The New BRAIN Of the Enterprise | Ryan Gavin

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_01] I'm old enough to remember typewriters in carbon paper. At what point do we hit sort of as fast as we can work? How is this going to affect not only the enterprise, but the economy?

[00:00:12] [SPEAKER_00] For many years, like the narrative is, well, you know, AI is not going to replace jobs. I'll be honest, I've said that line many times. This is probably the first time I believe it. They have now more agents deployed in their organization than they have employees. They have more digital workforce than they have human workforce, which is incredible.

[00:00:26] [SPEAKER_01] Where do you see this going as these agents become more capable? Do you imagine Slack as becoming kind of the brains of the enterprise and employees are talking to the brain and the brain is then going out and executing actions on the part of it?

[00:00:47] [SPEAKER_01] So, so yeah, give me the, uh, uh, your background, how you got to Slack and, and what, uh, uh, Slack as the agentic OS operating system means.

[00:01:03] [SPEAKER_00] Sure. Well, one, thanks for, thanks for having me. It's great to, it's great to be here. I, um, so Ryan Gavin, I'm the chief marketing officer for Slack, really just middle management overhead is really what that means. Uh, I've been here for about two years.

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_00] Uh, good fortune to be able to work around kind of machine learning and artificial intelligence for many, many years. I was at Microsoft for 20 years in which time I got to work on search business, which obviously was heavy into machine learning. At times I helped to build out the business and marketing practice at AWS, um, uh, on the machine learning and AI side. This is now five, six years ago.

[00:01:36] [SPEAKER_00] I worked at a startup that was looking to disrupt the supply chain and trucking industry, uh, using machine learning practices. And so I was fortunate to kind of come over to Slack, uh, two years ago, um, to really kind of, uh, be part of this kind of incredible transformation that's happening right now, which is, uh, this kind of new moment for Slack, which is almost like what it was built for, uh, which is really to become this kind of, we call it kind of an operating system for work, uh, which is bringing together a platform that has kind of not only all your people and your teams connected,

[00:02:06] [SPEAKER_00] but now connecting all your data, your structured data, your unstructured data and connecting all your workflows, uh, all the enterprise applications that you're using, all the systems of work that you bring, um, and bringing all those together now, even with agents. Um, and how do you bring all that into one, one kind of workflow for organizations and for people, uh, which are some of our most important assets and how do you have them interact with it through one of the most powerful tools that we have, which is conversation.

[00:02:32] [SPEAKER_00] I don't want to have to learn another tool or a tab. I just want to be able to talk and have it do what it wants, what I want it to do. And that's, that's this moment that, um, organizations are seeing right now with kind of this transformation, this AI period. So happy to talk more about it, but that's the, the short overview.

[00:02:46] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Well, we're all familiar with Slack bot. I mean, anyone who's used Slack, uh, knows Slack bot. Uh, but this.

[00:02:55] [SPEAKER_00] You have the latest Slack bot. Can I just interrupt you? Like, and the Slack bot kind of has existed since the beginning of like notifications, but do you have the, like the new,

[00:03:01] [SPEAKER_01] do you have, do we have you on that? I don't think I do, but that's what I was going to ask. Is that, is this now a Slack bot that will actually do things rather than remind you of things?

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. That's okay. So at the end of this call, we're going to get you, we're going to get you hooked up, uh, on the latest thing. So we'll take that as an action. Um, so think about Slack bot. Yeah. Slack bot has this rich history of Slack. It's kind of this playful character that, you know, gave you notifications and things like that, but, um, wasn't anything like a personal agent for work or a new system. What Slack bot is now, honestly, is like the new interface for work. It's incredible. Um, and it is. The closest thing I've seen to a chat GBT moment inside of the context of the enterprise.

[00:03:43] [SPEAKER_00] Like it is the chat GBT moment for work. And the reason why is because, you know, while AI tools are unbelievably powerful and we all experience them in our consumer lives and we're, you know, using these LLMs to do just unbelievable things. And they understand the internet and they understand all the context of that, but they don't understand is your business context. And they don't understand you in the context of your work.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_00] And that is the Holy grail for getting agentic AI is to be able to truly unlock employee productivity. It needs to know me. It needs to know my work. It needs to know my business. It needs to know my data. And it needs to have access to that in the same way that I would have access to it, which means it's permissioned. It's controlled. It has governance over it, et cetera, et cetera. And that's exactly what Slack bot is now. Like the kids would say Slack bot has a glow up. Um, like Slack bot has had a complete glow up, uh, in the world of Slack.

[00:04:32] [SPEAKER_00] And it is now this personal agent for work that is allowing me to do anything that you can really imagine as a personal agent. So I can, you know, the basic tasks have a scheduled meeting sister easy. Uh, the more advanced tasks, something I did at the beginning of this week, uh, Slack bot. Uh, what are the areas that my team needs my focus right now? What are the five, uh, areas that I'm probably getting behind in my priorities?

[00:04:56] [SPEAKER_00] Give me a briefing overview for any customers I'm meeting with this week and be sure to update these four opportunities from these customers I met with last week, uh, long X, Y, and Z. That's a very common prompt that I will put in the Slack bot. And what's amazing about it is I'm not telling it which customers I met with. I'm not telling it who my team members are. I'm not telling it what my priorities are. It knows that because all that context lives in the unstructured conversations of Slack.

[00:05:22] [SPEAKER_00] It lives in the unstructured data that's, you know, supported by Salesforce and it can pull and access all of that and bring together an incredibly powerful response that sets me on my way that otherwise would have taken maybe a half dozen meeting. Maybe I would have to call a staff meeting. Maybe I would have had to send six or seven slacks or read maybe two dozen channels and all that just happens like that. It's transformative. We, um, we have a customer, Mr. Beast, um, who Mr. Beast Industries, one of the world's largest content creators is incredible.

