How AI is reshaping Slack

Over the last decade, Slack has amassed millions of users. The average user has Slack open 10 hours a day and actively uses it a couple of hours daily.

A lot of enterprise knowledge flows through channels, direct messages and meetings. Extensive new generative AI (genAI) features added in recent years assist in even better communication and collaboration. 

Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, hopes genAI will make its software a “work operating system” where digital labor can also communicate and orchestrate business processes. Some of the newer features include enterprise search, summaries, meeting notes and translations.

And there’s more cooking. Rob Seaman, chief product officer at Slack, gave sister publication Computerworld a glimpse of the company’s thinking and experiments. (This interview was edited for length.)

Slack

Slack

Do you see Slack as a communication layer for agents to talk and collaborate? “Absolutely. I think we have a continued role as a communication layer, but the emerging role for Slack is as the agent command center for users within teams and companies. Tasks are orchestrated and executed by agents on behalf of users.

“I look at AI-native companies for inspiration — Cursor, ElevenLabs, Vercel — they’re putting their agents in Slack because it makes sense. It’s a natural place.

“MCP and agent protocols are very exciting. I think Slack can be an MCP server and an MCP client. We’re working on the server part, but we could be an MCP client for other MCP servers on the desktop or in the browser.”

How do you get users to adopt and understand new AI features in Slack? “I’ll speak openly about what’s been a challenge for us, which is discovery. It’s something we’re spending time on — myself and Ethan [Eismann], our head of design.

“As we add more to Slack, we do not want to mess up the core communication experience. We need users to discover these things in their normal workflow in a non-distractive way that creates value, builds trust, then kicks out to deeper use.

“Gemini does this well — they make recommendations within the product, you try it, then kick out to dedicated Gemini experiences. You discover it, then go into a more dedicated experience.”

Any other cool features coming soon? “There’s one, AI Explain. As a product person, I get pulled into incident channels all the time. When something’s wrong with Slack, there’ll be an incident commander, engineers. I literally don’t know what they’re talking about.

“When I look at messages with acronyms I don’t know, if I mouse over a message, we now have little stars on it. If I click it, it takes that message, all the ones around it, smartly breaks it apart into searches, executes searches and comes back with an explanation for me.

“That would have been like 10 searches from my past. That’s a great candidate for launching into an agentic experience. I got an explanation, now let’s say I want to take a next logical turn. That’s where we can train users that Slack’s a lot more than just communication.”

Slack