Salesforce is betting everything on artificial intelligence, and Slack is the next platform to get a total makeover. CEO Marc Benioff and his team gathered in San Francisco recently to show off what they have been building. The headline news is that Slackbot is no longer just a simple helper. It is turning into a serious AI agent that can handle complex office tasks. Salesforce announced 30 new features that will roll out over the next few months, and they all aim to make your workday much shorter and less annoying.
One of the coolest things they showed off is something called AI skills. These are specific tasks that you can teach Slackbot to do. Once you set a skill up, you can use it over and over again in different situations. For example, you could tell Slackbot to “create a budget” for a project. Instead of you hunting through old messages and spreadsheets, the bot will go out and pull information from all your Slack channels and connected apps. It then builds an actionable plan and even sets up a meeting with the right people based on their job titles. It takes a process that usually takes hours and finishes it in seconds.
Slackbot is also becoming much better at talking to other tools. It now works as a Model Context Protocol client. This is a fancy way of saying it can connect with outside services without needing a human to middleman the conversation. It can reach out to Salesforce’s other AI tools to find the most efficient path for a task. According to the company, the bot is now smart enough to find information on its own without you having to point it in the right direction every single time.
Meeting culture is also getting a big fix. Rob Seaman, who is running Slack right now, explained that the AI can now transcribe meetings and summarize them on the fly. If you happen to zone out during a long call or miss a few minutes, you can just ask Slackbot for a recap. It will give you the highlights and even list out the specific action items that were assigned to you. It is basically a personal assistant that never stops taking notes.
The most ambitious part of this update is that Slackbot can now work outside of the Slack app itself. It can monitor your desktop activities, including your calendar, your habits, and your ongoing conversations. Based on what it sees, it can make suggestions for follow-ups on critical tasks or draft emails for you. Seaman promised that privacy is a top priority and that users have the power to adjust what the bot can see. They want to make sure the AI feels helpful rather than creepy.
Benioff and his team are clearly trying to turn Slack into more than just a chat app. They want it to be the center of your entire business. By flooding the platform with AI, they hope to make Slack an essential tool that businesses can’t live without. Since Salesforce bought Slack five years ago, the app has seen massive growth with over a million businesses now using it. This AI push is the next chapter in that story. It is a move away from simple communication and toward a world where the software does the hard work for you.