Salesforce unveils AI-powered Slack overhaul with 30 new features

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been reorienting its business around artificial intelligence. At a small event in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team showcased the latest outcome of that push: an updated version of Slack packed with new AI capabilities. The most notable is a major upgrade to its AI assistant, Slackbot.

These 30 new features, rolling out over the coming months, build on a January update that gave Slackbot agent-like abilities—such as composing emails, scheduling meetings, and searching your inbox for specific details.

Perhaps the standout announcement from Tuesday is what the company calls reusable AI-skills. These let users define specific tasks for Slackbot that, once created, can be applied across different scenarios and contexts. Slackbot comes with a built-in library of AI-skills, according to Salesforce, but users can also build their own custom versions.

Once these skills are set up, they can significantly cut down the work an employee needs to do. For example, a user can trigger a skill with a simple command in Slack—say, “create a budget” for an upcoming event—prompting Slackbot to pull together all relevant information from the company’s Slack channels, along with any connected apps or data sources, to produce an actionable plan. The bot will then automatically schedule a meeting to discuss the plan, inviting the right employees based on their roles.

Slackbot now also works as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client, meaning it can connect to and coordinate with external services and tools. One of those is Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform launched in 2024. Through that connection, Slackbot can “route work or prompt questions to Agentforce or any agent or app in your enterprise,” the company says, with the agent finding the most relevant and efficient path for the information without human intervention.

According to Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and former chief product officer, Slackbot can now also transcribe meetings and provide summaries. If a meeting participant happens to lose focus and miss critical details, they can simply ask Slackbot to generate a recap of the meeting, including any action items assigned to them.

The agent can also operate outside Slack and monitor your desktop activity—Salesforce lists “your deals, your conversations, your calendar, and your habits” as the types of data it draws on. Based on that context, the bot will make actionable suggestions or draft follow-ups for critical tasks. Seaman has said that privacy protections are built into this design, and users can adjust permissions as needed.

In short, Salesforce is clearly trying to push Slack beyond its origins as an enterprise communication tool and position it as a more versatile platform capable of handling a wider range of business tasks. The hope seems to be that, by infusing it with AI, Slack can become an indispensable part of enterprise users’ core workflows.

Benioff let his team walk through the major features on Tuesday, but during his keynote he noted that the five years since Salesforce acquired Slack had been an “incredible journey,” one that delivered “two and a half times revenue growth.” He added, “We have about a million businesses running on Slack. It’s been a huge growth story.”