Summary Bullets:

• The positioning of new Slack capabilities at the Dreamforce keynote was underwhelming, lacking cohesiveness and clarity.

• Slack will land on more solid footing if it can craft an AI message as compelling as its productivity message.

During the keynote of last week’s ‘Dreamforce’ event sponsored by Salesforce, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones updated the audience regarding new and forthcoming capabilities on the Slack platform. With a portion of the capabilities saturated with game-changing AI technology and Dreamforce serving as Salesforce’s showcase event, the update was no doubt intended to tantalize but instead was underwhelming.

Limited to only a handful of minutes and relegated to the tail end of a 90-minute kick-off, the announcements felt very much like an afterthought. This was surprising treatment for the business unit, which Salesforce spent nearly $28 billion to acquire in July 2021 and has so far seemed central to the company’s mission.

Puzzling event logistics aside, the capabilities unveiled were a scattershot, disjointed array. Piloting this winter, Slack AI will feature recaps/summaries of channel and thread activities and discussions; a workflow builder, generally available now for paid users, enables creation of no-code, automated workflows (such as approving travel expenses) along with coded, custom apps; the workflows and apps will be accessible from a dedicated hub launching later in September 2023; Slack Lists will enable users to manage, track, and triage work in a single place (it is piloting in late-2023 with general availability in 2024); Slack Sales Elevate launched in August 2023 and helps reps more proactively manage their deal pipeline; Slack Canvas is being improved with sales-specific templates containing curated information formulated with GenAI (the timeline for these improvements was not made apparent); wrapping up all of the capabilities is a reconfigured user experience, which was unveiled in August 2023.

The presentation left a sense that Slack is feeling pressure to introduce generative AI (GenAI) features. And with good reason. GenAI has arrived on the scene rapidly and with much thunder and competitors such as Microsoft, Google, Zoom, and RingCentral have responded aggressively. Their rollouts have not only been swift but broad as well, spanning the range of functionality on their platforms (such as meetings, events, and contact center).

While Slack has kept pace with rivals in terms of speed to market, it suffers from a narrower platform with a focus limited to productivity. Another concern the presentation drummed up was the complete lack of reference to ‘SlackGPT,’ Slack’s vision for GenAI that was introduced in May 2023. Attendees were left to wonder how (and if) ‘Slack AI’ and ‘SlackGPT’ will work together.

Despite the doubts and unanswered questions, there are bright spots for Slack. From an AI perspective, capabilities already launched under the ‘SlackGPT’ umbrella and those revealed at Dreamforce mark definitive progress. More generally, although Slack lacks the broad platform that rivals enjoy, its focus on productivity is wise. Improving productivity has always enjoyed enduring appeal among businesses of all stripes, and given the high degree of uncertainty in the current economic climate, the need to do the same (if not more) with less is especially acute. If Slack can craft an AI message as compelling as its productivity message, it will land on more solid footing.