Slack announced on Sept. 16 the rollout of several new AI features, productivity tools, and ways to connect to Salesforce CRM.

These updates reflect Slack’s ongoing rapid pace in introducing AI-driven features, most of which focus on text summarization. AI search and summarization first appeared in the messaging and productivity platform in February, followed by automated workflow builders in August.

Slack AI is available now, at an additional cost of $10 per user, per month in addition to Slack Pro and Business+ plans, or priced depending on Slack Enterprise contracts.

The beta release of Salesforce’s Agentforce — formerly Einstein Copilot — will be available in Slack in October.

“AI presents a lot of opportunity here, but we also think it presents some risk, because if not executed right it could create even more chaos and slow people down even further in getting their job done,” James Lancaster, VP of AI and search at Slack, told TechRepublic.

Overall, Slack’s goal is to remove “low-value tasks” and make it easier to search through the large numbers of apps and services employees may use during their work day. The new AI features and integrations aim to alleviate “context switching” challenges employees face when their tools don’t seamlessly interact with each other, said Lancaster.

Slack is taking a two-pronged approach:

• Adding AI agents.
• Using generative AI natively (Slack AI).

The agents framework integrates closely with Salesforce, which is also promoting its Agentforce initiative during this year’s Dreamforce conference season.

Slack’s AI summarization expands

Huddles in Slack, search, and Workflow Builder will now boast AI summarization features. During huddles, Slack will generate a canvas sidebar with an auto-generated transcript and notes.

AI features in search will be enhanced to include files, such as videos, canvases, Google Docs, and other connected applications. Customers have been asking for more access to context and files, Lancaster said. Those new files will be used when the Slack AI crafts its response to the search query.

SEE: Generative AI can cause buggy code that causes company downtime, the CEO of Sonar reports.

AI agents from organizations such as Adobe Express, Asana, Box, Cohere, Workday, and Writer will enable conversations to seamlessly span across multiple applications. Customers can build their own agents with their custom large language models.

Slack hasn’t specified which company’s AI models it uses, typically referring to them as “third-party LLMs” hosted on AWS.

Additionally, Slack AI will come to Workflow Builder, a tool for automating processes. That means workers can use natural language to build a workflow.

“We sat down with customers, and what we heard is: the sentence is really the starting point for how they think about what they would build,” Lancaster said.

New productivity tools further enmesh Slack and Salesforce

Salesforce also announced the launch of two new non-AI productivity tools:

• Salesforce channels: Brings CRM information into Slack, which can be accessed through either Slack or Salesforce.
• Slack templates: Integrates different types of Slack modules and simplifies specific tasks or needs.

Salesforce Channels will be bundled with the Salesforce Starter Suite in the coming months. Slack templates will be available in October.

“We’re seeing customers string together workflows, lists, and canvases to really automate business processes and save their employees time,” said Lancaster.