Slack is updating its collaboration platform with a set of artificial intelligence features designed to save time for knowledge workers. 

The Salesforce.com Inc. unit detailed the enhancements today ahead of its parent company’s Dreamforce 2024 product event, which will kick off on Tuesday.

The first addition to Slack’s feature set is a collection of AI agents called Agentforce Agents. They’re part of a broader AI feature bundle, Agentforce, that Salesforce debuted last week. The company is embedding new machine learning features into several of its cloud services in a bid to make users more productive.

The first AI agent that Slack detailed today is called Agentforce in Slack. It enables users to access sales data that their company keeps in Salesforce’s customer relationship management platform without switching tabs. The agent can also generate promotional emails and perform certain related tasks. 

Another new agent, Agentforce Sales Coach, allows users to hold simulated sales negotiations. The goal is to help salespeople hone their pitching skills. According to Slack, the agent can not only raise the points that a prospect might make but also provide users with feedback on the persuasiveness of their arguments.

Customers whose requirements are not met by the built-in agents can access third-party AI agents. On launch, there are agents from five companies: large language model developer Cohere Inc., AI writing assistant startup Writer, Box Inc., Asana Inc. and Adobe Inc. The latter company’s agent allows Slack users to interact with its Adobe Express graphic design application, which lends itself to creating marketing materials such as brochures and newsletters.

More agents are in the works. Slack says that AI search engine provider Perplexity Inc. and Anthropic PBC, which develops the Claude series of LLMs, are among the companies planning to introduce AI agents for its platform. Enterprises with specialized requirements can optionally build their own custom agents using the platform’s application programming interfaces.

The agents detailed today are rolling out alongside updates to two existing Slack features: Workflow Builder and Slack AI.

Workflow Builder is a tool that can perform actions automatically when certain conditions are met. For example, a worker could configure it to notify colleagues whenever an important business document is modified. Workflow Builder can also perform actions in third-party applications.

Until now, the only way to interact with the tool was through a point-and-click interface. Users had to manually specify what actions an automation workflow should perform, when and in what application. Today’s update adds a chatbot interface that makes it possible to create automation workflows with natural language instructions, which is significantly faster.

Another update is rolling out to Slack AI,  an existing suite of machine learning features in the collaboration platform. It’s available as an add-on for paid Slack subscriptions. 

The feature bundle is being expanded with a tool that can automatically extract key information from Slack Huddles meetings. The tool generates a summary of each meeting along with a transcript, an overview of the action items discussed by the participants and the files they shared. These items are automatically organized in a canvas, a shared document similar to a Google Doc that can be accessed directly within the Slack interface.

Slack AI’s search bar is receiving an update as well. The tool can now retrieve information from canvases, uploaded documents, clips and other files in addition to the data sources it supported until now. 

Image: Slack