Change How Your Business Works with Slackâ€™s Latest Updates

 Auto-transcribed on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.media and text playback available on this page: https://aliceapp.ai/recordings/Ml1h9D2seFycOgBS8Qo_ptqbRrUPNEGk

Key 	Value 	
Words: 	3,427 	
Duration: 	00:18:42 	
Recorded on: 	Unknown date 	
Uploaded on: 	2024-09-17 21:03:48 UTC 	
Last update: 	 	
At: 	Unknown location 	
Using: 	Uploaded to aliceapp.ai 	

Speakers:

 Speaker A - 54.48%

 Speaker B - 45.52%

Notes:

- First thing day one, we're excited to talk about Slack's latest innovations. General, uh, gist is we'll talk about roadmap. Don't make your purchasing decisions based on roadmap. Put on things that are currently available.-  Slack is an acronym for searchable log of all conversations and knowledge. We're bringing native AI functionality into Slack to make it easier to work with corporate knowledge. Secondly, we're looking at how we bring third party agents into Slack. And the third is agent force, which you'll hear a lot about at Dreamforce this year.-  Slack rolled out slack AI in February of this year, for Valentine's Day. Since then, we have summarized, I believe, over 600 million messages, threads, conversations. Massive time saver since February. What's new to slack AI?- Now we've got a new dedicated spot in the right hand panel of the UI that allows you to bring in your favorite AI tools. We've also simplified sponsored connections. Some really exciting things coming out for Slack Connect later this year and early next.- We're expanding the usability of slack specifically targeted towards frontline users. Frontline workers are often the experience your customers get of your organization. We want to make sure that we provide them a streamlined experience.-  AI, slack, AI agent, all of that embedded in slack, it can also pull results from your uh, Salesforce channels. That is a way to ask your CRM to do work for you while you're looking at the data and collaborating with your team. It's all one perfect virtuous cycle of information and collaboration.

[00:00:00]  Speaker A 
So my name is. What? Sorry. All right, welcome to Dreamforce day 1830. Thank you so much for everyone being here. Who here is not a morning person? Yeah, yeah, fair. Everyone got their coffee? Great. Um, really appreciate you guys being here. First thing day one, we're excited to talk about Slack's latest innovations. We hope you're excited to hear about that. For everyone who is watching this later, uh, welcome to the session. We're glad you've tuned in. My name is Camilla Khairov. I am a product marketer on the slack team. This is my 13th Dreamforce, uh, lucky 13.

[00:00:37]  Speaker B 
Lucky 13.

[00:00:38]  Speaker A 
Uh, and Steve, would you like to.

[00:00:39]  Speaker B 
Hi, everyone. I'm Steve Hamrick. I'm a product manager on slack. I've been with Slack for about five years, and this is probably my fifth dreamforce, actually.

[00:00:46]  Speaker A 
Ooh. Getting up there in years.

[00:00:48]  Speaker B 
Yeah.

[00:00:48]  Speaker A 
That's amazing. Um, for those of you who whose dreamforce this is the first dreamforce, you will see this slide approximately 14,000 more times in the next three days. General, uh, gist is we'll talk about roadmap. Don't make your purchasing decisions based on roadmap. Put on things that are currently available. There, you got it. Now you can tune out for the rest of the week. All right. Uh, we've already set our thank yous. Right?

[00:01:12]  Speaker B 
Thank you very much for being here.

