Salesforce this week rolled out a major upgrade to its corporate Slack corporate messaging platform. The new AI agent, a turbocharged Slackbot, promises to transform user experience dramatically in just one week. Salesforce released this reinvention at their annual Dreamforce conference in October. It represents a big turning point for the household name smart-speaker-slash-automated-helper, Siri.
The revamped Slackbot, still called Slackbot to leverage the name’s stickiness among users, is different than earlier versions. User engagement on the platform skyrocketed with the release of the next-generation Slackbot. As opposed to previous iterations, it now functions as a text-based agent. Salesforce has bigger ambitions to grow its capabilities.
This month, Slackbot will get voice capabilities, so whether they are writing or talking, users will be able to carry on a free-flowing conversation with Slackbot. And it will begin to learn how to navigate the web, in tandem with its users. This redesign will transform it into a more dynamic and information-rich resource.
Salesforce has claimed Slackbot is the most widely used internal tool ever launched by the company. Before launching new products, Salesforce rigorously tests them with its employees for several months, ensuring they meet user needs and expectations. As Parker Harris, Salesforce’s Chief Technology Officer, emphasized, “It is an agent, it is a super agent that is your employee agent.”
That second-generation Slackbot rolled out this past Tuesday, and Harris is hopeful that it’ll have a widespread impact. He expressed his confidence by stating, “I am very confident that investing in Slackbot is not only good for Slack, it will be incredibly good for the entire company.” He highlighted that the active user count serves as a promising indicator of product-market fit, saying, “Just seeing the sheer active user count is a great sign we have hit on product-market-fit.”
Salesforce views Slackbot’s evolution as a “second bloom,” aiming to replicate the viral success seen with AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This strategic move further highlights Salesforce’s drive to enhance workplace communication and productivity via cutting-edge technology.