Slackbot is an AI agent now

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

The cloud software giant rolled out the new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. The new AI agent version of Slackbot, generally available to 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 and interact with other enterprise products like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive to find information if given permission. This allows users to work across a few different popular enterprise apps without leaving Slack.

Salesforce and its enterprise software competitors are pouring resources into developing AI products in an effort to maintain and even grow market share. The redesigned Slackbot was originally announced in Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference In October, it’s just one part of Salesforce’s AI-driven organization Product plan.

Harris told TechCrunch that the next generation of Slackbot is very different from what came before; The company kept the name because it was already well known.

Harris added that Slack doesn’t generally release new features. Instead, Slack typically releases product updates to help boost adoption, which makes Slackbot very different from previous product updates.

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

Salesforce tests new products, like Slackbot, with its employees for months before launching — Harris joked that they like to drink their champagne first. He said Slackbot was the most widely adopted internal tool they had launched.

“Just seeing the sheer number of active users is a great sign that we’ve reached product-market fit,” Harris said of internal adoption. “Inexpensively certified in companies.”

Harris said this is just the beginning of Slackbot’s second boom as an AI agent. In the future, they want Slackbot to go beyond just a text-based agent in Slack. He said they want to add voice capabilities in the future and the ability for Slackbot to surf the Internet alongside its users.

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