Slack Announces Multiple New AI Features Including Third-Party AI Agents

Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, announced new features and updates for the workplace application yesterday. According to the press release, the new AI features will link Slack to Salesforce and other partner companies.

Among the main features, Salesforce highlighted the integration of Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent, within the Slack interface allowing teams to interact with the data and insights in Salesforce. Agentforce will be available in beta mode in October.

For now, the company is already allowing third-party AI agents from parent companies like Anthropic, Perplexity, Adobe, and Cohere to be on the platform—users will find the assistants in Slack Marketplace. A new salesforce channel is also available for Slack Sales Elevate users and the Slack integration will be included in Salesforce Starter Suite in the next few months.

The new features will allow workers to interact with AI agents, as if they were teammates, through the Slack platform in multiple ways, centralizing and linking multiple tools to simplify workflow.

“Work is broken. Desk workers report spending 41% of their day on tasks they consider low-value, nearly half aren’t able to find the information they need to do their jobs, and there are more apps and disconnected work than ever before,” states the document. “Simply adding AI, with even more apps, into an already inefficient work system will only magnify these challenges.”

According to TechCrunch, Denise Dresser, head of Slack, told the tech news site in a recent interview that they want to turn the platform into a “work operating system.”

The new AI updates were announced just a few months after Slack faced criticism for the way they have been training its AI algorithms.