Slackbot gets 30 new AI upgrades as Salesforce pushes Slack toward an 'agentic operating system'

Salesforce is bringing a massive overhaul of its popular enterprise communication platform, Slack. The headline is a serious makeover for Slackbot, the platform's AI-powered personal agent, transforming it from a simple chatbot into a full-fledged enterprise agent capable of drafting emails, scheduling meetings, and going through your inbox for specific information. This release puts Slack closer to what the company describes as an agentic operating system.

The most useful addition is "reusable AI skills", which let users define specific tasks for Slackbot from start to finish. Once created, these tasks can be deployed on demand across a variety of scenarios. There is also a strong focus on sharing and co-developing tools within an organization, meaning if you find a prompt useful, you can share it with your team. Slack comes with a built-in library of AI skills, but users can also create their own.

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Slackbot also gets a Deep Research mode, and the chatbot will now conduct multi-step investigations rather than instantly responding. The new version also brings MCP (Model Context Protocol) client integration, allowing Slackbot to connect to and coordinate with external services and tools. This includes creating Google Slides, drafting Google Docs, and interacting with more than 2,600 apps in the Slack Marketplace.

Slackbot will also analyze your workflow, learning your preferences and shortcuts while actively figuring out how to help you do your job more efficiently. The agent can now also operate outside of Slack and can even listen to meetings held on Zoom and Google Meet. Based on that, it can transcribe and summarize meetings, and anyone who missed key details can simply ask Slackbot for a recap covering decisions made and action items.

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The Slackbot glow-up is big news for productivity, but it raises genuine concerns about workplace surveillance. Rob Seaman, Slack's executive vice president and general manager, has said that privacy protections are built into the design and that every capability is user-initiated and opt-in. Slack won't listen to your meetings unless you tell it to take notes, and the user preferences and habits Slackbot learns will not be accessible to administrators and can be cleared by the user at any time.

That said, what we're seeing now is part of a broader push by companies to bring agentic AI into the equation, systems that can autonomously handle defined tasks. Salesforce is clearly steering Slack in that direction, positioning it as more than just a messaging app and instead as a platform that can actively manage business workflows.

Slackbot is already included in Business+ and Enterprise+ plans at no additional consumption cost. Starting in April, it will also roll out to users on Slack's free and Pro plans, though in a more limited capacity.