[00:05:49] [SPEAKER_00] They have their employees are all up on Slack bot. Now, one of them saying they're saying like 20 hours a week of their time is being saved. Now 20 hours a week. It's like, okay, that's interesting. You do the math. That's six months. That's six months of time given back to go focus on, you know, creating their next major project or whatever it is. Um, it's like, you know, there's a lot of buzzwords that are thrown around this stage, but it's transformational. It is like Chachaputee moment for sure.

[00:06:13] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Well, and I'm, I'm excited to hear about it because I, I, I've been waiting for, uh, these agentic systems to be integrated into products. I use a product called Descript for, uh, for video editing and things like that. And they now have an agentic assistant, uh, that's incredible.

[00:06:36] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, the, the one thing, uh, in your example there, uh, you, you were telling me what you would tell Slack, but you still have to type it. Or is there a convert, a voice interface where you can just talk to it?

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, we're, we're innovating really, really fast. In fact, we just, just recently launched. Now I can just talk to Slack. So I can just grab them. I'm going to my car after the end of the day, I can say, Hey Slack bot, do all those things I just said. I can speak to it. Um, we have new, new capabilities that allow Slack bot to be your meeting assistant. So I can ask Slack bot to be participant in a meeting, capturing notes, following up in actions. What, and what makes it really differentiated again is unlike a lot of other meeting assistants out there on the market that can transcribe notes and do all those wonderful things that we've seen.

[00:07:23] [SPEAKER_00] What Slack bot can do is because it knows your business and it has access to the systems of record of your business. When you are asking for an action in a meeting, Slack bot can actually go take that action. So go update that opportunity record or go, uh, schedule that meeting or go get this set up with, you know, inside of this system. Slack bot can actually take the actions from the meeting. So when you're finished with a meeting, actions are already being done and taken for because you have a system that knows and has access to your, your organization's system.

[00:07:50] [SPEAKER_00] And that's, that's the powerful unlock that differentiates a lot of the, these features, which we're all kind of blending together. You see a lot of AI capabilities. They all kind of like, yeah, they all do roughly the same thing. Um, this is the, what, what makes it different.

[00:08:01] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And, and what's amazing for you guys is you're already installed in, uh, in a huge, uh, section of the enterprise. I mean, I don't know what the metrics are. Uh, what are the metrics? How many enterprises in, in, uh, I'll tell you, we, there's certain data we don't share.

[00:08:25] [SPEAKER_00] Um, but the, the things that we share, there's like, you know, 6 billion messages being sent in Slack a week. Um, and you know, what's interesting to that and why I'm excited to get you stood up with Slack bot is when you think about those messages, you know, I'll tell you just a, a small personal anecdote. You know, those messages represent the, the long-term memory of your company, but historically that has been largely inaccessible. Right. You have the conversation goes away.

[00:08:54] [SPEAKER_00] Like if I ask you, Hey, what was the conversation you had in Slack four weeks ago with so-and-so you're like, uh, yeah, I don't know. Like, what was the context you gave? Well, you don't know. It just kind of goes off into the ether. Well, that's unbelievably valuable context. When I joined Slack two years ago, you know, it was fortunate enough to have people who were assigned to help me onboard or help me get up to speed in the company. And here's a document you can read and here's people you should meet all that kind of lovely stuff.

[00:09:19] [SPEAKER_00] Number one onboarding tool was our new AI search capability inside of Slack, which allowed me to access that long-term memory. And I could go and just sign Slack and I could ask all the quiet questions like, you know, what's a V2 mom, which is our tool that we use here at Salesforce or establishing those. Or like, you know, someone would put an acronym in like, I have no idea what that is. Or, Hey, this conversation has been happening in this channel. I have no idea what they're talking about. Can you explain this to me? Like I'm a layman and, and I could go in there. It was my number one onboarding tool.

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_00] I would go up to it like 30, 40 times a day. And it was giving me this rich context of the company, the history of the accounts. I'd go to a new customer meeting. I could go through and see the journey that customers been on. Not because it was all in the CRM system. The CRM system had how big the opportunity was and what their phone number was. But what was really valuable is looking at the, you know, 400 thread conversation when they were really trying to fight to get this deal done and what was happening and what were the dynamics and all that. All that happens in conversation. And now that's unlocked.

[00:10:18] [SPEAKER_00] And that is becoming unbelievably powerful. And those are the tools that really start to go through. And that's why Slack bot's kind of having this moment because when you unlock that and you couple it with the structured data, you can take workflows that, you know, previously might have been days to weeks and you can take them down to literally seconds.

[00:10:37] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. This, you're talking about CRMs. Does this integrate with any CRM system or, or is it with specific systems?

[00:10:48] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, no. So that's, again, beautiful part of Slack and, and, you know, why we were talking about as an operating system for work is it's an open platform. So, you know, whether you're a company like Vercel or Perplexity, you know, which recently released their computer, you know, agent on Slack. You know, Slack is one of the fastest growing platforms right now for agents and people building agents and they're deploying them in Slack. And the reason why they're doing so is because that's where the workers are. That's where people are working.

[00:11:17] [SPEAKER_00] So instead of asking employees to go to yet another tool or to learn yet another thing, bring it into the flow of work. And that same thing is for CRM. We have native CRM built right inside of Slack, which allows small businesses to go through and get started with customer management, deal opportunities, et cetera, and allows them to seamlessly upgrade to Salesforce as they start to grow and scale. But it's all done through conversation. And that same capability is now extended out to third parties.

[00:11:41] [SPEAKER_00] So anyone who wants to have Slackbot, for instance, talk to their agent that may be wired back to a system of record like a CRM. Slackbot can now is now an MCP client. So any MCP server can call Slackbot. Slackbot can talk to it. And so you can use Slackbot as that interface for your system of record, whether it be a CRM or an HR system, DocuSign, a Notion, whatever it is. And that's the real transformation. You know, people talk about like the Saspocalypse and Sass is dead and whatnot.

[00:12:12] [SPEAKER_00] It's not right. The right way to think about it is like bad UI is dead. Like bad tabs and browsers and me having to go figure out how to work with your thing, that's dead. And what it's being replaced for is a conversation the way I want to have it with an agent like Slackbot that can now be orchestrated across all these systems of record and increasingly all the other agents in your organization. You know, I spoke to a customer just last week. It's incredible.

