Slack now lets users add AI agents from Asana, Cohere, Adobe, Workday and more

Workplace messaging app Slack wants to make it easier to build and connect AI agents for clients. 

The new feature, Agents for Slack, will be available for paying users. It will bring Salesforce’s AI agents, third-party agents from partners and Slack customers’ own agents into the chat platform. 

Rob Seaman, Slack’s chief product officer, said in an interview with VentureBeat that desk workers are increasingly wanting to consolidate more of their workflow into a single place so they don’t have to hunt for information. 

“We see that desk workers are spending a self-reporting third of their day on tasks they consider low value and half of the people we talk to aren’t able to find the information they need to do their jobs,” Seaman said. “We think this is because there are more and more apps and services they use on a daily basis and it’s hard to keep track of.”

While Slack does not necessarily have its own agents, it hosts agents from the platforms its customers use. Salesforce with its new suite of AI agents, Agentforce lets people “talk” to their data on Salesforce and take action on tasks. Seaman said people can type questions or instructions to Agentforce, “so your responses will be based on the data in your CRM and the conversation and context happening on Slack.”

Slack will also connect to out-of-the-box AI agents built by Asana, Cohere, Adobe Express, Workday and Writer. The actions these agents would take will depend on the programming set by the partners. Customers who made their own AI agents can also integrate these into Slack. 

Continued growth of AI agents, but convincing users to use them is another story

Bringing AI agents into Slack means users can call up, say, Agentforce from a dedicated interface on Slack. This brings up that AI agent, where the user can then ask questions normally stored in the customer relationship management system in the Slack window. The agent can recommend the next steps or draft emails on the users’ behalf.

However, Slack insists that agents will only have limited access to customer information. “We built a new API specifically for agents where there’s a contract seeded with it that the data cannot be exported, stored or used for LLM training,” Seaman said. Agents made by Slack customers can still train on their data. Seaman said to think of AI agents on Slack as more powerful versions of the apps already connected to the chat service, like Google Calendar or Zoom. 

Slack is just one of the companies adding access to AI agents, but it is probably one of the larger workplace productivity companies offering it to customers. Agents are fast becoming one of the biggest trends for enterprises. Recently, other providers like ServiceNow announced AI agent capabilities for users. 

However, few agents have been in use for very long, so employees have little experience using them. We’re still developing autonomous agents that will not require as much prompting or continuous instructions.  

Slack and other companies adding access to AI agents have to prove that there is demand for such agents by actual users, especially as AI adoption isn’t yet 100%. Slack’s research showed some hesitancy in the workplace about adopting AI tools, particularly as some workers feel using it is unfair. 

Slack must also convince users to connect more apps to their messaging system. 

Slack leaning in on AI innovations

Adding AI agents to Slack is not the only AI-focused update from the company. 

It is adding notes and transcriptions of conversations through Huddles — Slack’s audio meeting option — both the audio and written messages. The notes will show up in a canvas, a tab in a Slack channel that summarizes the channel’s action items, or any other notes people in channel want to share. 

The AI Workflow Builder will generate workflows from prompts to automate tasks, while AI search will find answers to questions from files uploaded on Slack, transcripts or documents from connected apps like Zoom.