Salesforce has announced an AI-heavy makeover for Slack, with 30 new features

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, is here to organize his business around AI, and at a small conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest result of these efforts: an updated version of Slack, with new AI features. The most important of these is the brilliance of its AI assistant, Slackbot.

The 30 new oneswhich will be available in the coming months, follow change for January that powered Slackbot – including the ability to compose emails, organize meetings, and filter your inbox for information.

Perhaps the most notable feature announced Tuesday is what the company calls AI capabilities — which allow users to define tasks for Slackbot that, once created, can be used in a variety of fields. Slackbot comes with a built-in AI library, Salesforce says, but users can also create their own models.

Once these skills are established, they greatly reduce the amount of work an employee may need to do. For example, a user can activate a skill using a simple command in Slack – say, “make a budget” for an upcoming event – and have Slackbot gather all the necessary information from the company’s Slack channels, as well as any connected programs or data sources, to create a feasible plan. The bot will set up a meeting to discuss the plan, and invite the right employees according to their roles.

Slackbot now also works as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client – meaning it can connect and interact with external services and tools. Among them is Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI-powered platform it was launched in 2024. Through that agreement, it can “run tasks or ask questions to Agentforce or any agent or program in your business” says the company, the agent getting the right and useful way of the information, without human intervention.

According to Rob Seaman, Slack’s longtime CEO and former chief product officer, Slackbot can now transcribe meetings and summarize them. If a meeting participant leaves the meeting, thereby missing information, they can simply ask Slackbot to explain the meeting, including everything they’ve been given.

The assistant can also work outside of Slack and monitor your desktop activity – Salesforce lists “your activities, your conversations, your calendar, and your habits” as the types of data it captures. Based on this passage, the bot will make possible recommendations or follow-up actions for complex tasks. Seaman he said that Privacy protection is built into this design and that users can change permissions as needed.

Summary: Salesforce is trying to take Slack beyond its roots as a business communication tool and position it as a flexible platform that can handle a variety of business functions. The hope seems to be that, inundated with AI, Slack can become an important part of the business startups that use it for business purposes.

Benioff let his team pass the majors on Tuesday but noted, in his keynote, that the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack had been an “incredible journey,” one that had resulted in “double and a half revenue growth.” He added: “We have about a million businesses doing business on Slack.