Slackbot is an AI agent now

Slackbot, the automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned corporate messaging platform Slack, is entering a new era as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will be as viral as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The cloud software giant rolled out the new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent version of Slackbot, which is generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, can find information, draft emails, and schedule meetings, among other things, all within the Slack platform, according to the company. It can also connect to, and interact with, other enterprise products like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive to find information if it’s granted permission. This allows users to work across a handful of different common enterprise applications without leaving Slack.

Salesforce, and its enterprise software competitors, are pouring resources into the development of AI products in a bid to preserve, and even grow, their market share. The remodeled Slackbot, which was originally announced at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in October, is just one piece of Salesforce’s enterprise AI-heavy product plan.

Harris told TechCrunch the next-gen Slackbot is completely different than what existed before; the company kept the name because it is already well known.

Harris added that Slack doesn’t generally release new features. Instead, Slack typically issues updates to the product to help drive adoption, which makes Slackbot quite different from past product updates.

“It is an agent, it is a super agent that is your employee agent,” Harris said. “It’s powered by generative AI, and it is something that is highly crafted and highly curated to be an agentic experience that employees and users love.”

Salesforce tests new products, like Slackbot, with its employees for months before they release them — Harris joked they like to drink their own champagne first. Slackbot has been the most adopted internal tool they’ve released, he said.

“Just seeing the sheer active user count is a great sign we have hit on product-market-fit,” Harris said about internal adoption. “Adopted, not mandated, in corporations.”

This is just the beginning of Slackbot’s second bloom as an AI agent, Harris said. In the future, they want Slackbot to move beyond just a text-based agent only in Slack. He said they want to add voice capabilities in the future and the ability for Slackbot to browse the internet alongside its users.

“I am very confident that investing in Slackbot is not only good for Slack, it will be incredibly good for the entire company,” Harris said.