Slack’s AI Glow-Up: Salesforce Unveils 30 New Features to Turn Chat Into Action

Salesforce has announced a major AI-focused overhaul of Slack, introducing 30 new features rolling out over the coming months. The centerpiece of the update is a significantly upgraded Slackbot, which is evolving from a chat assistant into a more autonomous workplace agent. The new capabilities build on January’s agentic update and are designed to help Slack move beyond communication into workflow execution, task orchestration, and cross-platform business operations.

A standout addition is reusable AI-skills, which let users define repeatable tasks for Slackbot that can be triggered across multiple contexts. Combined with deeper integrations, meeting transcription, desktop activity awareness, and coordination with Salesforce’s Agentforce platform, the update signals Salesforce’s ambition to make Slack central to enterprise productivity.

Key Points

• Salesforce introduced 30 new AI-driven Slack features expected in the coming months.
• Slackbot received the most significant upgrade, expanding its autonomous workplace capabilities.
• New reusable AI-skills allow users to create repeatable task workflows or use built-in templates.
• These skills can automate complex processes, such as building event budgets by gathering data from Slack channels and connected apps.
• Slackbot can now automatically schedule follow-up meetings and invite relevant employees based on job titles.
• It now works as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client, allowing coordination with external tools and services.
• A major integration is with Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent development platform launched in 2024.
• Slackbot now supports meeting transcription and summarization, including personalized action-item recaps.
• The bot can also operate outside Slack, monitoring desktop activities such as deals, calendar activity, conversations, and habits to suggest next steps.
• Salesforce says privacy controls are built in, with adjustable permissions.
• Marc Benioff emphasized Slack’s momentum since acquisition, citing “two and a half times revenue growth” and roughly one million businesses using Slack.

Key Quotes

“The five years since Salesforce acquired Slack had been an ‘incredible journey.’”

“It’s been a huge growth story.”

“We have about a million businesses running on Slack.”

Slackbot can “route work or prompt questions to Agentforce or any agent or app in your enterprise.”

Implications

This update suggests Salesforce is strategically repositioning Slack as more than a messaging platform. By embedding AI deeply into workflows, meetings, desktop context, and enterprise systems, Slack is being shaped into an operational layer for day-to-day business execution.

The introduction of reusable AI-skills could reduce repetitive employee work and standardize common business processes. Meanwhile, the MCP and Agentforce integrations point toward a future where Slack acts as a coordination hub across multiple enterprise agents and applications. If widely adopted, these changes could make Slack a far more embedded part of how organizations manage planning, follow-ups, and execution.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/31/salesforce-announces-an-ai-heavy-makeover-for-slack-with-30-new-features/