Slack opens up to third-party AI ‘agents’

Slack AI customers can now interact with AI “agents” in other apps, including Asana, Box and Anthropic’s Claude. 

The AI agents, accessible via a new chatbot interface in Slack, let users perform a range of actions in the integrated app, Slack said Monday. 

With the Asana agent, for instance, Slack users can “surface project insights and recommendations, such as status, blockers, next steps, and more,” parent company Salesforce said in a statement. The Adobe Express agent lets users create content such as graphics for social media posts from a prompt without leaving Slack. 

Other agents coming to Slack include Amazon Q Business, Cohere, Perplexity, and Writer.

Users can access the third-party agents via the Slack Marketplace or  create their own agent with “purpose-built APIs,” Slack said. 

A chatbot interface connects with parent company Salesforce’s CRM software. This involves access to Salesforce’s own Agentforce AI assistant, which has been rebranded from Einstein Copilot. From within Slack, the Agentforce AI can provide an update on the status of sales opportunities and cases, recommend next steps, draft emails, and more. 

Agentforce in Slack is slated to be available in beta next month. 

Other updates to Slack AI — the company’s paid AI service — include note taking in huddles voice and video calls. Here, the transcript of a huddle conversation is used to create a canvas document (Slack’s document editor tool) containing related information such as a meeting summary, action items, and links to relevant files. 

In Slack’s Workflow Builder, users can direct the AI assistant to generate a workflow automation using natural language prompts. 

The Slack AI search function gets an update, too; users can now surface results based on files uploaded or connected to a Slack workspace. Until now, Slack could only search conversations in the app; now the tool can retrieve information from sources such as canvas documents, Google and Microsoft documents, and files in connected apps, Slack said. 

Aside from AI-related features, Slack introduced new templates that can provide a starting point to help users begin a new project. A template for a marketing team could create a Slack channel with a standardized brief in a canvas document, a project plan in a Slack list, and an automated workflow for weekly status updates, the company said. 

Templates will be available in October.

Finally, Salesforce channels — available now to Slack Sales Elevate customers and later to Salesforce Starter Suite customers — are a new type of channel that connects Salesforce CRM records to conversations in a Slack workspace, enabling users to update CRM data without switching screens.