[00:12:42] [SPEAKER_00] They have now more agents deployed in their organization than they have employees. Wow. Just let that sit in. Like they have more digital workforce than they have human workforce, which is incredible. But there's a secondary problem that comes from that, which is, you know, very familiar if you've been around enterprise software for the last several decades, which is now like, well, how do all these employees know which agent to go to for what task and what skills they have? And how do I find them? And et cetera. Well, that's where orchestration comes in, this idea of like a super agent.

[00:13:10] [SPEAKER_00] And Slackbot can, being this MCP client, can now know all those other skills of all those other agents and can invoke the right agent and prompt them on your behalf. So we have an incredible sales agent here at Salesforce that we use that really knows and understands our customers, et cetera, and helps our sellers sell. I don't use it, but Slackbot does. When I ask it questions, it goes and queries the sales agent, gets that special expertise that was built by AgentForce, and then brings it back to me. I never have to learn and find out where it is or how to manage it, et cetera.

[00:13:40] [SPEAKER_00] That orchestration becomes a key component to kind of unlocking the gains of this kind of agent proliferation era, which we're about to be in, or we probably are in right now.

[00:13:50] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. I've got to ask the company with more agents and employees, what industry is that? And are they a young company? Because there are these agent native companies that are springing up to challenge legacy enterprises and variants.

[00:14:08] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, they're a large and growing AI company. You've heard of them for sure. I'm not going to say their name because I didn't ask about this specific stat that they gave me to share publicly. But you've heard of them. They're on the bigger side versus the smaller side, just to kind of put it that way. Yeah.

[00:14:25] [SPEAKER_00] But you're right in that there are these small startups that can go through and can act like very, very large companies because they are understanding the leverage of having something like Slack as this operating system, the system of engagement. And then you're bringing in all your agents and having a single human who can orchestrate work. That pattern is very powerful. It's never been a more exciting time to be a startup, no doubt about it. Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:14:51] [SPEAKER_00] And I think it's going to be a challenge for many enterprises to say, can you transform at a rate? Can you transform how your teams work at a rate that's going to keep clip with those startups that really have very little barriers right now? Because, you know, they don't have all the historical governance and all the historical software stacks to deal with. They all don't have the data policy privacies that they're struggling through. And that'll be the interesting question for these large organizations.

[00:15:16] [SPEAKER_00] And when I spend time with customers, whether it be like sitting down with Engine or Remarkable or any number of slalom, et cetera, I don't, as a chief marketing officer, I'm not really selling Slack really at all. I'm almost exclusively just talking about transformation of your employees and how do you transform what your employees are able to do and to get the productivity levels that they're going to be required. Because most people aren't adding people, but they need to add impact per person.

[00:15:44] [SPEAKER_00] And how do you multiply the impact per person by a multiple? Two, three, four, five X. That's the question. And that's the transformation that's kind of happening right now.

[00:15:55] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And so Slack is acting as an orchestrator. The actual agents, are they coming from Agent Force?

[00:16:06] [SPEAKER_00] The answer is both. Salesforce, as you know, is Salesforce's platform for building out these highly specialized agents that can be customer-facing. It can also be employee-facing. And these agents can be tuned, trained, managed. You can have deterministic controls over them. You can go through and monitor their performance and tune it over time. These are kind of robust agents that are doing a job. And you think about these specialized skill sets, like that sales agent example that I was telling you about. They are trained against that, and they can work with your team.

[00:16:36] [SPEAKER_00] Now, there are also other agents from other companies that are being built out and deployed, et cetera. Now, what you want is a place for all those things to come together. So whether it's Agent Force agents that are showing up inside of Slack, which we have, as well as third-party agents, you know, whether it be coming from OpenAI or Anthropic, or I mentioned Perplexity. And the computer agent that they recently just deployed in Slack for Cell is another great company that deploys incredible agents inside of Slack. There's literally Slack is one of the fastest-growing platforms right now on the planet for agent deployment.

[00:17:05] [SPEAKER_00] All those things can come inside of Live in Slack. And because we're an open platform, things like Slack bot can work equally well with all of them. And so that is really incredibly important for these enterprises as they go through and they think about, you know, obviously they're going to have a rich stack of enterprise software that they're looking to transform. And how do you bring all the elements into it? Every enterprise worth its salt is building, you know, an agentic layer at some point, and they're adding agents inside of all these things.

[00:17:33] [SPEAKER_00] You were even talking about your video editing tool. The, you know, the question is, can you bring all that together in a thoughtful way that doesn't just multiply the problems that we had in the past, which is, hey, Mr. or Mrs. Employee, here are your, you know, 1,000 enterprise applications. Good luck figuring out how to use them. And, you know, that's required to get your job done, even though it's really not helping you get your job done.

[00:17:55] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Yeah. And, um, the, uh, you mentioned, uh, uh, perplexity's, uh, computer, uh, agentic system. Um, if, if, I mean, for example, I'm, I'm using open claw. Sure. Yeah. Uh, although I'm about to try, uh, perplexity's computer, which I, from what I hear is, is similar, if not the same.

[00:18:21] [SPEAKER_01] Um, can you connect to things like open claw or, or are you restricted to sort of approved, uh, uh, or is that up to the enterprise to manage?

[00:18:36] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. So there's, there's two things. We have a, we have a marketplace that has all the governance that you'd expect of a marketplace. So, you know, we, we take very seriously applications that are going to be deployed in Slack that they have, you know, security, privacy policies, you know, respect PII, et cetera. So we have, we have a, um, uh, a governed marketplace. So if you want to deploy an application inside of Slack, that's available to, you know, third parties, it goes to the marketplace, just the same way you would, you know, an application published in the Android store, the, uh, Apple store.

