How Salesforce Uses Slack Agents to Scale Internal Support | Dreamforce 2025

Hi. So like I said, my name is Kanila Khadyrov. I am on the product marketing team at Slack. I am joined by Robbie Burbeck. Do you want to say hi?

Hello everybody. Thanks for coming.

Robbie is one of our illustrious business technology leaders and we call it at Salesforce Business Technology because basically he has to hear about all of us in the business units, whinge about everything and then he has to fix it. So. So that's where he gets that special title. So I wanna say thank you. I know day two is always oh God, there's so much more to do. So I really appreciate you guys being here with us today. We're gonna get into the meat of the content. So at Salesforce we're really intent on being customer zero, AKA drink our own champagne. Try out all the things that we want our customers to adopt. Because for us it's really important to not only understand where are the pitfalls and what we can be improving in the products that we're releasing, but also why we're building the products to begin with. Because our philosophy is if we can find value and find utility in all of these tools and all of this functionality and all of these new ways of working, then we can talk about that much more eloquently with our customers and help you learn from our experience of what to do and for frankly what not to do with some of these situations. We have made sure that in our product life cycle we always leave room for that customer zero deployment so that we can learn from ourselves and put that back into the product. And actually the IT organization is now under product, right?

That's correct. Yeah. Just recently this is a fairly new change for us all, but we moved into the product organization and we've had really close connections to the Salesforce product teams in the past. There's been a lot of the work that we need, the features that we need, they show up on the roadmap. But now being part of the product organization, we're shifting way further left as part of that. It's more of a co design, co creation and really drinking our own champagne a little bit.

There we go. Which long and short of it is that you guys get to benefit from all of the weird bits that we find and smooth out and all of the rough edges.

Yeah, we find the issues way, way earlier. So they never. They don't show up for you.

Absolutely. So when Robbie's boss, Andy bought Slack, bought Slack for Salesforce before we acquired Slack, his whole idea was that this is going to be A monumental change for how we at Salesforce work. And he was right. Because 87, 90% of every employee's day is spent in Slack. And so when we introduced Agentforce last year, it was kind of a no brainer that Agentforce really does belong in Slack. Because the most important thing for us as customer zero is to meet our employees where they are and understand what their use cases and jobs to be done and needs are and make it as easy as possible for them to self serve, address that, et cetera. These are just some of the agents that we have live in Slack. This is all built on Agentforce. We actually do have a couple off Slack, but I don't want to talk about that because we don't talk about them. They're just, you know, the elephant in a different room. The point is if we think about our employees in four different categories, we've got sellers, we have folks that deal with customer support. So customer success as well as just customer success managers, we have the employee experience. What do we as Slack employees, Salesforce employees need on a day to day basis? And then operational efficiency. How do we make it easier to get a conference room set up for an on site or do customer meetings? Right. All of those things that you kind of look at as the minutiae of your day to day work. That's not the strategic center but all the stuff you have to do so you can actually work on the strategic work. We are trying to abstract all of that in into agents and make sure that there's automation for it. There's an agent to answer your question. There's data behind all of that to help you get your job done as quickly as possible through the wait, the waiting, through all of the nonsense and the tiny little annoyances.

So you can actually focus on paper cuts every day.

Yes, we try to get rid of many of those paper cuts as we can through agents. All right, today we are going to talk about manager, channel expert and employee. Because those three are kind of on a perfect spectrum of what you can do with agents from out of the box all the way to very custom. But since I didn't build these things.

Robbie, my turn to have to stand up.

You have to stand up now. I'm sorry.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so we're going to, we're not going in order of this slide, but we're going to start with our channel expert agent. This. I bet there's many of the folks in this room who are experts in your field that you have people that rely on you for information, they come to you multiple times throughout the day or come tap you on the shoulder, send you a Slack message. And I bet you get asked the same questions same time by different people all throughout your working. Throughout your working life. Wouldn't it be great if there was some automation that you could create that would help you to deflect some of those questions or, you know, expand it out? Might not be a single person as an expert, but maybe there's a team of experts that get inundated with similar types of questions all of the time.

All of which could be deflected if the people asking the questions just read the thing that says read me.

