Slack is Adding AI Agent Capabilities

Ahead of today’s Microsoft 365 Copilot wave 2 announcement, Slack preemptively revealed its own AI-based chatbots, called Agents for Slack.

From what I can tell–the official announcement isn’t live yet, so I’m working off third-party reports here–Agents for Slack is an AI extensibility platform that lets paying customers enhance the capabilities of the messaging-based productivity system with third-party and internally made custom chatbots called agents. The firm has collaborated with its Salesforce corporate parent and companies like Adobe, Cohere, and other partners on the platform, which competes with Copilot for Microsoft 365 capabilities for Teams. And it provides an alternative to Copilot Studio, which customers can use to build so-called “custom copilots” or “custom chatbots” that run within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Agents is a better term, for sure: The language of AI is complicated and confusing enough, and Microsoft had used that term for years before the Copilot push. (And it still does: One can still create Power Virtual Agents using the Microsoft Power Platform, for example.)

“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,” Slack chief product officer Rob Seaman told VentureBeat. “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.”

Slack-based agents will work in the background and connect different back-end systems and then present users with integrated views so that they can act on them. As with other chatbots, they can ask the agents questions or give them directives, and the responses will be grounded in whatever data sources they provide. This allows “desk workers”–what Microsoft used to call knowledge workers–to stay in Slack and still get work done that involves other services. And because companies can build their own agents–just as they might build their own custom chatbots for Teams or Microsoft 365–they can create custom internal solutions for employees.

Slack already offers third-party integration with third-party apps, and it provides its own Slack AI capabilities as well. But this new agent-based capability appears to straddle those two worlds, while adding the custom in-house capabilities that larger corporations, in particular, might find compelling.

Agents for Slack will be available for paying customers by late 2024 or early 2025.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot wave 2 announcement is set for 11:00 am ET today.