[00:19:06] [SPEAKER_00] The, the, uh, other side of that is in custom applications, which can be built inside of Slack. So an enterprise can go through and build and many, many, many do. We have over a hundred thousand AI applications that were built in Slack over this last year and a half. Um, these are custom applications that organizations can go build and deploy and they stay inside of their organization. Those, and those can be built and those don't have to go through our marketplace. So, and any organization can build on our API sets to go and build with our customer applications or then third parties.

[00:19:34] [SPEAKER_00] If you're like a perplexity would go through our marketplace and then they can offer that application out to the, the totality of Slack users out there. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the, one of the reasons why, just to kind of give you the, and to that, one of the reasons why the, uh, explosion of these applications in Slack has been so pronounced recently is we've made it very, uh, simple, safe, and secure for organizations to tap into the kind of this goal that I was talking about earlier, these unstructured conversations.

[00:20:02] [SPEAKER_00] So we have a real time search API, we have an MCP server that allows you in a safe, secure way while respecting all the permissions I have. The organization has to tap into that as unstructured conversational data and bring that in. And that enriches these applications, uh, greatly. And so by doing so, all of these organizations can not only just bring their application functionality in the sack, they can then couple it with the conversational data inside of Slack. And you can really start to unlock some, some pretty powerful scenarios.

[00:20:29] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And that conversational data, um, if you're, if you're adopting, uh, the, the, the new Slack bot, uh, does it have access to, uh, conversational data that existed before, uh, the new Slack bot was integrated? I mean, yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:51] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. So, so, you know, uh, the, the beauty of the cloud, all that data. Is there stored, it's your data as a customer, it's your, you know, permission data, you, you govern how long you keep your data, et cetera. So it's obviously predicated on the fact that the customer would, would have, have that data, but if they have, then Slack bot just honors the permissions that I have. So in the same way that, uh, I have a permissions to see public channels, I have permissions to see the private channels I've been part of.

[00:21:16] [SPEAKER_00] I have permissions obviously to see the direct messages or, um, you know, MPDMs as we call them, multi-person direct messages. Um, Slack bot inherits those permissions, respects those permissions, and then can go through into the way back machine and can go and see all that context. So the reason, um, I was, you know, talking earlier about looking at, um, you know, presentations, maybe even from the founder of, of Slack, Stuart Butterfield, you know, 10 years ago and inquiring and looking at things that he might've done originally for customers.

[00:21:45] [SPEAKER_00] That was all shared in a public channel. And I get to see that now as a, an employee. That's incredible. Um, so yes is the answer. So you turn on Slack bot, it has access to that rich history, uh, uh, for your organization.

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Where do you think this is going? I mean, uh, you, you've got an open ecosystem and you've got partners, uh, you mentioned perplexity, open AI, Anthropic, uh, Google, uh, Microsoft, you know. Microsoft. Yeah. So is this, uh, yeah, where do you see this going as these agents become more capable?

[00:22:27] [SPEAKER_01] Uh, it is, is, I mean, do you imagine, uh, Slack as becoming, I mean, you, you're calling it the, uh, operating system for, for the workforce.

[00:22:39] [SPEAKER_01] You see it as, uh, becoming kind of the brains of the enterprise and employees are talking to the, to the brain and, and the brain as in going out and executing actions on, on the part.

[00:22:57] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, the, the reason I'm, I'm asking is I've talked to so many companies that are building that orchestration layer or, or building agent building layers, uh, and the MPC or MCP, uh, you know, connective tissue.

[00:23:18] [SPEAKER_01] You, uh, and you, because you have this installed base, uh, you have the advantage of doing that for everybody. And then all the user has to do is talk, talk to Slack.

[00:23:35] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I, let me give you maybe, um, let me give you maybe a little bit longer answer to your question, but like, maybe hopefully I'll come all the way back around to it. It's start more complex and, and hopefully end a little bit more simply the, you know, if you look at kind of the modern enterprise stack and, you know, certainly what, you know, Salesforce and kind of our agent force 360 platform is envisioning is, you know, there are, you know, a growing amounts of systems of intelligence, right?

[00:24:00] [SPEAKER_00] These LLM providers are providing just intelligence and access to intelligence at unprecedented level. It's incredible. But the first thing you need to do is you need to like access that intelligence and harmonize it through your data and like your data layer of your metadata. And bringing together all your various data systems. And we have a product called data 360 that really helps you harmonize and understand and bring all that data together to make it actionable. Then obviously every enterprise has kind of their systems of work.

[00:24:27] [SPEAKER_00] What are the, the applications where people are working in Salesforce's case? We have obviously sales service, you know, ITSM commerce, et cetera. Those that that's those systems work applications. Those are the, the units of function of, of, of effort that's happening across each of those functions in the line of business, et cetera. And are incredibly empowered, incredibly powerful. And then as you talked about, everyone's kind of now has their system of agency.

[00:24:52] [SPEAKER_00] We have agent force as our, as our air, which is the platform for building kind of agentic capabilities on top of those three foundations. You know, all those three things are incredibly important and need to come together. And now when you, when you talk to the employee level, which, you know, I would argue is one of the most important growth drivers in this AI era. And I can talk about that more and why that is.

[00:25:13] [SPEAKER_00] But when you talk about employee productivity and team productivity, what's required to get the benefits from the intelligence, harmonized data, all these systems of work, all these applications that your enterprise relies on. And now you're agentic platform. Well, you need ideally one conversational interface, one place to go that brings together both the humans and the agents, as well as the data and the workflows that connects to all the various applications that you go through.

[00:25:42] [SPEAKER_00] And doesn't make me think, doesn't make me learn a new way of working. Doesn't make me have to go through and get trained on anything. It just works. Like I should be able to talk to work day is easy. I'm talking to you. I should be able to talk to open AI is easy. I'm talking to you. I should be able to talk to my CRM is easy. I'm talking to you. And I shouldn't have to go through a training or I shouldn't have to ask my employees to do something different.

