Salesforce unveils revamped Slackbot as AI work assistant for enterprises

Salesforce on Tuesday, January 13, announced the general availability of a redesigned Slackbot, positioning it as a personal AI agent built directly into Slack for enterprise users.

The latest announcement is a step forward in Salesforce’s broader push to embed agentic AI deeper into workplace tools, following its unveiling of Agentforce 360 at Dreamforce last year.

The company said that the new Slackbot is designed to bridge a long-standing gap between consumer AI tools and enterprise-grade workplace systems.

Unlike standalone AI assistants, Salesforce claims Slackbot operates with full awareness of a user’s existing Slack conversations, files, channels, calendars, and permissions. The aim is to let employees search for information, generate documents, schedule meetings, and trigger workflows without leaving Slack or manually providing context.

“Slackbot isn’t just another copilot,” said Parker Harris, co-founder of Salesforce and chief technology officer at Slack. “It’s the front door to the Agentic Enterprise, powered by Salesforce. This brings AI that is grounded in your company’s data, workflows, and Slack conversations, right into the flow of work. It is the crucial step to realising the future we’ve been building toward — bringing Agentforce 360 to life with an intuitive, conversational interface, and elevating every human with enterprise-grade AI.”

According to Salesforce, enterprise adoption of AI has been slowed by fragmented tools, hallucinations, and a lack of trust. With Slackbot directly being embedded into Slack, the company says it can offer more accurate responses while adhering access controls and compliance requirements that are already in place.

Slackbot will also act as the primary interface for interacting with Agentforce and third-party AI agents, allowing users to trigger actions and coordinate tasks through simple conversational prompts. Over time, Slackbot is expected to automatically determine which systems or agents to involve based on a user’s request.

The company says Slackbot can already summarise conversations, retrieve files, draft meeting notes, create collaborative canvases, manage calendars, and pull relevant customer data from Salesforce systems to prepare users for meetings or account reviews.

Several early users reported savings in time. Salesforce said internal teams and external customers including Beast Industries, reMarkable, Xero, Engine, and Slalom participated in testing over recent months.

Slackbot is now generally available for Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, with a phased rollout continuing through January and February. Enterprise administrators will be able to control or restrict access during the rollout period.

The announcement underscores Salesforce’s bet that the future of enterprise AI lies not in separate tools, but in assistants that operate directly where work already happens.