When Slack was acquired by Salesforce in July 2021 for nearly $28 billion, the smart money said that Slack would slide into obscurity. Slack was seen as a second-tier player in the team collaboration space, while Salesforce was a premier provider of CRM technology and a captain of industry at large. But the opposite happened – Slack has taken on a new role within Salesforce, according to research firm GlobalData.
Gregg Willsky, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Technology & Services at GlobalData, comments: “It seemed certain that Slack would be stripped of its brand name, and its technology capabilities absorbed into Salesforce’s massive stockpile.”
Slack is increasingly becoming embedded into Salesforce’s broader product fabric, simultaneously being positioned as the front end for Salesforce’s AI ecosystem and evolving as the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform.
Willsky continues: “The poster child for Slack’s AI influence on the Salesforce platform is Agentforce, which allows users to build specialized, task-specific AI agents that operate directly in Slack, handling everything from simple support queries to executing complex processes.
“At the center of Slack becoming the symbol for collaboration capabilities on the Salesforce platform is a comprehensive update that created a unified space in which teams can collaborate and act without leaving the flow of work. At the heart of the update is a type of Slack channel named ‘Salesforce Channels’, which reflect Salesforce’s broader strategy to consolidate applications, workflows, AI agents, and data into a single environment.”
Slack has evolved not only from a product perspective, but from a management perspective as well. In January 2023, Lidiane Jones, an EVP and GM at Salesforce, succeeded Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield as CEO. Only 10 months later in November, Jones was replaced by Denise Dresser, a long-time Salesforce executive. Dresser departed in late 2025 and Rob Seaman, Slack’s Chief Product Officer has been acting as interim CEO since.
Willsky concludes: “Slack has come a long way, little by little, since Salesforce purchased it, but it is not yet time to include it in a discussion with competitors such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom. Rival organizations have kept busy accumulating AI-driven features across their platforms, not only for team collaboration but for contact center as well – and have generated substantial brand equity in the process. However, as a central interface into the Salesforce platform, a foundational tool across corporate America, Slack merits keeping a close eye on.”
