Jessica Christian | San Francisco Chronicle | Getty Images
After announcing plans in October to bring generative AI to Slackbot, its virtual assistant, Salesforce said on Tuesday that it will become available to Business+ and Enterprise+ Slack subscribers.
“Because it lives inside Slack, Slackbot understands your conversations, files, channels, and the people you work with,” the company said in a blog post. “It only sees what you can see, always respecting your permissions and access controls.”
Slackbot can find data in Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, Box, Atlassian’s Confluence and other services. It’s using Anthropic’s Claude model, though Salesforce is testing alternatives, co-founder and technology chief Parker Harris told CNBC.
While the artificial intelligence boom has lifted the fortunes of tech companies ranging from chipmakers like Nvidia and Broadcom to internet giant Google, Wall Street has remained skeptical of how Salesforce and other enterprise software companies will fare, and whether some of them will ultimately be displaced. Salesforce’s stock price is down 18% in the past year, compared with the the Nasdaq’s 24% gain over that stretch.
Harris said that large language models, and the many popular coding agents that are now running atop them, are not disrupting cloud software. And services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT aren’t hooked into corporate systems.
“People who say, ‘oh I could vibe code up Slack and Salesforce now, and my AI is just going to do it all for me’ are crazy,” said Harris, who’s been focusing on Slack in recent years. Salesforce bought Slack for $27.1 billion in 2021, by far its largest purchase on record.
Across the software industry, companies have been incorporating models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic with hopes of fueling growth by increasing productivity for clients. Aside from Slackbot, Salesforce has been selling Agentforce services for automating customer service and other business functions.
Harris said the new Slackbot helps him prepare for meetings and research topics.
“I’m finding I’m using search less,” he said, referring to the app’s search function.
Slackbot was developed after two Slack engineers considered how CEO Marc Benioff might use an in-house tool instead of instinctively opening ChatGPT and uploading internal documents such as earnings scripts.
“Now he’s doing everything with Slackbot,” Harris said.
Slack is now used by millions of people in thousands of organizations, a spokesperson said, and is one of the company’s fastest-growing cloud offerings. Slackbot is the most quickly adopted feature in Salesforce’s 27-year history, Harris said, adding that he expects people to switch to Slack from Microsoft Teams and that companies might now start getting rid of ChatGPT subscriptions when they see what it can do.
But talent has headed in the other direction. In December, OpenAI hired Slack CEO Denise Dresser to be the startup’s chief revenue officer. Rob Seaman, who had been Slack’s product chief, became the unit’s interim CEO.
Demetri Salvaggio, vice president of customer experience and operations at business travel software company Engine, has been testing Slackbot’s new capabilities and said he uses the feature to “sanity check” himself at the end of the workday and make sure he hasn’t failed to respond to any important messages. Engine has licenses for Google’s Gemini assistant and Anthropic’s Claude, but they’re not embedded in the company’s Slack environment, Salvaggio said.
He said Slackbot probably saves him 45 minutes to an hour per week.
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