Why should you ever log into Salesforce again? It's a good question, says co-founder Parker Harris

We're actually dis-intermediating Salesforce. We are basically saying, 'Why should I ever log into Salesforce?’.

Coming from the guy who’s driven the direction and development of Salesforce’s product architecture over the past 27 years, that’s a bold comment from company co-founder Parker Harris, one that inevitably catches the eye. And as anyone who has tracked Salesforce over its history will know, when Parker Harris says something, it is something that needs listening to with a great deal of attention.

So what does he mean here? He’s talking about the role of Slack and the new Slackbot AI tech in re-shaping the way end users engage with the world of work. That leads to the man who sweated blood on Salesforce’s Lightning UI pitching a thesis that opens with that unexpected question quoted above:

Why should you ever log into Salesforce again? Maybe you never will. Maybe you will go into Slack, because Slack is that new engagement layer for enterprise software, for developers, and it's also where the AI is.

All roads lead to (and from) Slack 

Harris’s comments came about as part of a launch event for an AI makeover of Slack with 30 new features trotted out for attention. (I won’t be going through all 30 here - you can get a drill down on the official pitch here.) He was joined at the keynote in San Francisco by co-Founder and CEO Marc Benioff, who was on evangelical form:

It is amazing to see how agentic AI is revolutionizing all these customer experiences since we first launched Agentforce a couple of years ago now.

But he conceded:

We know there is still now very much what we call the agentic divide. It used to be the digital divide, now it's the agentic divide. We're having these great [agentic] experiences with our customers, but still, we know there are many companies who have not yet crossed this chasm.

How do you get across this chasm? Step forward Slack. Benioff argued:

We think that in this moment of transformation, one of the things that we've seen to help these customers move across the agentic divide is Slack. Slack is how work has been getting done. It's been an incredible journey. In five years we've delivered already two-and-a-half times revenue of growth since the acquisition on Slack. It'll probably be three times by the end of the fiscal year. We have about a million businesses running on Slack. It's been a huge growth story.

It has indeed, agrees Harris:

Slack is where the biggest brands work. A lot of the large companies, the category leaders, are living in Slack. Amazon is one of our biggest slack customers - it’s unbelievable what they're doing with Slack -, Verizon, Target. Here in San Francisco,  the top AI companies, where do they work? They're not vibe-coding their own place to work.; they all live in Slack. Every single AI company lives in Slack. It's not just work getting done in Slack, it's AI work getting done in Slack.

Working with Slackbot

And now there’s Slackbot, which Harris first talked to diginomica about at the top of the year: 

Slackbot is the fastest growing feature I have ever seen at Salesforce, maybe in the industry. It is unbelievable. It knows you. It's your teammate, It's your collaboration pal. It's right there with you, doing work with you, and doing worth work for you. And it's magic. It's out of the box, and it just works. It's also [the case] that Slackbot is expanded with skills through our partners, these partner applications. We have a huge AI marketplace...There are companies building their products right into Slack. You use Dropbox or DocuSign, if you use Linear for coding, [you get] an unbelievable experience within Slack, and Slackbot can take all of those and gets even more powerful through all of those skills.

And of course Slack is positioned as a driver for Agentforce adoption, a critical corporate priority for 2026. Harris explains: 

Slack is where you manage Agentforce. Your Slackbot is your employe  super-  agent. There are a lot of incredible agents being built on our platform, on Agentforce, for Sales, for Service, for Marketing, for every use case you can imagine. But as an employee, should you have to go, 'I need to do this, but which agent should I choose? Let me go through the UI and find it.' No, you don't have to do that. Slackbot knows you. It also knows all of the other agents that are out there that it has access to, and it'll just hand off to those. It will orchestrate those agents to get your work done and make you more productive. So Slack is the front door to the Agentic Enterprise.

There’s been a 300% growth in custom AI agents since February, says Harris:

This is people building applications, building AI agents, and running them in Slack, as Slack is the best place for humans and AI to work together, or even AI to work with AI. We opened up our APIs, a real-time search API, as well as the MCP server [going] GA. That happened in February. [That resulted in] 300% growth, like a rocket ship, unbelievable.

That sort of growth stat backs up his assertion that time is of the essence, he argues, with the world of work morphing into its evolved form:

Sales is different. Deals are closing more quickly. Service, Field Service, IT Service HR, everything is changing. If it's not changing fast enough, I guarantee you, Marc will be beating people over the head in Salesforce and saying, 'Why are you not going faster?’

My take

Benioff picked up on Harris' opening question later in the day when he contemplated the idea that the traditional Salesforce interface essentially fades into the background. It's a thought that has occurred to him and clearly is part of the plan:

There's no question [that is the future]. We've said this to our whole company now several times, that we really, over time, want to position Lightning where it gets amplified, where it's strongest,. Lightning has a role, but Slack has a role. Slack, as a conversational interface, is just a great place for Salesforce users to live. Not just Salesforce users, even Tableau users, other, other and, of course, the users of all these ecosystem products as well.  

Slackbot should be a highly-composable object that can be dropped into every capability. We're committed to working deeply with teams from Microsoft and every other collaboration tool, like Workspace from Google. But in addition to that, the idea is that it can get dropped into every Salesforce app as well. So when you're in Sales Cloud or Service Cloud (sic), the Slackbot is with you as well. 

Is that a message that's being heard across Salesforce? Presumably yes, although when told the thesis makes sense,  Benioff does add: 

Will you communicate that to my product people as well?

One last thought from Harris, on those doom-and-gloom armageddon pedlar predictions that AI will kill off traditional SaaS applications providers: 

There is no 'SaaSpocalypse', that is just ridiculous. Everybody needs their Sales, their Service, their Marketing. All the applications, all the workflows, everything our customers have invested in, is incredibly valuable today because it's now powered by the system of agency.

Parker Harris has spoken.

Case closed.