‘Turning Agents into Teammates with Agentforce’
First of all: What is Slack?
If you’re not familiar with the technology, Slack is a business comms platform that enables teams to collaborate efficiently, centralising conversations, files, and tools in one place. With its intuitive interface and powerful integrations, Slack has become a cornerstone of modern workplaces, streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity. However, as businesses generate more data and communicate across multiple channels, employees often struggle to find the right information when they need it. This is where AI-powered features in Slack, including Agentforce, come into play.
Why Agentforce in Slack? Turning AI into Your Teammate
Slack is taking a bold approach to AI by integrating Agentforce, an autonomous AI-driven assistant, to help users navigate their work environment more effectively. Rather than replacing human effort, Slack AI aims to act as an enabler, supporting users by synthesising (making information coherent) and summarising existing data, surfacing relevant insights, and reducing the time spent searching for critical information.
A key advantage of integrating AI into workplace communication is the ability to tailor information to different learning styles. Whether you prefer concise bullet points or a more detailed breakdown, AI-powered summarisation adapts to your needs, ensuring you receive the most relevant updates in a way that suits you best.
Moreover, Slack prioritises responsible and sustainable AI. This means ensuring fairness, non-discrimination, and privacy at every stage. Your data never leaves Slack, and large language models (LLMs) are not trained on it, nor do they access the Internet. This commitment guarantees that businesses can harness AI-driven productivity without compromising data security or compliance, and this model (coined the ‘Einstein Trust Layer by Salesforce) is a major reason why Salesforce are leading the charge with AI.
The Challenge: Time is Our Most Precious Resource
The modern workplace is overwhelmed with information. 9.3 hours per week—that’s how long employees spend searching for information across multiple sources (Slack, 2025). With countless apps contributing to daily workflows, critical insights often become scattered across different channels and systems.
Can you trust the data you access? Is it up-to-date or stale? Finding relevant information in Slack shouldn’t feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. With Agentforce in Slack, AI removes the noise, surfaces the most pertinent details, and ensures teams stay informed without wasting time. Notably, early pilot users of Slack AI have already reported saving 97 minutes per week!
Key Uses of Slack AI
Slack’s AI-powered features are designed to eliminate information overload and optimise workflow efficiency. Here’s how:
1. Slack Recap: AI-Powered Catch-Up
Slack AI automatically generates intelligent recaps of conversations and updates. Whether you’re catching up after a holiday or need a quick summary of a busy channel after a day of meetings, Recap ensures you never miss key details. Instead of scrolling through endless messages, AI compiles the most relevant discussions so you can focus on what matters.
2. Capture Key Takeaways from Huddles and Meetings
Meetings are crucial for collaboration, but not everyone can attend every discussion. Slack AI helps capture and summarise the key takeaways from huddles and meetings, making it easier to align teams, document action items, and ensure nothing gets lost in translation.
3. AI-Powered Search: Finding the Right Information, Fast
In a recent webinar, Slack highlighted that 47% of workers struggle to find information in their workplace tools. Slack AI enhances search functionality by understanding context and delivering the most relevant results based on your query. Whether you’re looking for a project update, a specific file, or past conversations, AI helps retrieve the right information instantly.
4. Summarise Channels for Quick Insights
Slack channels often contain valuable discussions, but reading through weeks of messages to find one key piece of information can be overwhelming. With AI-powered channel summarisation, Slack condenses conversations into digestible highlights, providing a quick overview of what’s important without needing to sift through hundreds of messages.
5. AI Workflow Builder: Automate with Natural Language
Slack AI introduces an AI Workflow Builder, allowing users to create automated processes using natural language commands. Instead of manually setting up workflows, users can describe their needs, like they would to a colleague, and AI takes care of the rest – streamlining routine tasks and reducing manual effort.
AI in the Workplace: The Future is Now
AI is already an integral part of our daily lives – Slack (2025) reports that 60% of people interact with AI at least once a day. By 2030, 80% of project management tasks are expected to be AI-driven. This shift isn’t about replacing human workers; rather, it’s about enhancing their capabilities, or ‘augmenting’ them (a hot AI buzzword).
As the Harvard Business Review (2023) states, “AI won’t replace humans. Humans with AI will replace humans without AI.” This perspective underscores the importance of businesses adopting AI-powered tools to remain competitive. Companies that leverage AI, like Slack’s intelligent features, will outperform those that don’t by working smarter, not harder. The good news is that Slack has made it that much easier to incorporate and explore AI securely in your employees’ day-to-day work.
Customisation & Integrations
Yes – like Salesforce, Slack can integrate with all of your other third-party ISV (Independent Software Vendor) applications. Companies can embed their preferred applications directly into Slack, ensuring a tailored experience that aligns with their workflow. In this way, businesses can extend Slack AI’s capabilities to meet their specific requirements.
Conversational AI
Slack AI isn’t just about finding information – it’s about creating a conversational interface where humans and AI agents collaborate. Whether it’s retrieving reports, automating workflows, or summarising discussions, Slack AI acts as a digital assistant that helps teams find what they need and take action immediately.
It’s clear that AI is a powerful force in shaping the modern workplace. By removing the noise and presenting relevant insights, Slack AI empowers teams to focus on meaningful work rather than administrative overhead.
Slack is levelling-up the workplace by making AI an intuitive and integrated part of daily communication. From smarter search to automated workflows, Slack AI helps businesses save time, increase efficiency, and enhance collaboration – all while ensuring data security and compliance.
For organisations looking to support, augment and retain their staff in an increasingly competitive landscape, adopting AI in Slack is a brilliant quick-win. By turning AI into a true teammate, you can pave the way for a more intelligent, productive, and efficient future of work for you and your team.
To learn more, schedule a chat with one of our friendly experts today.
References
- Karim R. Lakhani and Adi Ignatius (2023) AI Won’t Replace Humans — But Humans With AI Will Replace Humans Without AI, Harvard Business Review, Business and Society. Available [online] https://hbr.org/2023/08/ai-wont-replace-humans-but-humans-with-ai-will-replace-humans-without-ai (Accessed 13/02/25)
- Slack City Tour (2025) Salesforce Webinar 16/01/25