When Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion in July 2021, I heard plenty of consternation in the analyst back channel - from sticker shock to head scratching. But have circumstances changed? 

diginomica gets that feedback firsthand; guarding against excessive skepticism is part of the job. After all, we've heard similar AI talking points across many, many keynotes.

During my Salesforce Connections 2026 podcast review with Rebecca Wettemann, my pick for the biggest surprise of the show: Slack. No, not because Salesforce was pushing Slack during demos - that was to be expected given Slack's prominent role in Salesforce's last earnings call. 

What caught my eye? The organic/community vibe around Slack. We can talk "AI First" mandates all day long - true/lasting adoption comes from the ground up - always has.

It comes down to this: instead of hopping in and out of multiple apps - including Salesforce - will users ask: why not just live in Slack? Hold up: maybe you think I got lured in by a slick Slack demo. Nope - but it's fair to ask for proof points. How about a field view from Brandon Metcalf, CEO & Founder, Asymbl, a Salesforce customer and partner? 

During our interview, Metcalf (pictured above) told me about how Aymbl builds AI recruiting agents/solutions for HR, which is why Asymbl bills itself as "Salesforce for Recruiters." Their solutions include a comprehensive Recruiter Suite and an agentic Talent Intelligence offering. Why build on the Salesforce platform? Metcalf told me: 

The recruiting process is a very workflow-oriented flow. It's not very different from a sales process of prospecting, identification, qualification, and then moving them through the stages to get to a deal done, or an offer placed.

 I've always built on Salesforce, because number one, the trust, the reliability, the scalability, the security. Our customers have always been confident we won't go down; we're protected; their data is protected, especially with recruiting data- and then we've always liked building the recruitment component to then tie to the other components of Salesforce - so tying to Sales Cloud, tying to Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, all of those different pieces.

 And does all the headless talk change that direction? Metcalf: 

We're really excited about headless, and being able to surface wherever someone wants to work, so surfacing in Slack, surfacing in Claude, or ChatGPT, or wherever you want to work, but still the foundational piece of a structured declarative workflow, and a work process-oriented infrastructure underneath, that your human workers or digital workers could access to complete the process.

I think when you look at a lot of the frontier type applications that are out there, for me personally, I think one of the areas they struggle to drive specific business ROI is: what's the database and infrastructure they're connected to, and how do you get a process to happen the same time, or the same way every single time. In business, it can't be slightly different every time - it has to be consistent. But the reasoning, the thought process that goes along with that can change, which is why I think headless is such a smart move.

So that's the headless advantage, but when it comes to headless options, how 'sticky' is Slack? Metcalf says Slack has impact on both his customers, and his internal teams. 

[Our customers] can ask Slackbot, which I love. We're a huge Slack fan. Slack is our operating system as a company, and we use our Recruiter Suite internally as well. So, you can ask Slackbot: what's the status of my job, or where's this candidate at, or what was the feedback on XYZ interview, - any of that stuff, because, because of the all the data sits inside of Salesforce, but Slack AI can easily access it. You can visualize information in Slack, and all of that, so you can operate your recruiting process from Slack.

As I type, I can hear some objections to living-out-of-Slack in my ears... Yes, the Slack interface can get chaotically busy (there are tactics and features to help with that), but in my experience, Slack is way better than some other collaboration interfaces I won't mention here. Perhaps that's because Slack gained initial prominence as a tech project tool, not as an overdue way to scramble into the video/team collaboration market.

But why now? Well, I'd point to the advantage of an interface that allows you to interact with humans, bots, agents, pull in data feeds, build (and share) new mini-AI apps - called Slack skills - all in one place. Not to mention generate Tableau dashboards and data visuals on the fly... 

I'm not personally wild about the 'digital workers/teammates' lingo many vendors use, but the point stands: couldn't we use a hybrid UI that fuses all that data/human/bot interaction into one home base? Whether that's Slack or not, doesn't that sound like the type of interface we need? 

Outside the keynote stage and onto the floor, it sure seemed that way. AI is redistributing the value in and around the SaaS layer. One of those new value layers is unquestionably a different user experience. 

But for a groundswell to take hold, the partner ecosystem needs to be part of that momentum too - and not just the big SIs. So I was very interested to hear from  Lauren Noonan, VP, Growth & Alliances for Salesforce partner Sercante. During our day one interview, Noonan gave me the partner angle: 

That is a very real path that people are taking, and we ourselves are heavy Slack users. We've integrated it with some of our agents with automation. We have a lot of notifications that are going to teams, and it includes the links back to Salesforce, so they can just pick up exactly where you want them to with the task, and so it is like helping people in the flow of work prioritize where they spend their time. 

Then also, to your point, you have the ability to integrate the AI conversational element right in Slack. It gives you that more traditional ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude experience, to get the context that you need, to do whatever the next thing you are going to be doing in Slack, and so I do think it is a big opportunity. 

Noonan says the commercial traction of Slack is shifting: 

We've been a long time user of Slack, but as a partner, there haven't really been interesting services opportunities around Slack. It's not overly complicated to set up. Yes, you can integrate it with a couple things, but it's never been a big revenue-driving opportunity for partners. 

But now all of a sudden, we're able to work with our customers and identify what kind of agentic capabilities you want: do you want to live within Slack, or live within Salesforce... It's just become, I think, a more interesting conversation about the exchange of data across the different systems that people are using, just to manage their day-to-day.

