Salesforce Reimagines Itself in a Slack-First World

At Dreamforce, Salesforce positioned Slack as the enterprise’s new agentic OS, embedding AI agents, workflows, and CRM apps directly into the platform

Slack signage on display at Dreamforce 2025. Credit: Ken Yeung

Salesforce is using this year’s Dreamforce conference to unveil a sweeping transformation: It’s rebuilding itself around Slack, turning the team communication app into the front door for its AI-driven vision of the “agentic enterprise.” Some of the bold steps Salesforce is taking to make this reality include natively embedding some of its CRM apps into Slack, rebuilding its legacy Slackbot, rolling out enterprise-grade search, and more.

This news comes as part of a broader wave of announcements that Salesforce is making this week, including the launch of its Agentforce 360 platform.

Disclosure: I’m attending Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce. The company has paid for most of my expenses. However, Salesforce in no way dictated the content of this post. These are my words.

“The asset and the value of Slack for us has grown tremendously and the value for us in the agentic era is huge,” Parker Harris, Salesforce’s co-founder and Slack’s chief technology officer, remarks during a press conference last week. “Slack is really not only becoming the front-end of Salesforce [and] Agentforce 360, but it’s really becoming your agentic [operating system] where you can search, collaborate, and act across all the people in your organization, all the data, connect to all those Agentforce agents to help you do your work,…personalized AI built-in for collaboration, just built in the flow of work, and Slack connected to all your business workflows. And if you need other agents out there in the enterprise, we can get you to them in the marketplace of agents.”

He proclaims that Salesforce is reimagining itself in Slack. In other words, instead of users logging directly into the CRM’s applications, they’ll natively interact with Salesforce’s capabilities within Slack. It’s a different experience from the third-party integrations the collaboration app had previously. Nevertheless, it reinforces Slack’s positioning that it’s the place where work gets done.

The Slackification of Salesforce

What a Slack-first experience looks like. Credit: Salesforce

To operate as an agentic enterprise, organizations need a central interface to coordinate all the bots working across the company. While it’s technically possible to deploy agents in multiple apps, true effectiveness depends on a unified context and shared data. Programs like Slack offer an ideal environment for this coordination: It provides a conversational interface, a history of bot interactions, and, as the core messaging hub, a natural place to manage and direct agent activity.

Though Salesforce may not be giving up on developing new cloud-based software, it’s starting a trend where its tools could automatically become Slack-first. Some of its core apps that are now natively accessible in Slack include its Agentforce editions for sales, IT service, and HR, along with Tableau Next.

There’s also a new agent in Slack called Agentforce Channel Expert. Employees can use it to get quick and reliable answers within any channel.

“For decades, Salesforce has been the engine of customer success, and Slack has been where work gets done. Now, at a time when every company needs to move faster, these two worlds are coming together,” the company writes in a release. “Slack is becoming the conversational interface for Salesforce, turning every dashboard, report, and customer record into the center of a conversation you can have with your team and agents, right in the flow of work.”

This Slackification of Salesforce shouldn’t be surprising and may be an approach that more developers will take. For example, earlier this month, OpenAI announced that third-party apps will be accessible inside ChatGPT, which is used by a staggering 800 million people weekly. Besides the added convenience for users, it also reduces context switching and increases time spent on apps, essentially creating an artificial walled garden.

Making Slack the Agentic OS for the Enterprise

Slack, by its very nature, seemed made for AI agents. The app’s rise during the commercialization of IT helped introduce chatbots to the mainstream workforce. However, in the generative AI era, Slack has discontinued support for the legacy custom bots and classic apps that teams previously used—Salesforce recently gave classic apps a brief reprieve, announcing that developers have nine more months to convert them into Slack apps.

It appears this change was to make room for a new type of bot, which Salesforce is introducing today. The next-generation Slackbot is designed to provide employees with a personalized agent to help manage their daily workflows. The company claims it can reason through complex, conversational tasks, drawing from conversations, files, and context to provide the right information at the right time. Over time, it’ll perform like a human assistant, capable of understanding your preferences and providing tailored insights and proactive support made specifically for the individual worker.

“Slackbot is showing us what the next era of productivity looks like: AI that works alongside every employee as a personal companion,” Andy White, Salesforce’s senior vice president for Salesforce Technology, remarks. “For Salesforce, that means our teams spend less effort piecing work together and more time delivering value for our customers.”

Slack is also debuting a search capability that enables workers to find files, messages, and data scattered across integrated applications. Enterprise Search, which Salesforce first announced in July and is similar to what Glean, Dropbox, Atlassian, and HubSpot offer, accepts natural language questions to retrieve company knowledge and help generate action, breaking down data silos in the process. The company discloses that it will release connectors for Gmail, Outlook, Dropbox, and Notion, as well as a custom API for internal systems, in the future.

The final component to Slack’s evolution into becoming the agentic OS is making it extensible. To achieve this feat, Salesforce is adding two developer tools, its Real-Time Search API and a Model Context Protocol server—both of which were introduced earlier this month. The company notes that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Writer, Dropbox, Notion, Cognition Labs, Vercel, and Cursor are among the companies already leveraging these capabilities.

“We’re pleased to bring ChatGPT even closer to where work happens in Slack—so teams can tap into frontier AI as naturally as talking to a teammate,” Hemal Shah, OpenAI’s product lead, remarks in a statement. “With the ChatGPT app for Slack integrated into conversations, files, and workflows, knowledge and insights are always at your fingertips, making it easier to move forward together.”

Credit: Salesforce

The Promise That Was Chatter

What Slack is doing today is apparently Salesforce’s fulfillment of what Chatter originally intended to do. Like Slack, it was a collaboration tool built into the Salesforce platform, functioning like a social media feed and competing against Microsoft’s Yammer. However, its prominence has been supplanted by Slack.

“Slack is really that dream on steroids, which is to get the work done,” Harris proclaimed. Unlike its predecessor, Slack provides a dynamic, intuitive, and AI-powered platform. Not only can workers collaborate in real-time and access enterprise apps, but they can also tap into AI capabilities to infuse into their workflows. It’s a marked difference from the Chatter and Yammer era.

When Will the New Slack Be Revealed?

With all these new features, what will the cost be to customers? Will an additional subscription be required? Harris acknowledges the concern: “We do want Slack to become an integral part of Salesforce, an integral part of Customer 360 and Agentforce 360, and we want to update our pricing and packaging.” To that end, Salesforce has three new plans: Slack Pro, Business+, and Enterprise+.

Though announced today, it will take some time before all of the above features are made generally available. That said, Salesforce states that Agentforce Tableau in Slack, the Agentforce Channel Expert, its Enterprise Search, Dropbox Connector, Real-Time Search API, and MCP server are all available today.

The new Slackbot is being piloted today with an expected general availability scheduled for January 2026.

Finally, Agentforce IT Service will be launching later this month, followed by Agentforce Sales and HR Service in Slack in November. The remaining Enterprise Search connectors (Gmail, Outlook, and Notion) will be released in January 2026.