Slack CEO: ‘AI is going to be a part of our entire fabric’

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Just over six months since she officially stepped into her role, Slack CEO Lidiane Jones has made her first big move to integrate Slack and Salesforce sforce more closely together.

This week, Salesforce debuted a custom version of Slack geared at sales teams called “Slack Sales Elevate,” which allows users to access Salesforce’s signature Sales Cloud tool from within Slack and is designed to reduce friction and boost productivity.

Slack Sales Elevate also taps into AI to help salespeople automate workflows and handle tasks like generating presentation templates. The company sees the possibility of eventually extending such tailored versions of Slack for Salesforce's other clouds as well, such as marketing, for example.

We caught up with Jones to chat more about the product, her thoughts on AI, and more. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What’s the strategic objective behind a product like Slack Sales Elevate?

First, it’s a significant milestone in showcasing the value of an integrated experience — it's our first natively built, Salesforce-based experience in Slack. The focus is very much on how we combine Slack’s collaboration-first productivity platform with the customer-360 view from Salesforce to really bring higher productivity to life for sales professionals. It’s the first proof point in showing how Slack really is the front door of Salesforce experiences for users.

Do you have plans to extend it beyond the sales function?

We have already been working to bring an integrated Salesforce and Slack experience for service agents so all the key stakeholders on our team trying to solve an issue can do it more effectively. And we're seeing really great results from that. So we will create this tailored, native experience across all the users that we serve at Salesforce — there's a ton of value in that.

Slack represented just 5% of Salesforce’s annual sales. Does it also help Slack become a bigger revenue-driver for Salesforce?

Yes, of course. But, the whole theory behind the acquisition was that bringing Slack and Salesforce together is a massive accelerant across the board. If we build a set of experiences that will accelerate the adoption of our technology for our customers, then it will result in business growth in the aggregate.

How big a priority is AI?

The set of breakthroughs that we expect to have with AI is pretty large. AI is going to be part of our entire fabric of product development. Generative AI feels very natural in the way of working on Slack, and we can really bring these capabilities to accelerate and leapfrog the way that people do work. AI will be a significant productivity assistant to all of our users.

What could that look like?

We announced SlackGPT a few months ago, and we’ve seen an explosion of generative AI experiences since then. People really want to embed these platform capabilities in the custom applications that they're building — since March, we’ve seen over 4,200 custom applications already being built. We’ll be launching a lot of native experiences that will just feel natural in the flow of work on Slack in recent months, like writing assistant insights and ways of catching up with your work and channels.

This Week in AI

Here’s where we bring you up-to-speed with the latest advancements from the world of AI.

• Voice assistants across the board seem to be getting AI makeovers. Amazon and Google are using artificial intelligence to make changes to Alexa and Assistant, respectively. Google and Amazon both began scaling back their traditional digital assistant work last year, as Axios reported.
• While Microsoft (LinkedIn's parent company), Google, Meta and Amazon have been far more vocal about their AI efforts, Apple's AI plans not only appear slow-going, but are also cloaked in secrecy. But don’t count it out: Apple is internally testing large language models and chatbots, though it has no "clear strategy" yet for its release, reports Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources .
• ChatGPT maker OpenAI recently filed a trademark application for “GPT-5” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on July 18. This next iteration of ChatGPT, as AI law expert Barry Scannell notes , could entail speech with questions and answers.
• Meta is preparing to launch a series of AI-powered chatbots with "different personalities" that can have "humanlike discussions" as soon as September, the Financial Times reports , citing unnamed sources. The chatbots, known as “personas,” will provide a new search function and offer recommendations. Some may even take the form of characters such as Abraham Lincoln.
• 谷歌 is experimenting with the use of AI to auto-generate YouTube video summaries , designed to help viewers decide whether a particular video is worth their time.

TechTok?

Catch up on the tech headlines you may have missed this week and what our members are saying about them on LinkedIn.

• Pinterest 's latest earnings suggest that it could have strong potential as a commerce player. The company posted better-than-expected revenue of $708 million in the second quarter, up from $666 million a year earlier. The reason for the turnaround, according to CEO Bill Ready, is that "shopping is working on Pinterest" and helping spur engagement.
• Uber’s earnings were yet another surprise , as the ride-hailing app announced its first-ever operating profit of $326 million in the second quarter. The company's net income soundly beat expectations, coming in at $394 million, versus a projected $49.2 million loss. Driving the numbers: record ridership, with number of trips booked jumping 26% in the quarter. Relatedly, check out these lessons for startups from Uber’s path to profitability, from Mistral partner Pablo Srugo .
• 亚马逊 plans to double the number of its same-day delivery warehouses in “coming years.” While Amazon vies to stay ahead of rivals in the $1.4 trillion e-commerce market, the pace of online sales has slowed since the pandemic, pushing the company to become more dependent on its cloud-computing unit for profit.

Movers and Shakers

Here’s keeping tabs on key executives on the move and other big pivots in the tech industry. Please send me personnel moves within emerging tech.

• Dell Technologies ’s co-chief operating officer Chuck Whitten is resigning next month amid the company’s historic slowdown in computer demand.?
• Luke Kallis , Snap Inc. ’s Americas VP of sales, is leaving the company after eight years.?
• Galvanize Climate Solutions has hired 苹果 's VP of ESG, Lisa Jackson, as a strategic advisor.?
• New York-based VC firm Primary X has nabbed Redpoint Ventures’ Emily Man as its first fintech-focused partner.
• Felicis Ventures has promoted Teresa Chan to CFO and co-COO, Dasha Maggio to co-COO and Katie Riester to managing director and GP of its fund-of-funds program.?

ICYMI

Here are other top stories of the week from beyond LinkedIn in the broader world of tech.?

• Check out this Time story about how this Indian startup wants to make sure the workers making AI happen also see its rewards.
• The Information’s Stephanie Palazzolo dives into how the International Conference on Machine Learning was a muted affair this year , where companies were more tight-lipped about their work compared to previous years.

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