Salesforce CEO Benioff Calls Slackbot A ‘Transformational’ Channel Moment

‘Now every engineer is augmented to a level that they’ve never seen,’ says Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff.

Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff called the company’s revamped Slackbot virtual assistant “probably one of the most exciting but transformational moments for systems integrators, for developers, for systems engineers, for forward-deployed engineers” and other professionals who not only code but handle intensive enterprise systems like CRM software.

“You can see these coding models have gotten to a whole other level of productivity and capability, especially when you see what’s happened in the last just few months with [OpenAI’s] Codex, but also with Anthropic [Claude Opus] 4.6, which is what Slackbot is built on,” Benioff told CRN during a press conference this week revealing the new and improved Slackbot.

“Now every engineer is augmented to a level that they’ve never seen,” he said. “And their job has changed from manual coding to supervisory coding where they’re paying attention to what the model is doing to basically deliver that next generation of capability.”

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Benioff On ‘Exciting’ Slackbot Changes

Slackbot was already made generally available on Business+ and Enterprise+ plans in a phased rollout that started in January, and Salesforce plans to open access this month. This summer, Slack becomes automatically provisioned, connected and ready for all new Salesforce customers.

Updates becoming generally available in May include AI skills, deep research, memory and Slackbot charts, the San Francisco-based vendor revealed this week. In June comes a preview for intelligent notetaking, Slackbot for desktop and voice command. Already generally available are agentic prospecting, engagement agent, pipeline management agent and CRM capabilities in Slack, which should especially appeal to small businesses that often use solution providers.

Solution Providers Make AI Realistic

Asokan Ashok, chief technology and innovation officer at San Diego-based Salesforce and Oracle solution provider SoftClouds, told CRN in a recent interview that Salesforce implementations are “catching up right now” thanks to the Automotive Cloud the vendor released in 2022. Automotive is one of the industries SoftClouds specializes in and has been ripe for AI innovation.

AI has allowed SoftClouds to take knowledge management systems to a new level, adding improved language localization for taking one document needed by car repairers worldwide and creating dozens of versions of the document in different languages.

SoftClouds is also exploring ways to expand its AI business into automatic speech recognition, color matching and video processing.

“When a lot of people think about AI, people think that, ‘OK, AI means it’s only text; it’s just knowledge,” Ashok said. "There are multiple other areas of AI that we are already looking at.”

Slackbot can save users 90 minutes a day and accelerate deal cycles by 60 percent, Salesforce said. Salesforce itself has used Slackbot to generate more than $6.4 million in productivity value. Slackbot as a customer prospecting tool has saved 225,000 hours within Salesforce.

Salesforce’s SMB organization leveraged pipeline management agents to save 125,000 hours of updates in two months, MaryAnn Patel, Salesforce senior vice president of product management for Salesforce Sales Cloud, said during the Slackbot event.

“This is the future of what it means to be Salesforce,” Patel said.

Salesforce bought Slack about five years ago and has delivered 2.5X revenue growth since then, Benioff said at the event. He expects to hit threefold growth by the end of the fiscal year.

Aimed at helping Salesforce solution providers that are all in on agentic AI is also a reimagined consulting track of the Salesforce partner program.

Revealed earlier in March, the program pays partners based in part on active consumption instead of seat provisioning. The change includes twofold to sixfold increases in certification vouchers and hands-on verification requirements to make sure solution providers can architect and deploy AI agents in high-stakes enterprise environments with security and compliance met.

The track also moves down from four consulting partner tiers to two: Summit for top-tier, strategic growth partners and Select for delivery partners who meet performance standards and takes 170 legacy “navigator” distinctions to 28 core competencies aligned with Agentforce and Data 360, among other adjustments.