Dreamforce 25 - Slack's new role as the 'front door' to Salesforce and the agentic enterprise

Salesforce today joins the growing roster of enterprise application vendors that are moving rapidly to replace the traditional point-and-click user experience of menus, buttons and tabs with a conversational interface powered by AI. In its case, this natural-language chat interface is being provided by Slack, the messaging app that Salesforce acquired in a $28 billion deal five years ago.

As Dreamforce opens in San Francisco today, several key updates for Slack are designed to turn this long-held ambition — Slack first talked about becoming "the conversational interface for generative AI" eighteen months ago — into a present reality. In a pre-briefing with Ryan Gavin, CMO at Slack, last week, he told me the aim is to become "the front door" for Salesforce:

We're re-magining Salesforce, so you will [go] through a conversational-first interface, and that interface is Slack.

Customers see the potential to raise the productivity of sales teams as well ...