How Can Admins Use Slack to Manage AI Agents More Easily?

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack.

Join us as we chat about enhancements to Workflow Builder, the Slack features everyone should be using, and the future of AI and Slack.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jim Ray.

Usability upgrades to core Slack features

Jim and his team have been improving the core Slack experience. “We’ve really been focusing on those little paper cuts, the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release,” he says. So essentially, Slack is a little better everywhere.

One area they’ve focused on is Workflow Builder. In particular, they’ve added new branching functionality—allowing admins to create conditional paths like “if/then” logic.

They’ve also been hard at work upgrading canvases and lists. With new data like AI-generated meeting notes, canvases provide a central place for all the relevant information. Jim also urges you to check out lists as a sort of “semi-database” for data you want handy in Slack.

Slack’s AI vision centralizes agent interactions

For Jim, Slack is one of the best tools to interact with and fully take advantage of the AI agents you build with Agentforce. It’s already the place your team communicates with each other, so why not be able to loop in AI teammates?

“In the same way that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it's the place where you're all working with those agents,” Jim says. And so his team is looking at how Slack can bring together every AI agent your team uses, whether they’re built in Agentforce or another third-party platform.

Dreamforce 2025 will spotlight Salesforce-Slack integration

I asked Jim for a sneak preview of what he has in store for Dreamforce 2025, and he did not disappoint. We’ve come a long way with tools like Salesforce channels and the ability to deploy an Agentforce agent directly to Slack. Now his team is working on ways to deepen the integration. So look for improvements to search and embedded Salesforce data in the coming year.

There are so many more great insights into how you can get the most out of Slack in the Agentforce era, so be sure to listen to our full conversation with Jim. And be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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Full show transcript

Mike:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. This week we're catching up with Jim Ray from Slack because it's very conversational. He's going to walk us through what's new in Slack from major releases that you may or may not have been paying attention to on Workflow Builder, Lists, and Canvases to, of course, all of the