When Slack was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for nearly $28bn, the smart money said that Slack would slide into obscurity. After all, Slack was a second-tier player in the team collaboration space while Salesforce was a premier provider of CRM technology and a captain of the industry at large. Surely, Slack would be stripped of its brand name and its technology capabilities absorbed into Salesforce’s massive stockpile. Well, quite the opposite happened – Slack has been granted a new and better life by its parent.
Slack is increasingly becoming embedded into Salesforce’s broader product fabric, simultaneously being positioned as the front end for Salesforce’s AI ecosystem and evolving as the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform.
The poster child for Slack’s AI influence on the Salesforce platform is Agentforce, which allows users to build specialised, task-specific AI agents that operate directly in Slack, handling everything from simple support queries to executing complex processes. The agents have access to company and customer data stored in Salesforce and are integrated with messages, files, and workflows residing within Slack. As a result, the agents provide responses that are highly tailored to the user’s work environment.
At the centre of Slack becoming the symbol for collaboration capabilities on the Salesforce platform is a comprehensive update that created a unified space in which teams can collaborate and act without leaving the flow of work. At the heart of the update is a type of Slack channel labelled ‘Salesforce Channels’. Salesforce Channels reflect Salesforce’s broader strategy to consolidate applications, workflows, AI agents, and data into a single environment. Salesforce Channels connect directly with Salesforce records such as accounts, opportunities, and custom objects. Salesforce Channels are bi-directional, being accessible from either Slack or Salesforce with no loss of context.
Slack has come a long way little by little since Salesforce purchased it, but it is not yet time to include it in a discussion with competitors such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. Rival organisations have kept busy accumulating AI-driven features across their platforms, not only for team collaboration but for contact centre, as well and have generated substantial brand equity in the process. However, as a central interface into the Salesforce platform, a foundational tool for corporate America, Slack merits keeping a close eye on.
“Slack has landed a starring role at Salesforce” was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand.