[00:01:13]  Speaker A 
Thank you for being here. Thank you for being customers. Thank you for your feedback with that, all of that, um, that makes our product better. It makes our ability to provide, uh, delightful experiences for you even better. We've done our introductions. I'm Camila, this is Steve. Uh, and from here on out, we have no script. So what are. Ok, so what are we talking about today? Um, as you may have noticed, agents, agent force, the concept of AI, working with your team alongside your team is a really big topic these days in tech. At, ah, Salesforce, at, ah, Dreamforce, um, we are all going to be talking about what does it mean to have agents, AI assistants, apps, all of that, working with your team? Because all of these bits and bobs of technology are fundamentally changing how we get work done. Um, customers, employees, they're all interacting with AI on a daily basis, but they don't always know why they're doing it or how they do it effectively. If you want to get the most out of agents and you want to get the most out of AI, the important part is how you set everything up so you can get the work done and you can, um, understand the value. And the point. Sorry, is that, to me, no. Okay, great. Uh, so it's all about getting the work done and making sure that agents make sense in your process. Don't just throw AI in willy nilly. It's all about, uh, making sure it makes sense. So slack is all about putting together one interface for work, not communication, not collaboration, not messaging. Yes, all of that, but also all of your work, your project management, your workflows, your people, your data, your agents, everything in one place. So from the time you wake, um, up in the morning and get your coffee and get work started to the time you're done with your day, all of those tasks, most of that work can be done within slack. If you think about how Slack is built, we ingest your humans, which sounds really weird, I know, but like, you put all your people, you put them together with processes and data and your apps, your integrated systems, and you put everything in one place, and then you have all of those pieces. Collaborate in channels, build an enterprise knowledge base together organically. You do project management. You tailor, uh, to your business processes, and then you get insights. You build your culture, you get your processes more effective. Um, all of that is what fundamentally makes work easier, faster, more effective. And, uh, when I talk about slack being operating system for work or the conversational interface for work, I really do mean more than just messaging. It's, look, we all have the cats channel or the dog's channel, or there is free pizza in the lunchroom channel. Yes, and that is fantastic. And messaging is so core to what Slack does. But if you think it's just messaging, you're missing the bigger utility of Slack. It is files, it is third party applications like docusign, making it easier than ever to get from a quote to a signed, uh, contract with your customers. It is third party integrations. It is connecting with your vendors, with your partners, with your customers who are outside of Slack, all within Slack. And, uh, when you put all these pieces together, you actually can design and deliver processes for every line of business in a way that improves their performance. Whether it's win rate for sales teams or, uh, our it department, being able to deliver better search results and better, uh, help desk and better self service, all because it's process sized and automated in slack. So if we think about how we're building all of this for the future of work, um, it's all about the product innovation that delivers this conversational interface. So we're going to talk about it in three buckets. Humans working with agents. So that's our AI bucket, work os for the enterprise. All of the things that you need to get your job done on a daily basis and then conversational interface to Salesforce. Slack is a salesforce company and it's all about bringing that CRM m data and making it actionable on a day to day basis. All right, first category, let's get started. AI and Slack.

[00:06:14]  Speaker B 
So we are bringing AI to slack in three big categories. Number one, we're bringing native AI functionality into Slack to make it easier to work with the corporate knowledge you've got in Slack. For those that don't know, Slack is an acronym for searchable log of all conversations and knowledge. And for most organizations, Slack becomes the corporate nervous system, the central brain of the organization. Secondly, we're looking at how we bring third party agents into Slack. And I'll show you what that looks like. And the third is agent force, which you're going to hear a lot about at Dreamforce this year. So starting with what's available in Slack AI right now, number one is searching answers. And this kind of works like magic. You use plain text search, you'll get a synthesized result from Slack that actually gives you an answer with citations to where it found that information. In slack, a huge time saver. If you're trying to find out about a project or you're trying to find out about a term that you're maybe not sure about, it synthesizes that information for you, brings it down to just the right bullet points.

[00:07:03]  Speaker A 
I mean, frankly, if you ever want to ask it like what is my biggest opportunity? Or, uh, who responds to my questions most quickly, you can do that in Slack search.

[00:07:13]  Speaker B 
So second is conversation summaries and this is again a huge time saver. If you're using slack for incident response, this is really valuable. Being able to get caught up in a thread or a channel when you're trying to respond to a really time sensitive issue is a number one a priority. And this has been a huge time saver and again, an enabler for organizations to move faster. Third is recaps, and this one is really valuable, especially for leaders in the organization where they're trying to stay on top of potentially dozens of channels that are moving very quickly and they want to know what's their team doing, what's their team working on. There's information that they want to stay on top of, but they don't necessarily want to read every individual message. With recaps, you can get a summary of all the channels you're kind of getting recapped on a daily basis and that will be available to you in the morning. In the morning, you'll get a nice summary, and you can just mark those blocks as red, or you can actually take action and drill into those conversations.

[00:07:58]  Speaker A 
By the way, we rolled out slack AI in February of this year, right, for Valentine's Day, also in time for.

[00:08:05]  Speaker B 
Our 10th birthday, actually.

[00:08:07]  Speaker A 
Since then, we have summarized, I believe, over 600 million messages, threads, conversations, uh, for a whopping total of a million, 1.3 million hour saved with just summaries. Massive time saver since February.

