Salesforce-Slack Seamless Integration Is Finally Here With Channels

Salesforce is embedding Slack directly into its CRM, and Tableau Next is now available directly in Slack, as the company aims to create a single space for workers to collaborate and take action. 

The cloud giant revealed the news today, claiming that Slack and Salesforce “just got seamless” in a further step towards eliminating “fragmented workflows”. Ahead of the revelation, we spoke to Archana Kannan, SVP of Slack Product at Salesforce, to get a little more context about the news and what the tech giant’s vision of a “deeply unified platform” really means. 

Salesforce Channels: Another Step Towards the Unified Platform

The Mothership isn’t shy about its long-term vision behind this move, admitting that bringing Slack into Salesforce is part of a strategy to “bring together every app, every piece of data, every workflow, every bit of metadata, and every AI agent into a single, intelligent, unified platform.” 

As part of this vision, Salesforce channels will be rolling out to Salesforce customers on a standard edition – who are also Slack customers – over the coming weeks. This will bring Slack collaboration into Salesforce, and CRM into Slack for Salesforce customers.

Salesforce channels will now unify Salesforce records and customer data with Slack conversations across both interfaces, with the aim to further power collaboration between human and AI Agent workers.

The new Salesforce channels are bi-directional and fully accessible in both Salesforce and Slack. This, the CRM giant says, will give teams “one connected space to break down silos, collaborate, and take action, instead of switching tabs or chasing updates across apps”. 

Built-in access to Agentforce will also help make sure humans and agents remain in sync, Salesforce says, with conversations, context, and data always staying connected. 

Permissions will be automatically inherited from Salesforce, meaning workers only need to authenticate once to keep “secure, compliant” collaboration across the systems, the CRM giant says. 

When given permission, Agentforce can also read specific Slack conversations – giving the AI agents more context for improving. Agentforce in Salesforce channels can take part in conversations, summarize discussions, and take actions on behalf of a team. 

Archana spoke to Salesforce Ben ahead of the launch, saying: “Since Slack’s acquisition, we’ve been on this deliberate journey to bring Slack and Salesforce together. Now, you can ask. ‘Why does it matter?’ When you think about the user and when you think about how teams work, teams have been struggling with fragmented context. 

“What Salesforce has done an incredible job of is bringing this customer 360 and overall view of all the customer data, all the touch points, and helping you think through all the different apps, so that we have this entire overview of customers. 

“But what is missing often is that it’s missing the context behind that. Why is this deal stuck? Which lead do I need to pursue? The right path for me to resolve the service cases? Those are disconnected and fragmented, and the conversations happen all over the place. 

“What we’re trying to do with Slack and Salesforce integration, and specifically these Salesforce channels, is we’re trying to break the barriers between Salesforce applications and the conversations that happen around those Salesforce records.” 

Archana said that it could be viewed as having two schools of thought, with Salesforce organized via records and Slack organized via channels. 

“This is a very happy marriage between the two of them,” she added. 

“Now you have both the data and the context that goes behind it. And what this powers is not just for humans to be operating this way, but for agents, and the future of this [is for] Agentforce to get grounded on the context behind all these different changes that happen, all these different records that happen.”

The goal is to make it so that, no matter where people are working, Salesforce meets users where they are, Archana said.

“It also is a stepping stone into this foundation of the future that we’re going to, which is agents getting grounded on this comprehensive view of the structured information and the unstructured information.”

The company says that, by embedding Slack into Salesforce, they are helping customers “move beyond disconnected systems and fragmented workflows”. 

“Whether it’s a deal, a service case, or a marketing campaign, work can now move faster – because everyone is connected, informed, and empowered,” Salesforce said in a statement.

Tableau Next Now Available in Slack

Salesforce is bringing their analytics platform, Tableau Next, into Slack on June 13 as part of the company’s vision of a “new, unified experience”. 

“Deeply integrated into Slack, Tableau Next lets users share AI-powered metrics, dashboards, and visualizations across channels, messages, and canvases – keeping insights and related discussions in one place,” Salesforce said in a statement. 

“Teams can embed analytics into workflows and click back to Tableau Next for deeper exploration. Thanks to shared metadata between Slack and Tableau, soon teams will be able to ask Agentforce questions in everyday language. With Tableau Next in Slack, data becomes a natural part of how decisions get made.”

The CRM giant says that this integration makes Slack the core operating system for enterprise work within Salesforce, connecting people, data, and actions, and teams can now: 

• Embed live, interactive metrics into Slack canvases in order to help real-time decision-making and integrate analytics into team workflows, with teams collaborating on a “shared source of truth”.
• Ask Agentforce questions in natural language and empower smarter, faster decisions.
• Jump to Tableau Next for advanced analysis and exploration.

Beyond the Buzzwords: What This Means

We at Salesforce Ben wondered, ahead of our chat with Archana, whether the intention behind this move was to make it so that, essentially, a salesperson only had to have one tab open – be it Salesforce or Slack – all day, in order to be able to perform their job correctly.

