Salesforce is reimagining Slack as a conversational AI assistant with agentic capabilities that can also serve as the gateway to third-party agents within the operating system. The upgrade, which is expected to be complete by the end of the year, will feature native AI experiences built into Agentforce for Sales, IT and HR Service, Tableau and more. Salesforce’s Slack redesign could position the app to compete with Microsoft’s Copilot and Teams as the conversational AI layer inside an enterprise’s daily workflow — the place to talk to both people and agents, accessing and interacting with a company’s data.

“Slack is now the single agentic operating system where all of your organization’s agents have a home,” Salesforce announced this week at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. Salesforce is outfitting Slack with Model Context Protocol (MCP) server capabilities to make it easy for developers to connect AI models to apps and data sources and is providing a Real-Time Search API for developers.

Partners including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Writer, Dropbox, Notion, Cognition, Vercel, Cursor and more are building intelligent agents to natively inhabit Slack, according to Salesforce.

The Verge forecasts that the transformation, currently in the testing phase, will take Slackbot from a basic tool for chat, reminders and notifications to an AI-powered tool that can “create custom plans tailored to your workspace, sift through a mountain of messages, gather information from a range of Slack channels, and more.”

In the pilot, available to about 70,000 users, Slackbot “will appear as an icon next to the search bar at the top of the workspace,” The Verge notes, pointing out that “clicking into it will open a DM-like panel on the right side of the screen where you can enter prompts like ‘What are my priorities for today?’ or ‘Find the latest updates on a project.’” Custom responses will be drawn from a user’s conversations, files and workflow tools.

As part of the newly unveiled Agentforce 360, “AI agents capable of accessing CRM data directly are now embedded in Slack, connecting users to Salesforce,” writes SiliconANGLE, explaining that “employees can ‘talk’ to their data and platforms just like other teammates and receive conversational or structured information, or ask AI agents to take action on their behalf.”

Workspace is also getting Channel Expert, “an always-on, in-channel agent that can answer FAQs and surface relevant information” about processes, workplace policies and more, in Slack channels.

Case studies and further exploration can be found as replays at Dreamforce 2025.