[00:08:24]  Speaker B 
So what's new to slack AI? What I'm really excited about, actually, is this first one is slack AI being your huddles meeting note taker. If you've ever started a huddle with somebody, I think of huddles as sort of the meeting before the meeting or the meeting after the meeting. A lot of times, Camille and I actually use huddles to get prepped for a session like this one. And she and I will actually go back and forth, agree on topics, agree on presenters, agree on action items, and.

[00:08:45]  Speaker A 
Then forget what we discussed.

[00:08:47]  Speaker B 
Admittedly, we will forget it unless we use Slack AI as a meeting note taker, in which case you'll get a canvas left behind wherever you started the huddle, and that will include all of the notes and the action items that you had discussed in that session. Again, a huge time saver. And just make sure that work becomes more transparent. And again, uh, adds value to the, uh, huddles themselves. Uh, second, here is the AI workflow builder. This is amazing, actually. Uh, workflows in slack are great as a time saver to automate routine tasks. But as, uh, we've extended the workflow builder, there's a lot of additional steps and tools you can use with the workflow builder. It sometimes is overwhelming as m easy as we've made it, as point and click driven as we sometimes it's just hard to get started. So I just want to ask a question in plain text and have the workflow builder build it for me. And with slack AI now I can do that. Third is the workflow builder summary step, and this one is huge. It's a step in a direction that we're taking with Slack AI, how do we make it more extensible through workflows? If you're using slack again for things like incident response, or maybe you're trying to mine slack for, uh, knowledge on a project. For example, in a workflow step, you might want to summarize that channel, put it into a canvas, and memorialize that for later. So the workflow builder summary, you can actually do that. Now, the other thing we've done with when uh, it comes to search is extend. The sources that Slack AI is able to respond with in search files was the first one we added. That is a huge one. We'll actually see citations like in this example to where it found that information inside of files that have been shared in Slack. And secondly is app search. So any apps that are connected, like Jira and GitHub, um, can also surface answers in Slack AI search. As far as architecture, I won't burn this slide down, but I just want to make sure that we mentioned that none of that information is pre trained in the model. It's all done in real time or what we call retrieval augmented generation. So that information is not stored in any large language model. It also doesn't leave our hosting boundary. So all this is what I just showed you actually stays entirely within Slack's hosting boundary. Another major game changer in terms of productivity with Slack of the last three, four years, especially, uh, we've added a ton of new functionality, whether it's canvas or lists, uh, the workflow builder, extensions, all of these things have made it sometimes difficult to get started in slack. And we recognize that we want to make it easy, want to make it more turnkey. We know that there's a lot of potential patterns and paths you can follow to get started on our use case. So we're introducing a new template catalog that allows you to go through, find a template that's relative to your line of business and your team, and actually pick that to get started with a channel. So instead of a blank channel and you're starting from scratch, you're actually starting with some content in place over time. We think this will be a place where we allow, uh, customers to create their own templates and their own solutions. All right, next, let's move into the work os for enterprise. So this is where we get into agents with Slack. Now we've got a new dedicated spot in the right hand panel of the UI that allows you to bring in your favorite AI tools. So imagine being able to crack open the right hand panel, bring in some information from Adobe Xpressen, for example. Maybe I want to ask it to generate something for me, and then I actually pass that back to the channel so I can work together with my colleagues. Secondly, we've done a lot of work to Slack Connect. So we've added a new way of governing your invites to make it automated in fashion. So organizations that are working with a lot of partners that want to streamline the invite process, we've added governs and Slack Connect APIs to make that process much simpler, much faster than ever before. We've also simplified sponsored connections. So if you're an enterprise grid customer, you probably are aware of, uh, the simplified sponsor, uh, connections. But just in case you aren't, sponsored connections allows you to work in Slack connect with an organization that is not paying for Slack. So they may be a freak Slack user, you're an enterprise grid customer, you want to be able to work with them. With sponsored connections, you can do that.

[00:12:18]  Speaker A 
By the way, I would watch this space. We've got some really exciting things coming out for Slack Connect, um, later this year and early next.

[00:12:25]  Speaker B 
Awesome. So the last thing I'll leave with here is that we're also expanding the usability, uh, of slack specifically targeted towards frontline users. So you recognize that slack gets used wall to wall for knowledge workers in an organization. But oftentimes the frontline workers in the organization are left out in the cold. And that's a real shame because frontline workers are often the experience your customers get of your organization. They are the last mile between you, your products and services and the customer. So we want to make sure that we provide them a streamlined experience. Uh, we already know that a lot of organizations are starting to use slack for frontline users. We want to just expand that further with a solution dedicated to them. Now with that, I'll pass it back to kil.

