Slackbot, the automated assistant baked into the Salesforce-owned company messaging platform Slack, is coming into a brand new period as an AI agent. And Salesforce CTO Parker Harris hopes it will likely be as viral as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The cloud software program large rolled out the brand new model of Slackbot on Tuesday. This new AI agent model of Slackbot, which is mostly obtainable for Enterprise+ and Enterprise+ clients, can discover data, draft emails, and schedule conferences, amongst different issues, all throughout the Slack platform, in keeping with the corporate. It may additionally hook up with, and work together with, different enterprise merchandise like Microsoft Groups and Google Drive to search out data if it’s granted permission. This permits customers to work throughout a handful of various frequent enterprise functions with out leaving Slack.
Salesforce, and its enterprise software program opponents, are pouring assets into the event of AI merchandise in a bid to protect, and even develop, their market share. The transformed Slackbot, which was initially introduced at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in October, is only one piece of Salesforce’s enterprise AI-heavy product plan.
Harris advised TechCrunch the next-gen Slackbot is totally completely different than what existed earlier than; the corporate saved the title as a result of it’s already well-known.
Harris added that Slack doesn’t typically launch new options. As a substitute, Slack sometimes points updates to the product to assist drive adoption, which makes Slackbot fairly completely different from previous product updates.
“It’s an agent, it’s a tremendous agent that’s your worker agent,” Harris stated. “It’s powered by generative AI, and it’s one thing that’s extremely crafted and extremely curated to be an agentic expertise that workers and customers love.”
Salesforce exams new merchandise, like Slackbot, with its workers for months earlier than they launch them — Harris joked they wish to drink their very own champagne first. Slackbot has been probably the most adopted inside software they’ve launched, he stated.
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“Simply seeing the sheer lively person rely is a good signal we’ve got hit on product-market-fit,” Harris stated about inside adoption. “Adopted not mandated in firms.”
That is just the start of Slackbot’s second bloom as an AI agent, Harris stated. Sooner or later, they need Slackbot to maneuver past only a text-based agent solely in Slack. He stated they wish to add voice capabilities sooner or later and the power for Slackbot to browse the web alongside its customers.
“I’m very assured that investing in Slackbot shouldn’t be solely good for Slack, it will likely be extremely good for your complete firm,” Harris stated.
