Slackbot, an automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned enterprise messaging platform Slack, is entering a new era as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will go viral like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The cloud software giant unveiled a new version of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent version of Slackbot, which is 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 to, and interact with, other company products like Microsoft Teams and Google Drive to find information if given permission. This allows users to work on several different common enterprise applications without leaving Slack.
Salesforce, and its enterprise software rivals, are pouring resources into AI product development to preserve, and even increase, market share. Slackbot remodeled, which was originally announced in Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in October, only one piece of AI-heavy company Salesforce product plan.
Harris told TechCrunch next-gen Slackbot is completely different from what came before; the company keeps the name because it is well known.
Harris added that Slack doesn’t usually release new features. However, Slack usually releases product updates to help drive adoption, which makes Slackbot different from previous product updates.
“It’s an agent, a super agent who is your employee’s agent,” Harris said. “It’s powered by generative AI, and it’s something we’ve built and curated to be an agent experience that employees and users love.”
Salesforce tests new products, like Slackbot, with employees for months before releasing them — Harris jokes that he likes to drink his own champagne first. Slackbot has the most adopted internal tools they have released, he said.
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“Just seeing the number of active users is a good sign that we’ve made it to the product-market,” Harris said of internal adoption. “Adoption is not mandatory in the company.”
This is just the beginning of Slackbot’s second bloom as an AI agent, Harris said. In the future, they want Slackbot to go beyond just a text-based agent in Slack. They say they want to add voice capabilities in the future and the ability for Slackbot to browse the internet alongside users.
“I strongly believe that investing in Slackbot will not only be good for Slack, but will be very good for the entire company,” Harris said.