Slack May Soon Bring Major AI Upgrades For Premium Users

Global users of Slack services may soon be able to do multiple AI-powered actions on the platform, facilitated by Salesforce, its new parent company.

Slack is bringing a slew of AI upgrades that might trigger a competitive advantage for the workspace collaboration platform. Its parent company, Salesforce, powers the AI features as it increases efforts to become an AI-first business. Slack AI was launched as an add-on service on February 14, 2024, and kept gaining popularity among businesses as more AI features were added almost regularly. 

In recent developments, Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, is bringing Agentforce AI Agents to the platform to help improve context-based searches, provide conversation summaries, and generate channel recaps. Think of the new AI agents as an evolution of chatbots that can perform autonomous tasks within the Slack ecosystem of workspaces.

However, Slack’s AI side of business will remain distant from free users. The AI features come as a paid add-on for Slack subscribers, including the Pro, Business+, and Enterprise Grid plans.

Multiple global businesses have adopted the new AI tools to improve work-related experiences for Project Management, Engineering, Sales, and Customer Service teams, all of which belong to the core consumer base of Salesforce. The company has assured its users that their data remains theirs, and Slack does not use customer data to train its Large Language Models. Everything runs on Slack’s secure infrastructure, ensuring that confidential internal conversations and data remain safe.

AI addon users will soon be able to add third-party AI agents to generate images, presentations, and social media posts (Adobe Express), write and test computer codes (Anthropic’s Claude), discuss projects (Asana), and answer queries related to company documents or HR records (Workday).

“AI is showing us a new way to experience technology which is very organic to Slack: it’s conversational, you’re surfacing information, and you’re taking action right in the flow of work. There’s probably not a better place and product than Slack to allow you to do that.”

- Denise Dresser (CEO, Slack)

Agentforce will extend Slack’s AI interface to perform on-demand analysis of business data for Salesforce customers directly on the platform. This will help the company achieve its vision of evolving Salesforce and Workday into internally built AI tools.