Today, Salesforce announced new AI agent features in Slack – i.e., Salesforce Agentforce is available within Slack – and that a new ‘Salesforce channel’ in Slack will connect Salesforce CRM records to channel-based conversations in Slack.
Slack also said that other new AI features such as huddle notes, an AI Workflow builder and Slack templates (collections of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows) are available. Slack AI search will now also generate answers from files uploaded and shared in Slack, canvases, transcripts from clips, documents from connected apps, Google and Microsoft files, and more. Lastly, third-party AI agents and assistants from partners like Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, and more can be deployed in Slack.
In February 2024, No Jitter (NJ) spoke with Jackie Rocca, Vice President of Product at Slack, and Christina Janzer, Slack's SVP of Research & Analytics and Head of Slack's Workforce Lab. Slack has long contended ‘work is broken.’ For example, desk workers report spending 41% of their day on tasks they consider low-value and nearly half can’t find the information they need to do their jobs. In short, desk workers feel unproductive.
In April 2024, NJ covered Slack’s release of the Recap feature which automatically summarizes user-specified channels into a ‘digest’ (complete with source links) which can save users dozens to hundreds of minutes per week. According to this most recent Slack news, since the release of Slack AI, customers have summarized more than 600 million messages, saving a collective 1.1 million hours across users.
Slack’s efforts to further improve desk worker productivity doesn’t stop with AI-powered summarization. “The typical worker context switches across 11 apps or tools in any given day. They feel like those tools are in silos, that they don’t talk to each other and that it’s like they’re chasing information from system to system,” said Slack’s VP of Product Management, James Lancaster. “We've worked hard to solve these problems by evolving Slack into what we call a work operating system, where the full power of Slack goes well beyond simple collaboration.”
This is where the idea of AI Agents – the same ones Salesforce announced as part of Agentforce – enter the picture. “What we’ve done is give people the ability to interact with AI agents directly in Slack. They can do things like answer questions, automate routine tasks, and even perform actions on your behalf,” Lancaster said. “Our vision, if we fast forward, is that there will be a wide variety of powerful AI agents in Slack.”
As the following animation shows, within Slack the user can ask the Agentforce AI agent for ‘next steps’ in a customer-centric conversation. Agentforce goes into the Salesforce CRM and produces a response to the question. These ‘Agents from Agentforce’ are powered by Salesforce Data Cloud.
Lancaster noted that customers will be able to incorporate third-party AI agents into Slack; some of the initial agents are from Asana, Cohere and Adobe Express. Customers will also be able to build their own agents in Slack, perhaps using their own custom LLMs. These third-party agents are available via the Slack Marketplace. Slack also stated that customer data remains in Slack's closed environment and is not used to train large language models (LLMs).
In addition to Agentforce, Slack introduced several new capabilities including Slack AI huddle notes, AI Workflow Builder, Salesforce channels and Slack templates.
Huddles are lightweight audio or video calls in Slack for informal, impromptu or otherwise spontaneous meetings. With Huddles notes, when Slack AI is invited to the huddle, the AI uses real-time audio and messages shared in the huddle thread to organize a transcript and notes with citations, action items, and files shared into a canvas. Anyone in the channel or direct message where the huddle started can view the AI-powered notes. The following animation provides a short demo.
A no code automation tool, Workflow builder was launched in 2019 as an automated tasking tool. With AI Workflow builder, customers can use natural language prompts to create those tasks. For example, a user could write: ‘send a welcome message to teammates that join a channel’ and Slack AI and Workflow Builder will automatically generate a workflow. The following animation demonstrates that capability.
Lancaster said that 6.4 million Salesforce records are shared into Slack every month, and in Slack customers use 3 million workflows daily to automate business process.
This is another new feature which further unites Slack and Salesforce. Essentially, a Slack Salesforce channel securely brings CRM data from Salesforce into a corresponding Slack channel so that a user can not only view that information but also edit and update their CRM data within Slack (illustrated below). This is an example of minimizing the “toggle tax” Lancaster alluded to – the time it might take to toggle between applications. Salesforce channels adhere to the record permissions assigned to a user in Salesforce, allowing that user to only see and edit data in Slack that they’re also allowed to in Salesforce.
“We’ll also make it possible to embed these Slack Salesforce channels into Salesforce itself,” Lancaster said. “Those Salesforce channels will be embedded in Salesforce such that I don't have to leave Salesforce and can still have a conversation with someone in Slack where the entire conversation is tied to that single record.”
Lancaster said that within Slack they have feedback channels for every product and feature. There is a workflow where people can submit feedback or log an issue and those gets logged automatically to a list. Then on a weekly or monthly cadence, those issues are rolled up and auto-summarized with Canvas. The following animation shows how it works.
Agentforce (formerly Einstein Copilot) in Slack will be available in beta in October 2024. Salesforce channels are available to Slack Sales Elevate customers now and will be included in Salesforce Starter Suite in the coming months. Slack templates will be available in October 2024.
Check out this article for more about Salesforce Agentforce, as well as these:
