Slackbot re-born for the Agentic Enterprise - Slack CTO Parker Harris gets personal about a game-changing overhaul for the tech

It’s two years now since Salesforce co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Parker Harris made an unexpected side-step into taking over as CTO at the firm’s Slack division. The anniversary comes at an appropriate time as Slack today unleashes into the wild one of its most significant functional upgrades as Slackbot enters General Availability.

Now, hold hard here - Slackbot isn’t new, is it? Well, this version is. Or as Slack CMO Ryan Gavin pitches it:

When I'm trying to sound hip to my kids, I say Slackbot got a glow-up! But that's probably an under-sell, because if you've been following Slack for any period of time, Slackbot has been around literally since the beginning. But it was previously really just around basic notifications, letting me know something might require my attention. This is an entirely new Slackbot - it’s got the same wonderful personality that we love to connect with, but it is now a deeply personal system, something that I'm relying on to get work done, not just to let me know something might be my focus. Not only that, it's helping me take action.

There’s certainly a lot of excitement within Salesforce around ’Slackbot re-born’ for the Agentic Enterprise. We first started to hear a bit about it at last year’s Dreamforce in October, while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was giddy as a kipper about its potential when he spoke in December:

It's the core of every demonstration we give to our customers to show how we have unleashed with Slack something new called Slackbot, which is really the heart of our employee agent strategy.

And you're going to see that it's incredible. It is able to go not only through Slack and not only through the whole Internet, but also through all of our customers' data that they have basically provisioned in a secure way through Salesforce as well and deliver context. 

And then bam, it's able to deliver to me an absolute and complete not only analysis, not only a summarization, not only all of the detail, but next steps, how to sell, what I should do exactly for the customer. I love demoing this to customers because they don't think it's possible, and then when they see it, they say, ‘Wow, this is what AI was meant to be’.

The human angle 

OK, so ‘never knowingly undersold’ is a compliment long laid at Benioff’s door so such enthusiasm doesn’t come as a surprise. I caught up with Harris for his tech assessment of why the new Slackbot matters so much as part of Salesforce’s wider Agentic Enterprise vision. He begins, as he might well, from the employee perspective, with Slackbot positioned as the Employee Agent alongside Agentforce as the Customer Agent, and with human intelligence up front alongside its artificial counterpart:

We've taken that last mile to be human, and the Slack development methodology, and we’ve applied that to an AI agent called Slackbot. So it's not just that it's an LLM (Large Language Model) and it's accessing all of the information that Slack has. My revelation, even more over the past two years, is that the power of unstructured information with AI is unbelievable from an IP perspective. So, Slackbot is an LLM- based agent accessing the Slack corpus, and then connected both through Slack from a user level to your Google Drive, your calendar and everything, but also connected to Salesforce. So it's connected directly to Salesforce, is also connected to Agentforce. It's connected to Data Cloud that has all this information.

But then coming back to the human, Slackbot knows you. It is highly personalized. In the craft and curation, we've gone even more heavily to,'what do you need? What  are you doing every day? What's your personality? How can I help you? And that's where you have human meeting AI, and  the humans like, 'Wow, this is a highly pleasurable experience. I love this. It's fun’.

Does that make it all sound a bit like a ChatGPT experience? Harris says:

ChatGPT is an end user, consumer-facing product, and it feels good, but where is the ChatGPT of the enterprise? We're all talking about the power of, 'Oh, it's connected to this. It can do this skill';  we're not talking enough about, ' What's the end user experience?', and that's really what Slackbot is. It's your personal concierge, your personal assistant. And it  is AI that just works out of the box. You don't turn on Slackbot and go, 'Right, now I need to go configure it'. It just works. And then it can get better as you connect to other sources, as you connect to Salesforce. The point of Slack is that it's an end user platform. It's not an admin platform. It has to work out of the box. It has be great out of the box.

Personal

One interesting aspect of the positioning of Slackbot to date is the emphasis placed on the personal assistant aspect. How does sit with Slack’s workforce teamwork functionality and perception?  Harris makes the case that most successful AI right now is personal, but adds:

Slackbot is creating canvases for collaboration. It's manipulating the assets of Slack in a team context, adding value to it. So, we will evolve to more and more power at the team level. You'll start to see more ambient support...So there's ways to open it up. But I think, right now, the state of the art is, ‘Let me have my digital friend help me, and I'm going to use that to augment me as a human in my collaboration with other humans, and we'll all work together’

The potential use base here for Slackbot is enormous, reaching beyond the official installed enterprise customer numbers for Salesforce. Slack is, I tentatively, suggested, a gateway drug for the wider company. Harris’s response is to call it, ‘our gateway drug to higher productivity’. It all seems a long way from Chatter, Salesforce’s earlier collaboration tool. Harris says:

The user base is huge. We're going to attack that opportunity both from the Slack user base, where they're on fire. They're using Slackbot, they're discovering agents, they're discovering third-party agents. We'll also do it the other way, where Salesforce customers. are like, 'I've used Chatter or I didn't use Chatter’. Well, we have Slack channels or Salesforce channels that replace Chatter, so instead of that Chatter feed, throw it out, and here's my Slack feed.

Now I can collaborate around a case or an opportunity or an account, I can go into Slack, I could then talk to Slackbot about that account. And when I talk about that account, I'm talking about the structured data in Salesforce about that account. I'm talking about them talking with the data in Data Cloud and talking about all the unstructured information we're collaborating around in Slack or tied to my email. And so, I think from an employee perspective, we're just so excited about Slackbot as a killer feature. AI adoption in the enterprise, from an employee perspective, we see it growing rapidly with our user base because of the assets that we have.

My take

I closed off my conversation with Harris by noting that I once said that while Salesforce execs come and Salesforce execs go, there is always Parker Harris at Benioff’s side. Thinking back, as long as I’ve been talking to the one, I’ve been talking with the other.

Two years in as Slack CTO, Slackbot is a big deal for Harris, but there’s other work that’s been done. For a long time, investors were concerned about a perceived lack of integration between Slack and the CRM mothership. Harris stepping into the breach when Slack co-founder Cal Henderson departed has helped to address that:

Investors were angry. In 2018 we bought it. There were still cultural issues between the two units, so I could have an impact there. I think we're almost there in terms of my feeling like... I'm at a point, almost at a point, where the Slack unit is really on fire. Slackbot's on fire. It's getting integrated well. And so at some point I'll look for the next thing...It's been a hell of a lot of fun working with the Slack unit, because I hadn't worked with young people at this level in a while, and it's just a vibrant people and culture and love of the product and users. So that's been a lot of fun.

Onwards!