Well, getting people to read things and I know is about the hardest job we have. Um, so up until now, there's been a couple of different ways that you could go and achieve this. Using Slack templates and workflows, you could set those workflows up to answer very common repetitive questions. But it replied on somebody you know, like you couldn't. There was no natural language processing. There wasn't any nuance to the answers that you received. It was just kind of like, hey, run the workflow. It will answer this, this or that. And that was about as much as you could get all the way to the further end where you could go build a custom agent stack to answer these types of questions as well. You could go build your Slack application, you could connect it to an LLM, you could set up your own rag solution, create the data ingest pipelines, and then tune it so that it answered a set of questions based on the content that you'd ingested really well. And that works. I know this because my team built it. We spent a lot of time, we invested a lot of resources into building a solution like this and it was extremely successful across Salesforce. We rolled it out across hundreds of channels. It answered thousands of questions. It was great. But it took a team of engineers and product managers to build it out and maintain it. But now what we have with Channel Expert is a plug and play solution that anybody with a Slack instance today that's connected up to their Salesforce agent Force implementation can go and get running out of the box. It takes very little time, very little setup. And you can have a channel expert running in any channel that is connected to whatever kind of backing knowledge information you have, whether that's like a Google Drive document or a Microsoft Word document or a Canvas in Slack. Connect it into your Channel Expert and it will sit there in a channel 24 hours a day. Never takes a break answering all those questions, even when you're asleep. This is great. It's saving us a ton of time at Salesforce. We've rolled it out across I think almost 1000 channels already. Internally answering questions all the time for people. It's been a huge innovation for us.

It's a perfect example actually of what happens when our IT team is working with products so closely. Because channel expertise is what you guys get based on what Robbie's team spent months deploying to Salesforce.

Yeah. And you can just turn it on with a couple of clicks now. You don't have to go spend all the same time that we did. It was really fun building that project, but we're really happy that it's going to be in the hands of all of our customers as well. Okay. So beyond the kind of the plug and play example there, you might find that you have more complex support needs across your organization as well that require integrations into other third party solutions. Things that aren't quite as easy, that aren't going to be as great of a use case for the channel expert. Now this is where you can kind of take the jumping off point from the out of the box channel expert and then start to go and configure your own agent force experience. Install that agent into Slack and it can do all sorts of incredible things. Really, as much as your imagination and your business processes allow. There's no limit to your teams and your own creativity here. One of the places that we wanted to, we thought would be a really great internal employee use case here was to streamline all of our internal it, hr, real estate, workplace services, those types of finance requests that come in employee like common questions into a single agent that employees can go to and ask all of those questions.

I think that's a really important point. It's all of that in one agent. It's not that I as an employee need to think, okay, I have this question. I'm going to need to go to my HR agent or my recruiting agent or whatever agent. It's literally, I am an employee with a question about being an employee at Salesforce. Where do I go? And it's one single spot. So again, it's all about meeting your employees, meeting your teams where they already are, to get that extra to give them that value.

Exactly right. And you know, this might look familiar to many of you in the audience as well. These were common complaints that we heard from Salesforce employees that they didn't know where to go to find information they spent so Much, so much time switching between applications. There was a lot of manual paper cuts and tasks and things that kind of slowed them down. So our goal was to create a solution that ambitiously would save every employee at Salesforce one hour a day. That's a lot of time to try and give back to employees. That's a huge amount of productivity. We're working towards that goal. I don't think we've quite reached that summit yet, but it's still our North Star for where we're going. And that was where we created our Employee Agent. So Employee Agent is built on AgentForce. It has all of our knowledge and content and different sources of Information aggregated into 360. Got it right. You did, thank you. And beyond that as well. So you can go in there and you can ask your questions about any of those different areas. If you have an issue with your laptop or you're wondering about the benefits in the company or how, how do I book a meeting room? It will provide information about that. That's sort of table stakes. But beyond there you can also start. We've all started to integrate it with other third party systems. So at the moment we're doing that through direct API integrations with Google Calendar. In the future this will be where we start to use MCP servers to bring other agentic capabilities as part of this interface. And the great thing is it's going to be one place for employees to go. You can just go to their employee agent. They'll be able to get the information that they need. They'll be able to have it perform tasks for them. We just recently released a feature so that at the end of any. We're a Google shop internally. So any of the Google Meets that we have that are annotated and summarized by Gemini, those are now delivered to you through the Employee agent as well. So the end of the meeting, if you missed it, if you weren't able to attend, it just pops you a nice little summary of the meeting. It'll tell you all your action items and then you can ask follow up questions as well. So because it has access to the full transcript that was there, it's not just a one and done notification that you get like you might have got an email or something in the past, you can ask it follow up questions. You can. Then because you're directly integrated in Slack, you can create reminders for yourself, you can add it to a list, you can do all sorts of stuff. So it's like, it's just, it's a phenomenal Place for employees to have access to information they need. And it's all directly within Slack as well. They never have to leave. So our final demonstration for today is our manager agent. We have about I think over 10,000 managers at Salesforce.

