Thousands of companies are racing to build agents, but most run into the same obstacle: how to make them actually useful in the day-to-day flow of work.
Agents run on data, but what makes them powerful is context, and the richest context comes from conversations. Conversational data is the gold of the agentic era, yet it’s been locked away in unstructured messages and chats, largely out of reach for employees, let alone applications.
The newly-launched Slack platform gives partners and developers the tools to securely connect AI with the rich corpus of customer-owned and -controlled conversational data in Slack.
With a new real-time search (RTS) API, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, and enhanced developer tools like prebuilt Block Kit Tables, Slack provides secure, flexible, agent-ready access to conversational data. This context enables agents to move beyond generic responses to deliver context-awar , user-specific conversations, making AI more relevant and accurate.
Companies like Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, Writer, Dropbox, Notion, Cognition Labs, Vercel, Cursor and others are already building on these capabilities to deliver compelling AI applications and agents, living natively in Slack. By securely tapping into Slack’s conversational data, these companies are among those bringing intelligence directly into the flow of work to accelerate growth.
By building agents directly in Slack, developers can overcome another problem plaguing the modern enterprise: endless fragmentation leading to low app adoption. There are over 200 000 SaaS companies in the world, and an average enterprise uses over 1 000 applications. The result is countless hours lost, with employees clicking between apps, endless copying and pasting, and context switching draining productivity by up to 40%.
Developers and partners are taking advantage of the Slack platform’s breadth to create AI apps and agents directly in the flow of work, allowing companies to:
- Unlock unstructured data: Slack is enabling organisations to safely and securely tap into the vast amounts of collective knowledge stored in Slack conversations to enrich AI and agents, saving customers an average of 97 minutes a week.
- Accelerate decision-making: By connecting app data, like Agentforce Sales or Workday, with Slack conversations, the platform provides complete context, enhancing search and AI for faster insights and action, resulting in 37% faster decision-making across teams and 36% faster responses to customers.
- Increase productivity: Businesses most able to use AI have three times higher growth in revenue per employee. By integrating apps and agents directly into human workflows, Slack eliminates context switching, enabling teams to cut hours of manual research and get straight to action.
- Solve the adoption gap: Slack brings partner and developer apps directly into the flow of work, helping overcome one of developers’ biggest distribution challenges — getting employees to actually use them — by making apps accessible where employees are already working. Over 1,7-million apps are actively used in Slack each week, and 95% of those users say using an app in Slack makes those tools more valuable.
- Ensure security and compliance: With Slack’s enterprise-grade security, privacy features, and granular permissions, businesses can safeguard their data while providing a secure foundation for agentic collaboration.
“The future of work is undeniably agentic, and the success of AI depends on its seamless integration into human workflows,” says Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack. “Our latest Slack platform innovations create the secure, data-rich environment necessary for AI agents to become trusted companions. We make it simple for customers and partners to build their AI solutions directly into Slack so that work is more connected, intelligent, and productive than ever before.”