[00:26:04] [SPEAKER_00] And in the future where, you know, employees are interacting with agents as frequently, if not more frequently than they're interacting with humans. The paradigm shift needs to be, well, what was the platform that allowed for human collaboration and team collaboration that really transformed the world? Like Slack was fortunately, you know, a huge part of that. The same rules apply with agents. It's just a broader workforce.

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_00] Like I should just be able to at mention an agent like I mentioned a human and bring them in and talk to them about the problem I'm working on and have them brainstorm and have them work on something and then come back and see the progress they've made. And then I should be able to invite Craig into that conversation. Like, Craig, I'll look at this. This is really interesting. We should work on this together. That human interaction in a very like pleasant, simple, non-intuitive, don't make me think interface is unbelievably important. And that's what we call is the system of engagement. Like how does every enterprise to tap these layers of the agentic enterprise?

[00:26:56] [SPEAKER_00] How do you have a system of engagement for your employees that hits those attributes? And it turns out those attributes are easy to talk about. They sound intuitive. It's kind of easy to nod your head and be like, yeah, I want that. It's actually really difficult to build and to build well. And I think that's our unique advantage with Slack right now.

[00:27:11] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And does this mean that individual users will be able to spin up agents or is Slack orchestrating existing agents?

[00:27:24] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. So both is kind of in the fullness of time. So right now Slack bot has this capability. So people, we call it kind of reusable skills. I, you know, if you're an X, Y, and Z role inside of an enterprise, you know, let's maybe talk about like Mr. Beast Industries, the content creator. You have an individual or customer. They love Slack bot.

[00:27:45] [SPEAKER_00] They have people who are, you know, writing scripts all day long and writing scripts for these latest content, you know, videos that they're going to be creating that are going to, you know, get 40 million views in 30 seconds. It's like it's incredible. So instead of having a kind of a process for writing skills, what they can do is give Slack bot a reusable skill that says, hey, here's how I write scripts. Here's the outputs I want for my scripts. Here's all the detail I want to be included. Here's the formats I want them in.

[00:28:15] [SPEAKER_00] And then I'm just going to go into Slack one side. It's time for me to write a new script. Here's the subject matter. Here's the, here's the core, you know, five pieces of details you need to go. Here's the hook that I want you to use. Go use that skill and go through it. So in that case, they've built like a skill or mini agent that Slack bot is accessing and going through and generating that. At the same time, Slack bot is an MCP client.

[00:28:37] [SPEAKER_00] So I can connect Slack bot with all these MC, anything that can talk to MCP and Slack bot can orchestrate across all the agents inside of my enterprise as well. So, you know, Asian force as well as all the third party agents. So employees are going to be building out their own little agent armies, you know, using things like reasonable skills and Slack bot. They're going to be having access to third party agents. They're going to have access to agents that their enterprise has deployed that they don't even really need to learn about.

[00:29:03] [SPEAKER_00] They just need to make sure those organizations have connected those to Slack bot so Slack bot knows about it and can call in the right agent at the right time.

[00:29:08] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like Slack bot's evolving into a sort of chat GPT for the enterprise. Can you talk about how it's going to help make strategic decisions, for example, or direct work?

[00:29:34] [SPEAKER_00] And yeah, I mean, it is this chat GPT moment for the enterprise for sure. And, you know, you know, I don't know if I mentioned this already, but, you know, we were talking in turn side of is talking about Mr. Beast. They have employees that are saving like 90 minutes a day. We see employees inside of Salesforce that are saving like, you know, 20 hours. It's incredible. Like we're talking months and months time back. So that, that moment is very, very real.

[00:30:03] [SPEAKER_00] The, what enables that moment to like really come to fruition and why employees are so over the moon about the new capability is, you know, a system is only as smart as the data it's trained on. And we've known this for forever. This is not new news in any way, shape or form. Data has historically been limited to structured data. So as we talked about before, now you've got structured data coupled with unstructured data and that intersection becomes very powerful.

[00:30:31] [SPEAKER_00] And then the third Venn diagram that sits on top of that is that insight can then be taken into action. So I'm not just asking a question, getting an answer. That's wonderful. What's, what's far better is I'm asking a question, getting an answer, and then directing an action for that, for Slack bot to go take. And because it can speak to those various systems and speak to those various systems of record, it can go then take those actions on my behalf. So now we've moved from, Hey, I've got, you know, a boost in my personal productivity.

[00:30:55] [SPEAKER_00] Maybe it used to take me four hours to prepare for a customer meeting and maybe now it takes me 15, 20 minutes. But even better yet, I can go through and direct the next set of actions that Slack bot can take based off that preparation. And Slack bot can go work with other agents and work with systems of record to go take those actions. And now I'm orchestrating work. So like what, what's different there is move from a functional doer of work to an orchestrator of work and employees increasingly become more generalists in nature, less specialized in nature.

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_00] And that allows them to play in far greater areas. You know, when every employee kind of be a generalist, like ambition and creativity are the only limiters of like the human potential and team productivity.

[00:31:38] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And, and, and, uh, you know, you talk about, uh, saving 20 hours a week. That's traditionally, uh, half the week, right? The work.

[00:31:49] [SPEAKER_00] It's six months a year. Yeah. And it's like people just take vacation for six months a year. It's, you actually get to go do stuff. That is actually.

[00:31:59] [SPEAKER_01] That's my question because, uh, I have spoken to people about the, the time savings. And how do you ensure that, that time savings accrues, uh, to enterprise productivity and not just longer lunch hours or, uh, you know, more time at the gym.

[00:32:20] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I listen, I'll give you two answers on this one and I'll just, I'll, I'll, I'll cop to, I'll cop to my own bad history in this area. I, you know, for years and we've been around, we've had this conversation, you know, this idea of like machine learning and AI and improving human efficiency and whatnot. And for, for many years, like the narrative is all, well, you know, it is not going to replace jobs. It's going to allow humans to focus on higher output, things that make us uniquely human and creativity and all these wonderful things. And I'll, I'll be honest. I've said that line many times.