This would make the necessary (if somewhat dull) bureaucracy, data entry, and secondary job tasks as streamlined as possible, freeing up more time for the salesperson to do what they do best – sell. One tab, one seamless, “unified platform”. 

Archana said: “By deeply integrating these platforms, what we’re doing is we’re reducing all the context switching that needs to happen. And it doesn’t matter – we know that an organization consists of different folks.

“People like working in different interfaces. There are some sellers who are on the go who want to just update things on their phone right after a customer call. There are people who love to work on Salesforce, and they look at that like they’re approving codes, they’re doing a whole bunch of things. 

“So no matter where you work, you have all the information that you need: the data from Salesforce, the conversations from Slack, and the agents all operating together with you. That really is the crux of where we are getting to.”

So, it sounds like it – but the different interfaces remain for now, meaning you can keep working in the one you prefer. 

We also asked about this recurring phrase, “deeply unified platform”, and what this really means for the future. 

In the short term, we are seeing it with further Slack and Salesforce integration – along with Agentforce, of course – but longer term, say, in one year’s time, or even ten years’ time, what are we likely to see, if all goes well? 

Archana said: “Each business has its own process, right? So each unique business process goes into the context of Slack. That means that nothing gets duplicated. The way that we have done this is not to say that everything from Salesforce comes into Slack as we copy it over, and that’s how things happen, but the source systems exist over here because the apps and data from all these disparate systems are surfaced. 

“So it’s more like, do you have the context to do work? We’re not trying to say that these source systems are going to vanish, right? Also what we are saying is that we’re going to enable people to do work where they want to do work, so that’s what you’re seeing, that Salesforce channels is a part of Salesforce too, it’s not just in Slack, it’s also a part of Salesforce, enabling people to do work no matter where they are, and nothing gets lost as a part of this, and work keeps moving forward with agents having the access to data.

“While Slack is your work operating system, we are very much a connected work operating system. So we connect to all these different systems, the different business processes, and bring them all together.”

Speaking about the longer-term vision of the future, Archana said that a lot of the work is happening in a “very conversational way”, and a lot more of the work is going to happen with agents. 

“All these interfaces are going to evolve in this new agentic era that we are existing in,” she said.

Beyond the Buzzwords Part 2: No, Really, What Does This Mean?

In a 2022 blog post, Slack asked (and answered) the question: ‘What is a digital HQ?’. The answer, as the article explains, is a “single, virtual space” to connect… well, as much as can feasibly and practically be connected to boost productivity and quality of work. Slack pitched itself as this ‘digital HQ’, obviously. 

That particular phrase seems to have gone out of fashion in Salesforce comms recently, with ‘digital labor’ and ‘digital teammates’ picking up the slack (ha ha) as Agentforce becomes the company’s poster child. 

But this recent news of ever-closer union harkens back to the idea of the digital HQ – the one-stop shop for everything. Where there was once a butcher, a baker, and a pharmacy, all in different stores across town (and run by different people), now there’s the mega-mart – the only place you need to go. Soon, so too would there be a ‘digital HQ’ – the one place, the one tab you need to have open for all your workplace needs.

But since completing its acquisition of Slack Technologies in July 2021, the two interfaces have remained very much separate entities. Some workplaces may use Salesforce but not Slack – and vice versa. But that’s a win, as long as they’re both happy customers… right?

Well, Salesforce is not the only digital HQ in town. In November 2024, tech rival Microsoft explained how integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams allows businesses to “speed up the flow of work, enabling anyone in an organization to view and collaborate on Dynamics 365 records, from within the flow of work with Teams”. 

While Microsoft (which has been the subject of a few notable Marc Benioff barbs) did not invent the concept of integration, the case for the digital HQ has already been made. Decision-makers at Salesforce/Slack, if they really do believe in the utility of such a concept, need to make sure their mega-mart is the one-stop shop for all your digital needs. If the digital HQ is the future, they need to be the ones to make it happen – sooner, rather than later.

Availability for Salesforce Channels and Tableau Next in Slack

Salesforce channels will be rolled out “over the coming weeks”, the CRM giant says. They will be available to all existing Salesforce and Slack customers who are on a Salesforce standard edition and a Slack free or paid plan. 

Tableau Next in Slack will be generally available on June 13. Additional functionality is “coming soon”, Salesforce says. 

Final Thoughts 

News around Salesforce tends to lean heavily towards Agentforce these days, and it’s no wonder. Just two months after launching in October 2024, a ‘2.0’ version of the AI suite was unveiled in December 2024, and even further capabilities (dubbed ‘Agentforce 2dx’) were then announced in March 2025. The AI product is clearly getting a lot of attention from the Mothership. 

But it’s worth remembering that Salesforce is still, at heart, a CRM giant, and it became that way by simplifying procedures as much as possible, meaning salespeople could focus on doing what they do best – without losing endless tedious minutes to boring but necessary administrative tasks. 

An enterprise-level package from Salesforce means those tedious minutes have certainly been reduced, with the help of the CRM system, but they have not been eliminated entirely.