11.

11,000, yeah. Added a couple. And that is, you know, I'm a manager myself. It's like one of the most rewarding things I get to do in my job is to help people move through their careers, help them to help them to grow. You know, sometimes you have to give difficult feedback as well. But it's all on the in the aim that they're able to move forward and learn in their careers. But it is a hard job as well. There is a lot of policy that you have to follow. There's a lot of things that we have to remember to go and do. There are different calendar events throughout the year. And so we created this manager agent for a couple of reasons. We want to be able to continue to scale out our managers across the company. We want to relieve, reduce some of that burden that's on them as well. And we really want them to be able to spend their time focused on developing their people. We found out that about 40% of managers time was spent on administrative work. That's not adding a ton of value to their people or to our company goals. And so our manager agent was developed with thought that hey, let's try and put some of that time back, give that time back to people, automate some of the repetitive tasks that they're working on so that they can spend more time focused on higher value operations. So you can see in this little demo here I can use my manager agent to prepare for one on ones with my employees. I recently, I just used this last week to go and gather feedback across the organization and all of my employees. It takes about 10 seconds to set that up. I go to the manager agent and I say hey, go request feedback on my employee. I want it from these people. And it sends off a workflow to those folks in Slack and then it gets delivered to me as well right back into the manager agent. So this isn't necessarily something that I think most companies are using Agent Force at the moment. We have obviously core integrations with agentforce, with our sales cloud, our service cloud, with our lead nurturing areas. But for all of the groups that are interested in using it for internal employee support, employee productivity, I said earlier there is really no limit to what you can use this platform for. You can apply to a whole host of creative and really interesting Employee productivity solutions as well. Really proud of this work. I think there's so much more for us to go and do in the future and we're going to keep pushing that forward.

Yeah. And the reason I think that we're so bullish on building these custom agents and doing all of this in sleep is because Slack is really where you get the context. Right. The reason Robbie can ask for feedback from on his employees is one, the agent has access to all of the unstructured data. All the conversations happening in Slack with that employee, maybe about that employee, and everything that you have access to, the agent has access to. So you can say, all right, give me a summary of the last week in Jane's life and where has she, you know, been spending her time? You can ask for feedback and it's easy for people to do, to actually do the feedback because you're not asking them to go into a different system, go fill something else out somewhere else. Right. Like you're catching them where they already are and they're going to engage with you because of that. Instead of, oh, okay, I'm going to have take time to go log in somewhere else, write down notes in a blah, blah, blah, like versus, hey, the manager agent asked me for feedback about Jane for Robbie and I can just answer with a blurb in natural language and it's no mental or actual context switching required. And the agent then has the insight into the rest of. That's why we really do. Like I said, we're really bullish about deploying all of our agents in Slack as much as possible because again, we're meeting people where they are and we're giving the agents the context of that unstructured data.

That's exactly right. Okay.

Is this me?

This is you?

Oh, this is me. Sorry. You can tell that we practice this, but honestly, Robbie and I have been doing this session for three years in various iterations because we keep iterating how we use Slack and what we're deploying in it. What we've seen, you know, we started with here's a help IT channel. Great. It's just one single point where everyone can funnel in with their questions. Then we added a workflow to it, then we added a bot to it, then we turned that into an agent. The thing with Slack is that as our business units needs change, we evolve our, our use of Slack to fit that need. We are constantly iterating, we are constantly improving, we are constantly making sure that what we have in Slack actually is appropriate for what the different lines of business want to do. And every single organization at Salesforce has seen improvements in how they work and what their main priorities are because of the tailoring of Slack to their specific needs. So, for example, we use Slack in the marketing team to put on Dreamforce and that's, there's a channel expert in the staffing channel for everyone who, you know, doesn't know where to go for their demo shift. There's, here's how you get travel approvals. There's, here's how we engage with our vendors. All of that is done in Slack because the team has enabled us as marketers to use the agents, use the workflows, use the Slack platform to really get what we need done. All right, if you want to dive deeper into this and you head upstairs, there's the reimagine work learning lab where we are happy to talk through all the different ways the different departments can use Slack and Salesforce. If you haven't checked out Salesforce channels and you have a Slack instance and you have a Salesforce instance, you should do that. It's free if you, it's how you connect the two really, really nicely and easily. Or you can hang out at the campground. There is a Salesforce on Salesforce area, there's a Slack area. Lots more places to get one on one demos, get insight and all of that. So with that, thank you so much for attending. Really appreciate it, guys.