Slack AI agents shift looks to “unify” enterprise data and drive team synergy

Salesforce has unveiled a raft of new updates and features for Slack as part of an effort to foster greater operational synergy for users of the workplace collaboration platform.

Announced at Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce said the updates will help “unify” data across Slack and Salesforce, bringing together enterprise data, apps, and automation in a more aligned and easily digestible manner.

Key to this overhaul is the integration of Agentforce in Slack, which has been a major talking point at the CRM giant’s annual Dreamforce conference.

Under Agentforce, enterprises are able to build customizable, autonomous AI agents aimed at both assisting human workers and taking over aspects of their daily work.

As part of the integration, Slack users will be met with a new interface designed specifically for agents, allowing teams to “talk to their data, surface insights, and take action on tasks”, according to the company.

“Users can ask questions or give instructions in natural language, and they’ll receive trusted responses grounded in both structured CRM data and unstructured conversational data,” Salesforce said in a statement..

“Agentforce can provide a status update on opportunities and cases, recommend next steps, draft emails and action plans, share those details in a direct message or channel, and more.”

Agent integration within the platform isn’t limited to Salesforce’s in-house offering, however. Third-party AI agents and assistants from a range of partners can also be deployed within Slack moving forward.

This includes agents from firms including Cohere and Adobe Express, the company revealed. More third-party agent options from Anthropic, Perplexity, IBM, and Amazon Q Business will be “coming soon”. Exact details on a timeline for these rollouts are yet to be confirmed.

In addition to Agentforce integration, Salesforce also announced the launch of several new features, including Salesforce Channels. This new feature connects Salesforce CRM records to channel conversations within the platform.

The company said this will give teams a “comprehensive space to collaborate on every account and opportunity, increasing alignment”.

Slack AI is delivering results

Salesforce has given Slack’s AI features a slight boost as part of this latest update, with new capabilities such as huddle notes and improved AI search within the platform to deliver more accurate results.

Slack AI launched in February this year with a host of features aimed at streamlining productivity for users, including automated thread, channel, and meeting summarization capabilities.

The company isn’t alone in launching AI-powered productivity tools, however, with Microsoft and Google both rolling out similar features across their Microsoft 365 and Workspace platforms.

Zoom, meanwhile, offers similar tools for users. With the widespread rollout of AI-powered features within leading productivity platforms, questions have been raised over exactly how providers can differentiate themselves.

Speaking to ITPro, Rob Seaman, interim chief product officer at Slack, said updates to the platform over the last year aim to make Slack “more of a work operating system” for enterprise applications.

Slack AI is also delivering results, Seaman told ITPro, with users reporting productivity improvements and consistent time savings on a weekly basis.

“Our research team surveyed existing Slack AI users and it’s saving people an average of 97 minutes a week,” he said.

These time savings are largely bolstered by automation of the search function within the platform, Seaman noted. “People spend a lot of time searching for information, so it makes that faster,” he said.

Similarly, the recap function for channels and threads is also delivering marked improvements for users.

“Recap, which is where you can add a bunch of channels to recap every morning and it gives you a daily digest, if you will,” he explained. “It summarizes what’s happened in those channels. Previously, you had to read the entire channel.”

“It’s a bunch of micro improvements and time savings that, at least self reported by the customer, add up to about an hour and a half a week.”

Additional research from Slack reported a 47% increase in overall productivity among users, and since launch customers have summarized more than 600 million messages, saving a collective 1.1 million hours.