Slackbot AI assistant can act even more like an autonomous colleague, with the introduction of more than 30 new capabilities.
Rather than framing Slackbot as just another AI tool, Salesforce wants us to see it as a personal AI agent for work.
Slackbot does all the things you'd expect of it – like drafting content, summarizing conversations and answering questions about company data – but it's designed to meet the worker where they are without forcing them into other apps and interfaces to share context.
Salesforce wants Slackbot to be your personal AI assistant
TextSlackbot has access to three primary sources of data and context: messages, channels and files within Slack itself; broader Salesforce systems like CRM; and third-party platforms via integrations.
One of the tool's clearest benefits is when it comes to video calls – which have risen in frequency with the rise of hybrid working per new research. Rather than just transcribing calls and producing notes, Slackbot can proactively surface live recommendations "like pulling up a specific Salesforce record in the chat the moment a customer’s name is mentioned."
Essentially, Salesforce sees Slackbot as being "one interface for your entire AI fleet," marking the end of standalone AI tools and separate apps.
"Slack is the operating system for work, bringing humans, agents, data, and apps together in one trusted conversational interface," CTO Parker Harris explained.
"The bottleneck isn't intelligence," the company explained in another post. "It's shared intelligence." With that, it's bringing skills to users, described as a set of instructions that allow other workers to access similar capabilities without needing the expertise.
Slackbot is currently available for Business+ and Enterprise+ users, but beginning this month, the company is also opening up limited access to Free and Pro plans.