That's enough to get me down to the show floor, where I kicked tires on Slack demos in the official Slack booth. I'll spare you the screen shots; I think most readers know what Slack looks like by now. What made the biggest impression on me? Slack skills. These skills give work teams a chance to quickly build things they need - and share the best ones. 

Obviously, organizing such apps is a factor here, but at least you have the built-in data access, security, and UI sorted before you start building something in Slack. And these weren't just simple things like "check my email." I reviewed a "competitive intelligence" skill, which provided a daily brief of competitor market moves. Obviously, sales teams could build skills around account handoffs, proposal follow-ups, etc.

Another skill analyzed the weekly schedule/tasks, and provided ten suggestions for saving thirty minutes of time that week. Another ranked the existing skills by usefulness, and aided in discovery. The word "multi-player" comes to mind here. Instead of certain AI tools imposed upon teams and metered by KPIs, why not let teams build their own AI-driven skills? I'm not typically a gamification fan, but is there something wrong with having fun building stuff at work, rather than wondering if your AI tool use is being monitored for a employee ranking leaderboard? 

During my sit-down with Eric Zenz, SVP of Product Management for Marketing Applications at Salesforce, the conversation turned to his own Slack usage: 

Just asking Slackbot: 'What does Eric need to know about this customer'... and getting a sense back of their licenses, their temperature, their case data - all that is accessible directly in Slackbot. It has definitely transformed how I interact with the CRM,  and our sales teams.

So what accounts for the increasing Slack traction I observed this week? Zenz says it's about moving beyond conversational context, to everything Slack is now connected to:  

The richer scenarios that we've pulled out recently... We connected to our Google Drive ; we connect it to our calendars, so then it doesn't just have the context of what's been said. It has the context of what's connected, and that has been an unlock. It is answering questions about my roadmap faster than I can, sometimes, for for my team.

Over at Asymbl, remote work is another Slack adoption driver:

The other cool thing about Slack: we've got 150/160 human employees, and I say that now, because we're a hybrid workforce and 60% of our team is digital, but in the United States, we're fully remote, so everyone's everywhere. 

In this context, Slack serves as the connecting hub, not just for human workers, but for humans and digital workers, sharing the same interface:

And then we have a large team in India - half of our team, if not slightly more, is in India, and most of them go to our India office in Jaipur. And then we have some remote people... Our engineers are using Jira and those systems to do their job. Slack is the central hub for where everyone actually connects - and it's where our digital workers connect. 

Last year, Asymbl won the first Agentforce customer success award. Again, Slack played a critical role. Metcalf explains:

Last year, we were on stage at Dreamforce. We won the first customer success Agentforce award last year at Dreamforce, for what we did to hire 100 people in 100 days. We went through a big growth spurt, and we had one human recruiter at the time, and we had huge client contracts we needed to fulfill, and we had 90 days to fulfill them. We could have hired a much larger recruiting team, but that would have taken 90 days. We could have outsourced it, but we didn't have a huge budget to outsource it to external.

To pull it off, that single recruiter relied heavily on Slack: 

We used our Recruiter Suite, and we used Slack, and we used our Recruiter Agent to actually move that process...  We had about 17,000 applications for those jobs that we had to get through, with one human recruiter. We eventually hired a second human recruiter, but then we leveraged all of that technology to drive it.

So we leveraged Slack to create workflow processes and approval processes to approve a job rec, approve the budget for the job rec, have that trigger in Recruiter Suite, so it automatically created it, went through the hiring process to get to an offer, and had an offer approval process in Slack, so everything was on-demand and real-time. I think we had hired about 116 people in about 100 day. 

But arguably, the most convincing metric was retention: 

The retention rate extremely high. We lost very few throughout, so not only did we hire all of those people, they all stayed.

During our Connections 2026 podcast, Wettemann added a twist to my Slack storyline: perhaps in some cases, Slack will basically end up as a competitor to Agentforce. With AI, the plot always thickens. But as I said to Wettemann:

If you're Salesforce, wouldn't you rather Slack be a competitor than a third party coming in for your customers? I think you'd rather have it be Slack.

The perceived value of SaaS is absolutely changing. I'd argue that value perception is partially agentic market hype, but on the other hand, the re-evaluation of SaaS software value is absolutely overdue. I see some of that value being redistributed from the SaaS layer to a few different layers, including context/data, AI orchestration, apps building/ecosystem, and user experience. 

Doesn't a big part of the SaaSpocalypse narrative lean on how intuitive users find interacting out of OpenAI and Claude, versus the clunky screen crawl of enterprise UIs? After all, there were LLMs before ChatGPT. But what if an enterprise vendor comes up with a similarly intuitive interface - one that connects not just with bots, but with human collaborators? We've seen some attempts; I'm sure we'll see many more. Some may prove popular - others will wither, while users access enterprise data directly from external chatbots.

Salesforce is clearly looking to account for that with its headless play. But will Slack turn out to be a surprise winner in the game of AI UX musical chairs? In the history of enterprise software, much stranger things have happened... Stay tuned. 

You can check our complete Salesforce Connections 2026 coverage here.

(End note: I didn't want to drift off-topic here, but if you're like me, and you're looking for a more transparent discussion of managing risk and bias in HR with AI, Metcalf and Asymbl are worth a look... Metcalf had some fresh views on "de-biasing" HR, and how Asymbl builds risk management alerts into its solutions, which I believe is far more effective than, say, a training seminar).