Salesforce on Tuesday made the rebuilt Slackbot generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, repositioning the long-standing workplace assistant as a full AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking actions on behalf of employees. The company says the new version runs on Anthropic's Claude and is built around a large language model rather than the algorithmic logic that underpinned the original tool.

The launch arrives at a moment when Salesforce is under pressure to demonstrate that AI strengthens its product portfolio rather than commoditises it. Microsoft's Copilot, embedded across Teams and Microsoft 365, and Google's Gemini integrations across Workspace have both moved aggressively into the enterprise assistant space over the past year. Slack, which Salesforce acquired for $27.7 billion in 2021, has been the company's primary vehicle for competing in that category.

Prior to going public, Salesforce tested the new Slackbot across its entire workforce of roughly 80,000 employees. According to Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, two-thirds of those employees tried the product, with 80% of that group continuing to use it regularly. Internal satisfaction scores reached 96%, and the company says employees reported saving between two and twenty hours per week, though those figures come from Salesforce's own internal survey. Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, described the original Slackbot as "a little tricycle" compared to the rebuilt version, which he characterised as connecting to Salesforce records, Google Drive, calendar data, and historical Slack conversations through a "very robust search engine."

The choice of Anthropic's Claude as the underlying model was driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack holds FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve US federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was the only provider able to supply a compliant model when development began. That exclusivity is set to end: Harris confirmed that Google's Gemini will be added this year, and said OpenAI remains a possibility. The company says it does not train any models on customer data, and that Slackbot surfaces only information each individual user already has permission to access.

The product's general availability puts Salesforce in a more defined competitive position against Microsoft and Google, both of which have substantially larger installed bases in enterprise productivity. Slack's argument, articulated by chief product officer Rob Seaman, rests on contextual proximity: the assistant is already embedded in the communication layer where work happens, requiring no additional setup from end users. Whether that convenience advantage holds as Microsoft and Google deepen their own integrations remains an open question.

Salesforce has indicated that Slackbot will eventually function as what Harris calls a "super agent," capable of coordinating with third-party AI agents already operating within Slack. Anthropic released a preview of Claude Code for Slack last month, and OpenAI, Google, and Vercel have each built agents for the platform. The company has not announced a specific date for multi-agent orchestration capabilities to reach general availability.