‘We Are Going Hard at Agentforce’: Slack SVP on the Roadmap, Salesforce Channels, and Chatter 

Slack will be ‘going hard at Agentforce’ in future, with Salesforce likely investing in further integration with Salesforce Channels, Agentforce, and Data Cloud, Salesforce Ben understands. 

The revelations came as we spoke to Rob Seaman, Chief Product Officer at Slack, at Agentforce World Tour in London, where we discussed CRM, Chatter, roadmaps, and artificial intelligence. 

Slack Roadmap for the Future (In Broad Strokes…)

Speaking at a roundtable press event, Rob did not want to discuss specifics for the future roadmap, but was happy to “spiritually talk about where we’re going” in broad terms. 

The key areas, specifically on the Salesforce integration side, include Salesforce Channels in Slack, which the company has now made available in LEX, he said.

“We are going hard at Agentforce honestly,” said Rob. “We want Agentforce, honestly, to be right there with you for any single Slack customer, we want it to be able to participate in channels. We want it to have access to all the knowledge in Slack. So we’re just gonna keep going long on agents. 

“I think there’s a lot that we can do to continue to improve that experience natively in Slack. I think it’ll be the best experience for Salesforce agents. 

“I also think there’s a lot that we can do with Data Cloud that we’re working on to unify the data sets and make those valuable for the mutual customers of Salesforce and Slack. 

“So I can’t get into too much detail, but those are kind of the primary investment themes – like this core integration of channels, the integration of Agentforce, integration with Data Cloud.” 

Interestingly, Rob also said that we are likely to see “more and more” Salesforce experiences happening through Slack, hinting at yet more integration between the platform and Salesforce’s CRM.

Is Salesforce Channels Just a Rebranded Chatter?

Earlier this month, Salesforce announced that Slack would be directly embedded into its CRM.

Salesforce Channels will unify Salesforce records and customer data with Slack conversations across both interfaces. The new channels are bi-directional and accessible in both Salesforce and Slack

Salesforce users might be used to collaborating on sales opportunities, service cases, and projects through Salesforce Chatter. By default, Salesforce organizations made after June 22, 2010 have Chatter already enabled for all users. 

We asked Rob what exactly was different about integrating Slack further into the Salesforce CRM, and Chatter.  

He told us: “One of the things about Chatter is you had to be within Salesforce, you had to be a Salesforce user, and you had to be within the record to actually engage with that thing. And it typically didn’t integrate with other systems either. And I think those are some of the strengths of Slack. 

“Slack is typically wall to wall. So every single person in your company, even if they aren’t a CRM user, is typically a user of Slack. Slack is integrated with myriad other systems and those other systems can help you do your job, whether you’re in service, sales, whatever it might be.

“And so the power of bringing Slack into Salesforce records, in my opinion, is you can extend the number of people that can contribute to the success of a customer, as an example, through an account channel. 

“You don’t need to give them all access to all the information that’s in CRM. But if you think about who in your company can actually contribute to the success of any one customer as like a salesperson, it’s literally anybody. It could be somebody bumping into somebody on the plane. It could be the CEO. And these aren’t people that are necessarily going to be on the account team and they aren’t necessarily going to live in Salesforce, but they will be in Slack. 

“So I think it expands the aperture of the number of people that can contribute to the success of a customer, but also to these other processes.” 

Rob said that case swarming is a great example of where the subject matter experts who can help you figure out how to resolve a particular issue are not necessarily always call center agents or users of Salesforce service. 

“It could be an engineer deep in the weeds of your infrastructure built a specific thing on top of an open source project that may not even know what the call center software is,” he added. “But they can now get pulled in through that Slack channel or through that Salesforce channel in Slack.”

Integration with other systems is also a significant difference. When you spin up a Salesforce channel about an account or about a particular case, it is automatically connected to Salesforce, but you can also pull in other systems too, Rob said. 

“You can integrate Jira, you can integrate pagerduty systems like that, which we often see with case swarming and incidents. And it gives you the ability to not only have Salesforce making updates to those channels, but other systems as well. And from that channel a user can actually effectively arbitrage tasks in those other systems as well.” 

Final Thoughts 

While Rob could only speak in broad terms in terms of the roadmap, it likely won’t come as a surprise that key areas to look out for are Agentforce, Data Cloud, and further integration with Slack. 

And while ecosystem veterans might be skeptical as to how revolutionary Salesforce Channels might be, Slack will be one of the key areas of Salesforce’s portfolio to watch for their vision of the future, it seems.

It’s not just for Salesforce professionals to communicate in and around a record – it encourages everyone in a company (providing they use Slack) to use this record as a central hub of communication, meaning, at least in theory, greater collaboration across a business, and a happier bottom line. 

It is also worth considering Rob’s comments that we are likely to see “more and more” Salesforce experiences happening through Slack, which appears to be the perfect candidate to become the “deeply unified platform” the company likes talking about so much.