[00:32:50] [SPEAKER_00] I, this is probably the first time I believe it. Uh, and I, I see it and I feel it. Um, and what I'm seeing is again, no one's going home faster, but the work they're doing is so much more enjoyable. And the work of work is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and compressed. And the work of work is what is like soul crushing for folks.

[00:33:12] [SPEAKER_00] But when you can go through and you can iterate on something incredibly quickly with the team, because you have these tools at your disposal, because you can deploy something like Slack bot, like work just simply becomes less daunting. It becomes less tedious. And like the energy that I see these teams have multiples. I'm seeing folks on our engineering team build new capabilities that otherwise would have like represented an entire company. And they're building it in like two days. Yeah. The help of like seven agents, you know, seven engineering agents, a design agent, a testing agent.

[00:33:42] [SPEAKER_00] And like in two days, a whole new product category is birthed inside of Slack bot that like represents a whole other company someplace else. Like that's insane. And it's not like those people did that in 40 hours a week. They worked like 60, 70 hours a week, but their like energy level is off the charts. Because they're focusing on the things that's like, this is awesome. I'm building. I'm creating. It's going fast. So that's the shift. It's not people are going home on Fridays. We are great as humans of filling our time.

[00:34:12] [SPEAKER_00] We will fill it up. But we can fill it up with stuff that is actually valuable and delivering returns. And what's happening is, and the equilibrium just works itself out, as organizations see this capability, as they see these employees that are now augmented with these tools, what happens? Well, the expectation just goes up. Like we're not necessarily adding headcount, but the expectation of the impact for headcount goes up. And so it naturally calibrates itself.

[00:34:37] [SPEAKER_00] So it doesn't leave time for, you know, wandering off and playing golf for, you know, four hours during the day. Like the expectation is now higher because these tools are allowing us to focus on that output level. That's really going to be, as I mentioned earlier, I think one of the top drivers of revenue growth in this new era is team-based productivity and what you can get out of that team-based productivity.

[00:34:59] [SPEAKER_00] And those are the organizations that are going to succeed in this new era, the ones that really can disrupt themselves and transform how they work, can get work out of the inbox, which is a death trap in the AI era, in my humble opinion, and can really say like team-based productivity is a competitive differentiator. We are going to have employees that are going to outperform our competitors' employees by 4x productivity. And that is a big deal. And it's a wild competitive differentiator for those who are getting it right.

[00:35:26] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And the conversational interface is critical. I've spoken to companies who sort of worry about, you know, what employees in their enterprise have the aptitude for working with agents. But if it's just conversational.

[00:35:49] [SPEAKER_01] And the other thing, I've spoken to companies that are building decision intelligence systems for the C-suite so that, you know, a CEO can brainstorm privately with a system before then sitting in a meeting or before directing his reports to do things.

[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_01] And with this, you know, a team of people that are building a meeting or something. And with this, you have that capability across the enterprise. Everybody can brainstorm and educate themselves and come up with ideas privately with Slack bot within a system that can take action. It was am I getting that right?

[00:36:43] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. I'll, I'll just give you an anecdote. This literally happened last week. I won't divulge the name, but an executive at Salesforce, they inherited a new function, a new area as often happens. and they had a meeting and the meeting, someone had prepared a long document for that meeting and they looked at it and they're like, this document, I don't understand half of it. I don't like the way it's formatted. I don't understand it. So literally this individual just fed it to Slack bot and said, I'm in a meeting. This meeting is about, you know, this topic that's uploaded this document.

[00:37:13] [SPEAKER_00] I don't love this document. Can you go through this? What's important here? What are the five things I need to really know? What are the four areas that, you know, the team may be underperforming that I should be on top of? And give me the six questions I should ask. And literally just put that in Slack bot came back and because Slack bot cannot just look at that document, which any LLM could look at a document. Slack bot can couple that document with who the team is, what's the history of the team? What's the other systems of data that would inform that? And came back with this incredibly rich thing. And literally this leader was getting compliments like,

[00:37:43] [SPEAKER_00] wow, I can't believe this is your first meeting in this area. Like the questions you asked were so insightful and you were, you were just, you nailed all the areas that were critical that we focused on. And like, you know, at the end of this, he's like, well, Slack bot did it. It was, and that, that level of, of individual empowerment and productivity is, is incredibly important. And then now you can imagine now, because it's Slack, one of the things that makes Slack unique versus all these other players out there is Slack is inherently multiplayer. So Slack is about your team.

[00:38:13] [SPEAKER_00] And so now when you can take that experience and say, cool team, look at this, here's what we should be working on. Here's the things that I can share it off across my team. I can get them pulled in and engaged. Now you're talking about taking individual productivity to team-based productivity. And that's a big deal because the multiplayer aspect of, of, of, you know, this productivity era, we're, we're spending a lot of time on individuals, but like, let's face it, the breakthroughs happen in groups. The breakthroughs happen when we're sitting down together and we're ideating this

[00:38:42] [SPEAKER_00] and I can start privately and, and, and do some ideation, but then I got to bring it to somebody. I got to bring it to a team member. I got to bring it to an engineer. I got to bring it to a marketer, whoever it is. Um, and that multiplayer facet is also one of the critical differentiators that I don't think enough people are talking about.

[00:38:57] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Um, and again, looking forward, uh, you know, this is going to speed up business. Uh, certainly, uh, you know, I'm old enough to remember typewriters and carbon paper.

[00:39:13] [SPEAKER_00] And my daughter just asked me the other day, did you, dad, did you use a typewriter when you started work? I'm like, Oh my God.

[00:39:21] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I did. I did. I was, uh, I was, I'm of that generation. And I remember word processors when they came in, uh, that that was a huge, uh, advance. Uh, but, uh, those things sped up work, uh, you know, increased the, the volume of, of work that could be done in, in a day. Uh, how do you,

[00:39:50] [SPEAKER_01] at, at what point, uh, do we hit sort of, as fast as we can work? You know, I mean, how, how is this going to affect not only the enterprise, but the economy?

