As enterprises grapple with what it means for many employees to have a personal AI assistant, CRM giant Salesforce revealed on Tuesday that it has relaunched Slackbot, a longstanding feature in Slack, as a personal AI agent for work.
The shift in retooling Slackbot as a personal AI agent demonstrates how vendors like Salesforce are striving to help enterprises adopt AI technology, not as a new tool they need to learn, but as one that is integrated into the applications they already use.
For Salesforce, this means providing enterprises with a personal AI agent, such as Slackbot, that works with the tools and information that enterprises already use and trust in Slack. Slackbot helps users find answers, organize their work, create content, schedule meetings, and take action, without leaving Slack.
Slackbot will soon be the best way for Slack users to collaborate with Agentforce and third-party tools, according to Salesforce. Agentforce is Salesforce’s AI platform that enterprises can use to build, deploy and manage autonomous AI agents. Slackbot is now generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers.
Personal AI Agent
While Slackbot is similar to and competes with Microsoft Copilot, there is a difference, according to Salesforce.
Slackbot is Salesforce’s move to create an agent that is deeply personal beyond just performing tasks and finding information, said Liz Miller, an analyst at Constellation Research.
“It turns the personalization directly back on to you so it’s more reflective of your work style, what your voice capabilities are and what you’re going to ask it,” Miller said. She added that the AI agent is also designed to help users improve their work quality and stay ahead of tasks. “It delivers a different type of personalization that is intensely personal and totally contextual to the employee.”
With Slackbot, Salesforce turns AI tools into something that makes life easier for employees, instead of something they have to learn, Miller said.
“It’s that capability to work in the way you want to work, as opposed to working in the confines that your AI, tools or stack demands that you work,” she said.
The Next Step
While what Salesforce is doing with Slackbot makes the AI agent more personal, Salesforce needs to go beyond the written text or written conversation, she continued. Instead of Slackbot responding to directions using text, the next phase will require voice.
“I should be able to say to Slack, ‘Hey, when’s that next meeting? After that, go ahead and set up a follow-up.'”
She added that some tools, like Amazon Nova 2 Sonic, a speech-to-speech model for real time conversational AI, enable back-and-forth conversation between humans and AI agents in specific settings such as customer service.
“The models are progressing so quickly that they can deliver an agentic, agent experience that is voice and text-enabled. That’s where we’re starting to see these types of personal assistants move very quickly,” Miller said. “When you talk about the future of work, you want to be able to be in your work style as multimodal and multi-channel as you as a human are.”
