Salesforce Rebuilds Slack Around New AI Assistant, Adding 30 Features

Salesforce showed off a major upgrade to Slack on Tuesday in San Francisco, rolling out 30 new artificial intelligence capabilities centered on an expanded Slackbot. Company leaders framed the update as a push to turn Slack from a messaging tool into a more proactive workplace assistant that helps employees manage tasks, meetings and information across apps and channels.

A cornerstone of the refresh is a system of reusable “AI-skills” that users can configure once and call up in many situations. Salesforce says Slack will ship with a catalog of prebuilt skills, and organizations can build tailored routines for recurring work. For instance, an employee might prompt the assistant to assemble a post-launch brief; the bot would pull documents, messages and calendar entries across connected systems, draft a summary and suggest next steps, cutting down the manual effort teams usually spend assembling context.

Slackbot also gains the ability to act as a client for the Model Context Protocol, allowing it to interoperate with external services and agents. That link includes Salesforce’s own Agentforce platform, enabling the assistant to route tasks or queries to specialized agents or enterprise apps and pick the most efficient pathway for getting results without constant human routing.

The updated assistant can transcribe calls, produce condensed recaps and monitor desktop signals such as open deals, recent conversations and calendar patterns to offer timely prompts or draft follow-ups. Slack’s interim CEO, Rob Seaman, said privacy settings are embedded into the design and that individuals and administrators can tune what the assistant can access. A privacy analyst who reviewed the announcement cautioned that organizations will need clear policies and oversight to prevent inadvertent data exposure.

The move fits a wider Salesforce strategy to weave AI deeper into its products. Marc Benioff noted that about 1,000,000 businesses now use Slack and that the five years since the acquisition have coincided with revenue growth of roughly two and a half times. Executives showed the new features onstage as part of that long-term plan to expand Slack’s role in daily business operations.

Industry observers say the features could boost team productivity if companies invest in governance and change management. But some warn that automated assistants can create new compliance and accuracy challenges, so IT and legal teams will likely need to set guardrails before full deployment to avoid overreliance on machine-generated actions.