[00:40:05] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Um, I don't know. I, I, you know, I wish I could sit here and say, wow, yeah, I can, I can forecast that. I think, you know, the human capacity to go through and orchestrate work is going to be, is going to really separate out kind of, you know, to say it like kind of crucially the winners versus the losers, like that ability to set up your organization so that a 10 person company operates like, you know,

[00:40:33] [SPEAKER_00] a thousand person company or a 10,000 person company. That's a very real paradigm. And the, the organizations that set up the systems and use things like Slack to enable that level of kind of exponential return from the, one of the biggest investments almost every company makes, which is its people like 30 to 60% of most of the money companies spend is on what it's on people. Um, and like, it's crazy to not think of that as a revenue driver for your top and your bottom line. Um,

[00:41:01] [SPEAKER_00] so I think that capacity is somewhat unlimited and it's almost, it's hard to say that cause you're like, wait, but there's only so many hours in the day, et cetera. But in a world where I can send a task off and that task can go to an agent and that agent can work with six other agents to work on it. And I can check in and I can be like, no Zig versus zag or, uh, let's cool. Let's bring in this conversation. Like your ability to get things done that are high value and high yield for the organization. Um, it's,

[00:41:30] [SPEAKER_00] I think we're scratching the surface of what, what it will look like. The, the things that will slow us down will not be the intelligence layer. Let me just say it that way. Like the intelligence will be, it will be all the enterprise goo that we've historically experienced, the data, the governance, the policies, the privacy is the tools to make this simple and easy. Um, giving it, making it accessible. You know what I call it? Like employee agency. That is going to be the bottleneck. Are you giving the capabilities in a thoughtful way that don't require your employees to think?

[00:41:59] [SPEAKER_00] That's what one of the design principles of Slack is, is called don't make me think. And, and it's, it's, it's easy to do now or as hard to do now, depending on your perspective with all this, you know, intelligence that's coming in. But Slack was built for this era. It was built around conversations and human connection. And that, that is exactly what this, this, um, time moment in time requires. It requires a conversational interface with the intelligence behind it.

[00:42:25] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Uh, I've got to ask, do you see anybody competing? Because again, uh, you guys have, you know, so much that's under one roof and you've got the installed base already. Uh, it is, is, uh, are, have you broken away or,

[00:42:46] [SPEAKER_00] no, no, I think it's, it's a great, it's a fair question. I listen, I'm paranoid. So I think I, you know, I think our, you know, our death could be intimate at any time, any moment. And disruption here, as much as I've talked about, you know, disruption that, you know, Slack is causing that could happen to us. If, if we lose our way on the things that made Slack, Slack and some of those design principles of don't make me think, et cetera. So we have to be as diligent as anybody in terms of delivering in this era where, again, we're not really selling Slack. We're, we're really selling transformation for customers.

[00:43:16] [SPEAKER_00] And it starts with understanding deeply the customer problem and working our back way back. You know, there's going to be lots of, of, of, of companies that want to be the interface for work. That is, that is a simple way to think about it. And, um, the companies that have a unique advantage to get that right, uh, will have many of the attributes that Slack already has. It's going to be, it's got to be an open platform. It's got to be able to connect across your enterprise. It's got to be able to bring your people and your agents together.

[00:43:46] [SPEAKER_00] Um, you better be able to orchestrate, you know, advanced workflows from it simply that you can just, you know, direct via human language. Uh, it's going to have to work the way people work, which is for their voice and their phones, et cetera. So the attributes that define who will kind of be one of the few players that are the conversational interface for work, those attributes are pretty clear. Uh, and we're really fortunate that we've got almost all of them with Slack. That doesn't mean we're safe and secure in any way, shape or form. We're very paranoid, but, um,

[00:44:16] [SPEAKER_00] it means we've got a hell of a good shot. And it means that if you look at kind of the enterprises that are moving to Slack that, you know, we're on historically competitors, companies like rocket, like companies like general motors, I'm not talking about like the leading companies like open AI and tropic. We all know that they all run on Slack, but like, we're talking like storied institutions that have historically not been on these systems who've thought of like their inbox is the work operating system. They're moving to Slack because they need to pin trends. It's just into this, um, transition their employee workforce. And that, that kind of shows us that we're onto something.

[00:44:46] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And does Slack, uh, can it manage your inbox?

[00:44:52] [SPEAKER_00] Uh, yeah. So yeah. So I think there'll more to come, I guess it's going to, the thing I'm going to say here on this day. So we, we connect with things like teams and one drive. We have great interoperability with Microsoft. We can connect in with things like calendar. Uh, and I would say I'm, when it comes to the inbox, watch this space closely, nothing to announce. Yeah.

[00:45:09] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Uh, you know, it's funny about, uh, you know, having agents, uh, out there, uh, preparing. I mean, you mentioned this, uh, example of a executive who gets this document, doesn't have the time or the patience to read it. And, and Slack reads it for him. That document was probably produced by chat, GPT or some system like that.

[00:45:37] [SPEAKER_01] And I was talking to a guy in the healthcare space about, uh, uh, clinical trials and the use of AI and clinical trials. And these massive, uh, documents are produced, uh, that are sent to the FDA for, for, uh, review and approval of clinical trials. And he was saying that, you know, the documents at this point are being written by AI and then they get to the

[00:46:05] [SPEAKER_01] FDA and no one's reading it. They're feeding it into it. Yeah. And he said that the day is coming where, where you'll just transfer the data. What's the point of, of creating a document that no one's going to read and then having AI translate the document or, or, or, or yeah. And do you see that at all? That, that there'll be a layer of activity that, that, uh, bypasses the, uh, the,

[00:46:35] [SPEAKER_01] the, the document phase.

[00:46:37] [SPEAKER_00] I think, I think what we'll see, I think what, what that scenario that you described is a reflection of the immaturity of the cycle, right? Right. It's people taking a process that has existed and applying a tool on top of it to make that process feel more efficient versus what will actually happen by the winners here is a complete re-imagining of that process. Right. So someone, someone will step back from that and be like, well, this is absurd. Like an AI doc can generate document being fed into an AI system and, you know, minimal human oversight.

