Connections 2025: Slack and the Future of Work for Marketers

Here to talk about Slack and the future of work for marketers, we're joined by Chief Marketing Officer Slack, Ryan Gavin. Thank you so much for being here, Ryan, and welcome to the broadcast.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

So you talk to marketing leaders and customers all the time. At this moment in time, it feels like we're on the cusp of massive change. What's top of mind for you and other leaders out there?

I mean, the massive change part is real work is probably going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last 25. And that's both exciting, it's intimidating, it's sometimes you're like, how are we going to process all this? And many of the leaders that I get to talk to are asking one of the basic questions, which is 50 to 60% of our money or capital is spent on employees, and how do we make those employees even more productive, have greater value in this kind of age of AI and agentic AI, and that is the real opportunity to give our people kind of superpowers that are going to unlock their potential. And that's a very, very exciting thing. But it's certainly not an easy thing at the same time. But it's, it's a. It's definitely a moment.

Yeah. And so running a marketing organization in the agentic area, I want to talk about challenges and then opportunities, but first let's, like, what do you see as the biggest challenges facing marketing orgs right now?

Yeah, I think it's for sure for marketing teams. I think it even goes beyond, you know, marketing. There's kind of this Gordian knot that's happening right now, which is this impossible knot of everyone's expected to do more with less. It's kind of a cliche phrase, but, like, do more with less resources. Every leader knows they need to be mobilizing on AI, but they're not sure how, they're not sure what's working. 80% of AI projects last year failed. Wow. Pressure against. How do I do this?

Right.

At the same time, things are moving faster than ever before. You had, you know, OpenAI with ChatGPT went to like 500 million users in 17 months. It took Netflix 10 years to get to 100 million users. Yeah.

Things are jaggering.

Light speed.

Yeah.

And then underpinning all that work still feels kind of broken. Like we're still spending a lot of time looking for information. 40% of time is spent looking for information. McKinsey says knowledge workers spend about 60% of their time just trying to coordinate work, the work of work. So the question is, how do we reap the benefits of this AI era? Kind of win this Gordian knot? And this is really our opportunity to kind of cut the knot and really rethink work. And what I talk to leaders every day. The opportunity is to reimagine every job, every function. Reimagine your company in an AI first world and ask yourself, how would we do this if we started today with all the AI tool sets available to us versus trying to increment from where we are? We have to rethink work and reimagine work.

Yeah, big questions. I mean, those. I feel like that's going to take a lot of thought and consideration to move through this. So how does Slack fit in to revolutionize the way we're going to work?

Yeah, this is when I get super excited about, obviously in the cmo Slack. I'm totally biased, but I'm a big Slack fan. We get to show up every day and we have this tool that actually stands for, I don't know if you know, slacks at Ackerman. Searchable log of all conversations and knowledge. Slack was kind of made for this moment. It's been in the market for 10 years. But it is this place that is bringing together human connection. It's now bringing in your digital workforce. Your Agent Force sits right in Slack, right alongside your teammates, and it's giving every employee the opportunity to have new capabilities that they've never had before. So if I'm a marketer, let's say I'm great at design, but maybe I'm not as advanced on, like, marketing analytics. Well, now you can hire an Agent Force agent to be your marketing analytics team. Or maybe I'm really creative and I can generate lots of great creative ideas, but I'm not so great at, like, lead optimization. Well, now you can hire somebody, an agent who can be on your team to do that lead optimization. Every employee just became a manager, which is really cool. And every employee just got a whole new set of capabilities that might have taken them years to learn otherwise that they could honestly get overnight. And that all happens in Slack, this kind of work operating system for the future. And that's this exciting moment that we're in.

Yeah. So touch on that a little bit more when we talk about the specific innovations within Slack that people can look forward to.

Yeah. So a couple things. We are making it easier than ever for every organization, every marketing team to build out their agents. So we have Agent Force Templates that are pre built. Templates that customers can go and add, connect to their data, connect to their marketing systems and deploy those inside of Slack. So we have things like a sales agent at Salesforce that's taking like lead routing time that used to be 20 minutes down to like 19 seconds. Yeah, it's crazy. And we have other agents that have gone through that. We've built out internally. Internally for things like enablement. How do we, you know, answer questions from our sellers? How do we answer questions from our customer support teams? Those agents, we set up one called the Agent Force Agent. We put it into some channels. In six months, it handled 18,000 requests at a 76% accuracy, meaning it resolved the question 76% of the time. As we start to scale this across like 700 different Slack channels that handle these customer inbounds, it's like a $20 million savings engineering time and productivity. Like, and you step back and you're like, how many $20 million ideas are just sitting there waiting for marketers to take advantage of? And that's kind of the opportunity with Slack right now is you can deploy a digital labor force to really start to unlock human potential and productivity, really.

Augment the capabilities of your work.

That's right. And it's not replacing people, giving them superpowers that allow them to do more and allow companies grow faster.

Exciting. All right, well, let's look ahead to the future. Like, what do you see? Where do you see Slack heading and the future of the organization?

Yeah, I think every marketing leader out there is asking them or should be asking themselves, how do I become an AI first marketer? And to do that, you need a platform that's going to allow you to bring agentic tools and capabilities into your organization. You also need to like, set your organization up to have permission to play with these tools. It's okay to acknowledge that there's still a lot of concern and trepidation and I'm not quite sure how to use these. And if you just add AI tools inside of an already broken system, you're just kind of adding more chaos. So we really do need to reimagine work. So every leader needs to start with something like Slack, where you have a command center to bring your people together to create that connection and culture and then deploy those agents that can really unlock capability. And we're seeing this across Slack. In fact, even at Salesforce, we launched a new innovation just recently called Salesforce Channels, which brings Slack right inside of Salesforce and Salesforce right inside of Slack. So when I'm having conversations. Slack, that can show up in my CRM, it can show up in my marketing tools and marketing cloud, and that is really powerful. So Salesforce and Slack have come closer than ever together. In agents are really unlocking all that potential. Yeah.

And it really became crystal clear for me when I saw agents in Slack. I'm like, okay, I get it. And I know I'm not alone in that. All right, well, thank you so much, Ryan, for joining us. If you'd like to learn more about Slack innovations for your business, just scan the code on your screen now. Or you can head to the link. S Force co slackinnovations.