Slack’s New "Agentic" Slackbot Is Finally Here: It Reads Your Chats So You Don’t Have To

Slack’s new AI is here 🤖 The new Slackbot reads your chats to answer questions and organize work. No more digging through threads. 🧵 #SlackAI 

If you’ve ever spent twenty minutes scrolling through a Slack channel trying to find that one document your boss mentioned three weeks ago, relief is on the way. Slack is officially rolling out the upgrade it promised last year, turning its once-basic chatbot into a genuinely intelligent assistant.

The Salesforce-owned company announced that the new agentic AI-powered Slackbot begins its phased rollout today, January 13. If you are on a Business+ or Enterprise+ plan, your Slackbot is about to get a PhD in your company's business.

From Basic Bot to Personal Agent

Let’s be honest: the old Slackbot was basically a glorified FAQ machine. It could tell you how to change your password, but that was about it.

The new version is a different beast entirely. Powered by Salesforce’s Agentforce 360 platform, this "agentic" bot doesn't just regurgitate generic help articles. It actively pulls from your organization's own data. It can read through the public channels you belong to, your group messages, and even your private chats to understand the context of your work.

It’s designed to act as a personal agent that lives right inside your workflow.

What Can It Actually Do?

The big selling point is context. Because the bot has access to your conversational history, you don't need to feed it documents or upload PDFs to get answers.

• Instant Answers: You can ask it things like, "What was the decision on the Q4 budget?" and it will find the relevant message.
• Workflow Automation: It can organize your tasks, summarize long threads you missed, and even create new content like meeting agendas.
• App Integration: This is the game-changer. The Slackbot connects to third-party tools like Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, Asana, GitHub, and Box via API. It can pull info from these apps to answer questions without you ever leaving the chat window.

The Privacy Guarantee

If the thought of an AI reading your private work chats makes you nervous, you aren't alone. Enterprise data privacy is a huge hurdle for AI adoption, and Slack knows it.

Gadgets 360 exclusively confirmed with the company that Slackbot does not train its models on customer data.

Instead, it uses a method called "Retrieval-Augmented Generation" (RAG). In simple terms, this means the AI grabs the specific information it needs to answer your question in that exact moment, but it doesn't learn from it. Your data isn't used to improve the AI's brain for other companies. It’s a crucial distinction that should appease IT departments worried about data leakage.

Who Gets It First?

The rollout starts today, but you might not see it immediately. Slack is taking a phased approach throughout January and February for Business+ and Enterprise+ subscribers.

Big names like reMarkable, Xero, and Mercari are already using it internally, so the tech has been battle-tested. If you're tired of treating Slack like a digital archive you have to manually search, this new AI bot might just be the productivity boost you've been waiting for.

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