[00:47:08] [SPEAKER_00] Um, what is the point? What are we trying to achieve here? And someone will step back and say, all right, well, what, what was the intent of this FDA review process to begin with? What are we trying to achieve? And what's a complete re-imagining of how to do it? And that, that is, I think the, the trap of, you know, applying tools to do the same thing we do more efficiently is oftentimes the, the early stage of the cycle. Oh, that's right. The, the more meaningful one is a, let's step back. What was the goal that we were trying to do to begin with? How do we re-imagine this completely? Um, and that's, you know, we work,

[00:47:37] [SPEAKER_00] Amazon's one of the biggest Slack customers out there. You know, they're doing some of the most incredible re-imagining out there. They're using Slack bar. They're one of the big Slack customers. Um, that's the, that's the opportunity here. It's not to do the same thing just faster. It's to re-imagine it.

[00:47:52] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And, and the, the other, uh, thing that's happening is, as you said, employees, individual employees become, uh, orchestrators of their own, uh, army of agents or will become orchestrators. Uh, and that gives them time to re-imagine their work or, or, or come up with, uh, new things that they can do in their, in their,

[00:48:22] [SPEAKER_01] uh, function. Uh, do you see that happening yet? Or, or, you know,

[00:48:28] [SPEAKER_00] it's, it's, it's so, it's so motivating. I was sending a note to, uh, my organization just last week, an individual on the team who, uh, he spends time thinking about how do you optimize, uh, dollars that we spend for, uh, media, where we're buying media and international markets and whatnot. And, uh, historically that's required a data scientist to really go through and do, like, really specific cohort analysis and like, you know, detailed understanding of how X, Y, and Z markets comparing versus this and where the optimizations are. And it's,

[00:48:58] [SPEAKER_00] you know, really complex stuff to get right. And he was always bottlenecked by our data scientist team who has a set of finite resources. So he spent a weekend and built a data scientist agent. And long story short, he now is completely on unshackled on doing that analysis. He can have this data scientist agent do 89 to 90% of the analysis. And then I just ask our data scientist team to validate it. Hey, is this right? Did we get any, did we miss anything? Like, did this get run properly, et cetera?

[00:49:27] [SPEAKER_00] That's like huge because now this, this individual's like time competency, the things he can go focus on just completely uncork. So, you know what I tell my organization is like just systematically find every bottleneck in your day. That's stopping you from moving faster or getting something done. And then ask like, how do we use AI? How do we use tools like Slack bot to do this faster, more efficiently? How do you add that army of things? So you're not a data scientist, but you can manage one. You know, you're not a creative person, but you can,

[00:49:56] [SPEAKER_00] you can build one and manage one. And that same, you're not, you don't know how to code. It turns out you don't need to like we can get for sale plugged in right inside of Slack. And now you can start coding websites. Let's go. That's it's it's a pretty amazing time to be an employee. You know, I think people, there's a lot of concerns or employees and, and, you know, sure it's going on with jobs, et cetera. The flip side of that equation is like, it may never be a better time to, to work at a company because it's just so.

[00:50:24] [SPEAKER_01] That's right. And, and it requires the employees looking at the, glass half full. I mean, I hear a lot of people wringing their hands, but I agree on the other hand, you've got all of these tools of start, start imagining what you can do with them. That's right.

[00:50:43] [SPEAKER_00] That's what I tell my kids. Yeah. Yeah. You kind of have to go through the looking glass on it. There's, you know, some fear and anxiety and everyone approaches this stuff somewhat differently. But, you know, as I, as I talked to my team, I was like, listen, whether you learn it here or you learn it someplace else, you're not going to get another job unless you know how to do these things. Well, so like, let's get out of it and let's go ahead because it's, it's, it is the new expectation.

[00:51:05] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. So this has been rolled out the, these, this new functionality is, is there, are there, you were saying, watch the space. Do you have a roadmap that you can talk about?

[00:51:19] [SPEAKER_00] We do, although it's changing fast and furious. And like, we, we literally, we launched Slack bot, you know, a little bit more than, I don't know when this podcast will come out, but it was about two months ago. And, you know, we've got like 30 new features that are rolling out almost every other month. So the innovation is coming fast and furious. you know, we'll get used to it up with Slack bot so you can experience it. And, but there's a ton of, of interesting things. It would, it would be almost. Ingenuine for me to talk about like the roadmap,

[00:51:46] [SPEAKER_00] because literally by the time we finished this conversation and this gets published, it'll be better updated, changed. Um, so I would just say, follow closely what we're doing and you're going to see some really cool stuff.

[00:51:57] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And just on that to follow closely what you're doing, presumably you can just ask Slack at this point.

[00:52:05] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. You, uh, yeah, get, get yourself on a Slack plan and, uh, just rock into Slack bot and say, Hey, what, what are the latest capabilities that have come out from Slack? And Slack bot will tell you.

[00:52:16] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Is there anything more you want to say before we sign off?

[00:52:21] [SPEAKER_00] Well, one, uh, thanks again for having me. I, I greatly enjoyed the conversation. I think, like I said, uh, there's a lot of things to ponder in this area. I, I come at it largely from an optimistic perspective because I'm get to see what customers like box and, you know, uh, Vercel and engine and zero and slalom are all doing with this technology. And it's, um, it's really inspiring. And I think that's the, that's the message I would have to go away is like lean into it. Um, be, have the courage to kind of reimagine work for your employees.

[00:52:50] [SPEAKER_00] And to know that that is not going to look like work of the past. And, uh, if you're still in the inbox, uh, it's time to move out. And, you know, the Slack as a work operating system, uh, while it sounds maybe like a fun turn of phrase, it's a really meaningful thing. And it's a, it's a real difference for the companies that are figuring it out. And you just got to look at the biggest ones like open AI and how they use Slack as a, as an example of, of where the world's going.

[00:53:14] [SPEAKER_01] Okay. Okay. Great.