Salesforce Inc. today unveiled major updates to its Slack platform that brings artificial intelligence agents closer to where people work by making the platform into a unified conversational interface.

Today’s update includes advances that surface core Salesforce apps directly in Slack using AI, such as Tableau Next, Agentforce Sales and IT and HR Service, combining customer relationship management with conversation. Two major upgrades to Slack introduce an all-new Slackbot for personalized support and Enterprise Search, which uses natural language to retrieve company knowledge.

“By making Slack the conversational interface for Salesforce, we’re giving every employee a trusted, unified home for AI and agents — and transforming how work gets done,” said Slack Chief Executive Denise Dresser.

Part of the newly announced Agentforce 360, AI agents capable of accessing CRM data directly are now embedded in Slack, connecting users to Salesforce. Employees can “talk” to their data and platforms just like other teammates and receive conversational or structured information, or ask AI agents to take action on their behalf.

A new native Agentforce agent in Slack, called Channel Expert, is also rolling out. It delivers always-on expertise within any conversation, using real-time search and user-provided content to give up-to-date answers to common questions. When it can’t answer, it flags teammates who can jump in to close the loop.

Slackbot and enterprise search bring information to teams

Slackbot has been reimagined as a personalized AI companion for teams that can access the breadth of Slack conversations, files and enterprise context to tailor its responses to match team cadence. Over time, Slackbot will learn user preferences and work styles, using that information it will be able to offer information and insights tailored to how people work.

The company said this will allow Slackbot to provide support that feels tailored to personal needs, summarize threads to pull out key information that users often look for and deliver more natural feeling assistance for drafting updates and organizing projects.

“Slackbot is showing us what the next era of productivity looks like: AI that works alongside every employee as a personal companion,” said Andy White, senior vice president at Salesforce for Salesforce technology. “For Salesforce, that means our teams spend less effort piecing work together and more time delivering value for our customers.”

Now accessible in Slack via a search bar, Enterprise Search connects to all knowledge across a company using natural language questions. Salesforce announced upcoming connectors to third-party services including for Google LLC’s Gmail, Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook, Dropbox Inc. and Notion Labs Inc. — with the addition of custom connectors to internal systems — users can securely access company knowledge with a single search.

Connecting third-party agents to Slack

Because Slack is where teams collaborate and bring together the language of work, Salesforce said, it provides a wealth of data for AI agents to work with and the richest context comes from conversations.

To support third parties building on this customer-owned and controlled conversational data, Salesforce created standardized connectors, including a new real-time search application programming interface and Model Context Protocol Server.

“[We] realized Slack is the perfect AI agents platform,” said Vercel Inc. CEO Guillermo Rauch.. Slack’s platform gives us the perfect foundation, and our agents don’t feel like tools — they feel like team members.”

A number of companies are already building on these new capabilities, including Vercel, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, Perplexity AI Inc. and Cursor. With access to these APIs and tools, they can securely tap into Slack’s conversational data to build more intelligent agents that connect to and understand team collaboration.

Image: Salesforce