Slack CEO Dennis Dresser told TechCrunch that the company is turning its business chat platform into a “work operating system,” specifically by making Slack a hub for AI applications from Salesforce, Adobe, and Anthropic. The company’s CEO sees Slack as more than just a place to chat with colleagues, but will users do so? And will they pay a premium for it?
Slack announced several new features for Slack AI, the more expensive tier of its messaging platform, on Monday. The updates include AI-generated Huddle summaries, similar to the channel summaries already available to its subscribers. Users can now chat with Salesforce’s AI agent in Slack, and third-party tools that enable AI web search and AI image generation are also available.
Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021, shortly after the messaging platform became a staple of remote work for millions of people. Three years later, Salesforce is pushing hard toward AI agents — so much so that even popular messaging services are following suit. Slack CEO Denise Dresser says the platform will play a key role in that transformation, because people are already chatting throughout the workday, making it a natural place to interact with AI agents.
“AI represents a new way to experience technology that is very organic to Slack. It’s conversational, it surfaces information and it enables action right in the flow of work,” Dresser, who took over as Slack CEO 10 months ago, said in an interview. “There’s no better place or product to do this than Slack.”
But why does Slack need AI? Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, many companies have embraced AI features to appear “cutting edge” even when the integrations aren’t particularly relevant to their core product. Slack’s addition of an AI agent to its messaging service seems like a no-brainer.
Dresser’s rationale for using AI agents is that Slack isn’t just a business messaging platform; it’s a digital workspace, or business OS, that “brings all people and processes together.”
A Slack representative told TechCrunch that every CEO is asking for AI features, like a way to quickly catch up on team discussions or a tool to surface information buried in some database. These are just a few of the small ways Slack is trying to lead its companies into the AI era, she explained.
Agentforce, one of Slack’s new agents, allows Salesforce customers to perform on-demand analytics on their business data directly from Slack. Slack agents from Cohere and Anthropic also offer similar services, as long as you pay for their enterprise AI services.
Perplexity also released an agent for Slack that lets you search the web. Adobe Express’ Slack agent lets you create branded content from text prompts within the messaging service.
Klarna’s CEO made headlines last month when he announced plans to ditch Salesforce and Workday as software vendors and replace them with AI tools built internally. Partner Andreessen Horowitz predicted this shift in July, when it would see companies move away from expensive CRM services in favor of their own AI solutions. Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff is skeptical of Klarna’s AI solution and wants to see evidence that the company is actually doing it.
Asked about Klarna’s comments, Dresser said enterprise AI solutions need to be trustworthy and secure, two things Salesforce wants to ensure for its customers.
That trust was put to the test earlier this year when Slack was accused of essentially training its recommendation system on customer data, according to a privacy policy discovered by developers at Hacker News. It was later revealed that Slack had used customer data to recommend emoji, and that it wasn’t using the large-scale language models that power Slack’s AI. But the privacy policy still insisted that Slack users email the company if they wanted to opt out of Slack’s training data.
At the time, Slack claimed that it did not use customer data to train Slack AI, and it still maintains this to this day.
“No LLM is trained on Slack data,” Rob Seaman, chief product officer, told TechCrunch. “To be honest, we had a bit of a hitch in our website policy and an update that we could have handled better. Especially in this age of AI and greater awareness of how data is being used, we’ve come to the point where we wish it hadn’t happened.”
As Slack leans more heavily into AI, these privacy concerns have become more prevalent. The service is moving from being a simple messaging service to one where AI tools bring information to and from the platform. As AI becomes just another tool in the box, users have good reason to be skeptical.
