News
Slack's basic automation tool got a big upgrade on Jan. 13 with the release of the new Slackbot. The update reframes the tool as a personal AI agent grounded in the information, documents and context available in a user's workspace to aid with calendar management, document synthesis, answering questions and more.
In short, Salesforce wants Slackbot to be your new personal assistant, or as the announcement put it,
Slackbot is your deeply personal AI agent for work, built natively into Slack for every employee, with no setup or training required. What makes it different is simple: Slackbot starts with your context. And that context is what’s missing from the other tools out there.
The company teased the update in October 2025. It’s the latest piece in Salesforce’s vision of an agentic workplace where humans and AI agents work side by side. Slackbot also feeds into the narrative the company has been building around Slack as the new operating system of work.
During last year's Dreamforce, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff explained the low adoption rates for its Agentforce solution as a sign of the deep architectural work required for the technology and acknowledged pricing hurdles. By making Slackbot available to all Business+ and Enterprise+ plans with no extra inference costs tacked on, the company is betting that Slack’s rich ecosystem of integrations and the reported low adoption hurdles will provide an easy starting point for agent adoption.
What's Inside the New Slackbot
Out of the box, Slackbot has access to your conversations, uploaded documents, channel interactions and Salesforce records to inform its results. The company outlined a few ways it can assist customers today, and promised further integrations and capabilities (such as the ability to schedule meetings and integrations with third-party agents) coming soon. Here are just a few:
- Create and Update Content — Slackbot can create or update Canvases in a user’s Slack, take notes from conversations, document processes or create a brief to prepare for a client meeting. If a person’s workspace is connected to Salesforce, Slackbot can create reports, answer questions and summarize account details from the CRM data.
- Answer Questions — Beyond the basic search functionality, Slackbot can answer nuanced questions based on information found throughout a user’s workspace, projects and conversations or about Slack functionality itself.
- Calendar Management — Slackbot integrates with Google Calendar out of the box and can find times across the team’s calendars to find a time to meet. It can also review and prioritize tasks and set reminders to follow up on specific deadlines.
Salesforce pitches the selling point as the promise of not having to jump between different apps to accomplish work.
Feedback From Slackbot Beta Testers
Early adopters, including Beast Industries, report saving up to 90 minutes a day as a result of using the tool. On a preview call, Beast Industries CIO Luis Madrigal shared a use case of using the tool to create an onboarding package for a new director in his team in under 20 seconds. He called the rollout one of the easiest ones he's done because, as he put it, "the plumbing is already there." Slack Chief Product Officer Ryan Seamen reported Salesforce's internal rollout of Slackbot had the highest adoption rate of recent history.
Slackbot has been an absolute 'chaos tamer' for our team. It’s not just about simple tasks; it’s about having a virtual teammate with far more context based on our business than any external tool. I estimate it saves me about 30 minutes a day just by eliminating context switching, making it incredibly convenient and a huge driver of efficiency.
- Mollie Bodensteiner, SVP of Ops
Engine
The bot respects existing permissions and access controls in Slack, but when it rolls out integrations with third-party agents, it raises concerns around data governance that AI leaders and privacy advocates flagged after the release of its APIs in October 2025. At the time, experts argued that ownership on paper isn’t the same as practical control, as expanded third-party access points and limited enforcement mechanisms make it harder for organizations to govern their data and ensure compliance.
What’s Next for Slackbot
The new Slackbot is a big change from the previous version of Slackbot, which functioned as a basic automation tool. The current model will improve over time as it gains more context and access to information. The promised next iteration will see Slackbot acting as the orchestrator between you and other agents, including Agentforce and third-party agents.
The focus on deep personal context and agent orchestration closely parallels the latest version of Glean’s Personal Assistant launched in September 2025, which derives context from the user’s personal graph and acts as the arbiter of which agent can best perform a task. Notably, Salesforce updated Slack's API access in May 2025 which cut off Glean from the platform. The two companies have since ironed out the issue, according to Glean.
Salesforce is betting that the best AI assistant is the one you don't have to set up. By embedding intelligence directly into Slack and eliminating adoption friction, the company aims to succeed where Agentforce stumbled. Early results suggest the strategy has promise, but the true test will be when Slackbot becomes a gateway to third party AI agents.
Have a tip to share with our editorial team? Drop us a line:
