As enterprises grapple with what a personal AI assistant means to many employees, CRM giant Salesforce revealed on Tuesday that it has relaunched Slackbot, a long-standing feature in Slack, as a personal AI agent for work.
The shift to repositioning Slackbot as a personal AI agent reflects how vendors like Salesforce are attempting to help enterprises adopt AI technologyNot as a new tool they need to learn, but as a tool that integrates into the applications they already use.
For Salesforce, this means providing enterprises with personal AI agents, like Slackbot, that work with the tools and information that enterprises already use and trust from Slack. Slackbot helps users find answers, organize their work, create content, schedule meetings, and take action without ever leaving Slack.
Slackbot will soon be the best way for Slack users to collaborate agentforce According to Salesforce, and third-party tools. AgentForce is Salesforce’s AI platform that enterprises can use to build, deploy, and manage autonomous AI agents. Slackbot is now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers.
personal ai agent
While Slackbot is similar and competes Microsoft CopilotAccording to Salesforce, there is a difference.
Liz Miller, an analyst at Constellation Research, said Slackbot is Salesforce’s move to create an agent that is deeply personal beyond simply performing tasks and getting information.
“It pushes the personalization right back to you, so it’s more reflective of your work style, what your voice capabilities are and what you’re going to ask her,” Miller said. He said the AI agent is also designed to help users improve the quality of their work and stay ahead of tasks. “It provides a different type of personalization that is extremely personal and completely relevant to the employee.”
With Slackbot, Miller said, Salesforce turns AI tools into something that makes life easier for employees, rather than something they have to learn.
“It’s the ability to work the way you want to work, not within the limits of what your AI, tools or stack demands,” he said.
next steps
Although what Salesforce is doing with Slackbot makes the AI agent more personal, Salesforce needs to go beyond written text or written conversation, he continued. Instead of Slackbot responding to instructions using text, the next step will require voice.
“I need to be able to say from Slack, ‘Hey, when’s the next meeting? After that, go ahead and set up a follow-up.'”
He said some devices, like the Amazon Nova 2 Sonic, a speech-to-speech model for real-time conversational AI, enable back-and-forth interactions between humans and AI agents in specific settings like customer service.
“The models are progressing so rapidly that they can provide an agentic, agent experience that is voice and text-enabled. That’s where we’re starting to see these types of personal assistants moving forward very quickly,” Miller said. “When you talk about the future of work, you want to be able to be as multimodal and multi-channel in your work as a human being.”
