Slack is becoming a hub for AI agents. Should it be?

Slack CEO Denise Dresser tells TechCrunch she’s working to turn the business chat platform into an “operating system for work,” specifically by making Slack a hub for AI applications from Salesforce, Adobe and Anthropic. The CEO sees Slack as more than just a place to chat with your coworkers, but do users want that? And if they do, will they pay a premium for it?

Slack announced several new features on Monday for a more expensive tier of its messaging platform: Slack AI. The updates include AI-generated Huddle briefs, similar to the Channel briefs already available to those subscribers. Users can also now chat with Salesforce’s AI agents in Slack, along with third-party tools that will enable AI web search and AI image generation.

Salesforce bought Slack in 2021, shortly after the messaging platform became a staple of remote work for millions of people. Three years later, Salesforce is making a big push into AI agents — and it seems so strong that its own popular messaging service is doing so, too. Slack CEO Denise Dresser says the platform will play a key role in the shift because it’s a natural place to interact with AI agents, since people already talk there throughout the workday.

“AI is showing us a new way to experience technology that is a core part of Slack: it’s conversational, it shows information, it takes action in the context of a workflow,” Dresser, who took over as Slack’s CEO 10 months ago, said in an interview. “There’s probably no better place and product than Slack to let you do that.”

But why does Slack need AI? Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, many companies have introduced AI features as a way to appear “advanced” even if the integration doesn’t make sense for the core product. Slack’s addition of AI agents to its messaging service doesn’t seem like an obvious exception.

Dresser’s rationale for the AI ​​agents is that Slack is not just a work messaging platform, but a digital workplace or work operating system that “brings all the people and processes together.”

Slack’s CEO tells TechCrunch that every CEO asks for AI features, like ways to quickly catch up on team discussions or tools to extract information buried in some database. These are just some of the small ways Slack is trying to bring companies into the age of AI, she explained.

One of Slack’s new agents, Agentforce, will allow Salesforce customers to perform on-demand analytics on business data directly in Slack. Slack agents from Cohere and Anthropic will offer similar services, as long as you pay for their enterprise AI services.

Perplexity also launched a Slack agent that lets you search the web. The Slack agent for Adobe Express will let you create branded content through text prompts within the messaging service.

Klarna’s CEO made headlines last month when he announced his plans to Abandon Salesforce and Workday As software providers and replace them with in-house designed AI tools. Andreessen Horowitz partners publish Blog post In July, the company predicted changes like this, as companies shift away from expensive CRM services in favor of in-house AI solutions. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is skeptical of Klarna’s AI solutions He wants to see some evidence. The company actually does that.

Asked about Klarna CEO’s comments, Dresser said enterprise AI solutions need to be reliable and secure, two things Salesforce tries to ensure for customers.

That trust was tested earlier this year when Slack came under fire for training its recommendation system on customer data by default, according to a section of its privacy policy discovered by developers at Hacker News. It was later revealed that Slack was using customer data to power emoji recommendations and not to train the large language models that underpin Slack AI. However, the privacy policy claimed that Slack required users to email the company if they didn’t want their messages to be part of Slack’s training data.

Slack claimed it did not use customer data to train Slack’s AI at the time and continues to do so today.

“No college graduates are trained on Slack data, ever,” chief product officer Rob Seaman told TechCrunch. “Frankly, there was an issue and a policy update on our website that we could have handled better. Especially in the age of AI and increased awareness of how your data is being used, this has become something we wish hadn’t happened.”

These questions about privacy have become more prevalent as Slack shifts more toward AI. The service is changing from being just a messaging service to one where AI tools pull information in and out of the platform. Users have good reason to suspect that AI is becoming just another tool in the box.