Salesforce announces an AI-heavy makeover for Slack, with 30 new features | TechCrunch

Salesforce, the cloud software giant, has been remaking its business around AI, and at a small gathering in San Francisco on Tuesday, CEO Marc Benioff and his team unveiled the latest results of those efforts: an updated version of Slack, with a plethora of new AI features. The most significant of these is a serious glow-up for its AI agent, Slackbot. The 30 new features, which will be available in the coming months, follow a January update that gave Slackbot agentic capabilities — including the ability to draft emails, schedule meetings, and sift through your inbox for specific information. Perhaps the most notable feature announced Tuesday is what the company calls reusable AI-skills — which allow users to define specific tasks for Slackbot that, once created, can be applied in a variety of different scenarios and contexts. Slackbot comes with a built-in library of AI-skills, Salesforce says, but users can also create their own custom versions. Once these skills are set up, they significantly reduce the work an employee might need to do. For example, a user can trigger a skill using a simple command in Slack — say, “create a budget” for an upcoming event — prompting Slackbot to pull together all relevant information from a company’s Slack channels, as well as any connected apps or data sources, to create an actionable plan. The bot will then automatically set up a meeting to discuss the plan, inviting relevant employees based on their titles. Slackbot now also functions ...