If you use Slack, you’re about to get an AI coworker who you just can’t avoid. Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, announced Tuesday that it is turning Slackbot, previously an app capable of executing simple commands, into a full-blown AI agent that will use your work chat and information to tune itself to your needs. That’s what you want, right?
The basic sales pitch for the AI Slackbot is that it is fully integrated into your workspace. “Slackbot is your deeply personal AI agent for work, built natively into Slack for every employee, with no setup or training required. What makes it different is simple: Slackbot starts with your context. And that context is what’s missing from the other tools out there,” the company said in a blog post announcing the update. That means it’s able to draft emails for you, find events on your schedule, and pull information from your chats and channels, among other things.
It can also interact with other products, including Microsoft Teams and Google Drive, which is certainly important if you want it to have any sort of utility in most workspaces, where Slack is solely a communication tool and actual work happens off-platform. Per Slack, these integrations will allow users to do work across apps without leaving Slack.
That also means Slackbot is seeing a whole lot of your work. According to Slack, Slackbot is “informed by your messages and files,” but “it sees only what you can see, always respecting the permissions already in place.” Can anyone else see what you and your Slackbot see? That isn’t disclosed. As you may or may not know, Slack allows administrators the ability to request access to direct messages sent within an instance of Slack and provides a whole lot of additional visibility into the activity of users.
Slack is also promising that Slackbot will eventually be able to work with other AI agents, like Salesforce’s flagship Agentforce, and will theoretically let you work across multiple agents to complete work while communicating entirely through Slackbot. There’s surely some functionality there. Harvard Business Review recently published research that found AI agents are much better at internal processes than customer-facing work, so it’s possible that Slackbot could capitalize on that trend. Alternatively, it might be more hype than help, and you’ll spend your days trying to configure Slackbot to do things that you would have already finished if you had just started doing the task on your own.
You’ll get to find out soon which future we’re living in. According to Slack, the new Slackbot is available to most Business+ and Enterprise+ customers starting today.
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