[00:13:06]  Speaker A 
Thank you, Steve Clicker. Thank you. Um, time check by the way, we've got seven minutes. We're going to speed through this. All right, um, who here uses Salesforce? Yeah, right.

[00:13:21]  Speaker B 
Surprise everyone.

[00:13:22]  Speaker A 
There's a maybe over here in the front. Uh, and if you're using slack and you're using Salesforce, how many times do you switch back and forth between these two systems in a day? Who enjoys copy, pasting or switching between systems? I don't want to see any hands because nobody ever. Right? So Salesforce channels, uh, takes everything you love about channels, the collaboration, uh, the ability to share information, uh, whether it's in files, workflows, canvases, etcetera. And we're embedding that in Salesforce. And more importantly, we're also embedding salesforce information in slack. So if for example, you're working on an opportunity or you're working on an account, you can see on the left your channel, your Salesforce channel will actually get tabs like overview and summary an account profile so that we are scrubbing, pulling data from Salesforce into slack. That allows the collaboration that's happening in slack to be grounded in and based on customer data, you can take action on your opportunities, your accounts or whatever, logging a call, updating the stage. You can do all of that in Slack. And for everyone who's working in Salesforce they can see that entire conversation that's been happening in the channel in their Salesforce UI. So no matter where you're working you literally don't have to context switch and you get all the information.

[00:14:49]  Speaker B 
I think just one important addition to this is that we respect all of the user access control out of Salesforce. So if there's fields that you don't have access to, those will not show up in slack and you will not see that information if you're not expressly um, granted permission to that object.

[00:15:02]  Speaker A 
But this is really the culmination of three, four, four years, it's been a while of lots of years of work of bringing Salesforce and Slack closer together really um, delivering on that better together story that we started out with uh, in this acquisition. All right, uh, we talked about it unlocking AI ah insights because don't forget when you have AI, slack, AI agent, all of that embedded in slack, it can also pull results from your uh, Salesforce channels. And if you've got in that same right hand panel you've got Agent force embedded in there. That is a way to ask your CRM to do work for you while you're looking at the data and collaborating with your team. So it's all one perfect virtuous cycle of information and collaboration. Sales uh, elevate then gets built on top of Salesforce channels because this is all about purpose built role specific tools. I am a leader and I want to see what my team's KPI's are looking like. I am a day ah to day rep and I want to update all of my opportunities in one view, in one place and have that sync back to Salesforce. Um, all of that is doable through elevate and of course the foundation of all of that is the Salesforce channels because once again it's all about the data and your people working together. I talked about this briefly. Uh, Agent force and Slack, you will hear this um, everywhere this week. Uh, we're really excited about this because all of Agent Force, which is the artist formerly known as Einstein co pilot is available to you in slack. So you've got your CRM data, your people and your uh, Agent Force CRM prompts all in one place. So you're once again interacting with all of that, um, getting the information you need, taking care of tasks in one place. Uh, as we continue down this path with salesforce channels, as we increase the functionality, as we increase the availability, uh, we're going to look at how do we bring this to the entirety of the salesforce portfolio. So for example, ah, tableau in slack, getting those insights, getting the visualizations, all of those, um, all of those uh, um, capabilities. Capabilities. Thank you. Uh, in one place, automatically coming to you, giving you more information. Um, Salesforce starter. Whether you're a giant enterprise or you're a small business that needs, you know, um, a more streamlined, a more user friendly aspect, salesforce starter suite and slack work together as a smooth. We have what your business needs from when you found it to when it starts growing. And with that, I think that's about our time. Um, if you go upstairs, we have the slack zone. Lots of demos of everything I talked about and everything Steve talked about. Uh, you can see all of that live. Our keynote is at 1230 today. Also upstairs, which again you will see all of the things that I just talked about, uh, live in demos. We're really excited. Um, if you have any questions we will be here after or you can come upstairs and thank you for joining us for the very first session of Dreamforce.

[00:18:26]  Speaker B 
Thanks everyone.

[00:18:27]  Speaker A 
Have a great week.

[00:18:34]  Speaker B 
Hello. Hi. Hi and welcome to Dreamforce. Are you having a good dreamforce so far?