Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gillian Bruce, Director of Developer Marketing at Slack. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce allows you to bring Salesforce to Slack, and why every admin should learn how to build Slack solutions.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Gillian Bruce.
If you’re a longtime listener to the pod, you’ve got to be excited about this week’s guest. Gillian was my co-host for years, and I thought we should bring the dynamic duo back together to talk about her new gig as Director of Developer Marketing at Slack.
Ever since she went over to the Slack team, Gillian’s been struck by how friendly the platform is for admins. There are tons of solutions that you can implement with low or no code, and powerful features like Slack Canvas and Slack Lists that give you a lot of flexibility without the need for customizations.
All this is a cinch if you’re used to building things in Salesforce. And when you hear what Gillian has to say about combining Agentforce with Slack, you’ll want to get started today.
In our episode with Jim Ray about Slack integrations, he told us how Slack can be a multi-purpose tool. There are over 2,600 integrations currently out there, letting you bring information from Jira, or Workday, or Salesforce, directly into Slack. While that could be a lot of information to sift through, Agentforce is here to lend a helping hand.
You can now use Agent Builder to create employee-facing AI agents for Slack. There are special Slack actions, like searching and summarizing data in Slack, creating or updating a Slack Canvas, and sending DMs. This gives admins all sorts of new ways to integrate Salesforce into your business processes with less friction and more wow.
Agentforce is new and we know it can be hard to get your head around everything that it can do. That’s why Slack is building some templates for employee-facing AI agents. For example, a product specialist agent that can give you quick answers so you don’t have to comb through pages of documentation.
If there’s one thing Gillian wants you to take away from this episode, it’s that Salesforce Admins should start building on Slack. “It’s going not only set yourself up to be super valuable to your organization in this era of agents,” she says, “but it also is going to open up so much more possibility for you career-wise.”
There’s so much more in this episode about tricks for Slack and why you should look out for Gillian at your next Dreamin’ event, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re thrilled to have Gillian Bruce back with us. Gillian, who now leads the Slack ecosystem marketing team and is on a mission to show why every Salesforce admin should be jumping into Slack and using it to not only build custom agents, but also amazing workflows and incredible integrations that Slack can do.
Gillian explains why learning and leveraging Slack is simply a must for an admin. I mean, it’s so easy to use. I love it. Now, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. That way, you can catch every new episode immediately when it comes out on Thursdays. So be sure to hit the follow button on whatever podcast platform you’re listening for. So now, let’s welcome Gillian back and talk about Slack and Agentforce.
So Gillian, welcome back to the podcast.
Gillian:
Mike, thanks for having me.
Mike:
I know, you’ve been over overly communicating with people.
Gillian:
It’s been a while since I’ve been on the pod with you, it feels like I just rewound the clock quite a while.
Mike:
I know, in the Wayback Machine. Don’t forget, we have the Wayback Machine. I don’t have the fancy noisemaker, you just got to put it in your head and envision that. What have you been up to since we’ve last talked on ye olde podcast?
Gillian:
Oh, just a few things, you know? A few changes.
Mike:
Okay. Still all about admins, obviously.
Gillian:
Admins are always in my heart, and it’s actually been quite fun, because about, what, eight months ago at this point, I have transitioned over to Slack to lead up their ecosystem marketing team, which includes developers, community, and partners. And one of the big things I’m focused on is, as I’ve gotten to know the Slack community over here, is helping all Salesforce admins understand how awesome Slack is, and how important it is that you learn how to build and use Slack.
Mike:
Yeah, I mean, you know me, I use Slack for a ton of things, and I love building out forms and workflows in Slack. It’s so admin friendly.
Gillian:
It is very admin friendly, and the thing that I think is so interesting to me, as I’ve been getting to know the Slack community, and people who are Slack developers, and Slack builders, is there are so many commonalities and opportunities between the Salesforce, admin, and Builder audience and the Slack Builder audience. And when you’re building something with Workflow Builder. It’s very similar to building a flow. In fact, building something with Workflow Builder in Slack is, to me, honestly a lot easier than building an automation with Flow and Salesforce.
Mike:
Kind of is, a little bit.
Gillian:
A lot more straightforward, and part of that is because the platform is built to do a different thing than Salesforce is. But there’s so much you can do with being able to point and click, and do these low-code builds and low-code solutions in Slack. And it doesn’t even mean building a lot of customizations. We’ve got things like Slack canvas, and now we have Slack Lists, which are amazing for your to-do lists, if you haven’t tried those out yet. And just generally using channels and building automation between channels to help manage your notifications and work processes, there’s a lot there. But of course, there’s something on the top of everyone’s mind these days.
Mike:
I mean, I would love to talk all of the workflow stuff, but we’re Agentforce, Gillian, we have to cover agents.
Gillian:
Well, and agents are a big deal, and I think especially agents… So let’s put my developer hat on for a second. So in the Slack developer community, people have been building agents for quite a while, and they’ve been building their own agents and deploying them into Slack. There’s also agents that are already on the Slack marketplace built by our third-party vendor, so like Adobe Express, and Writer, and Cohere. They already have agents that you can interact with in Slack, but the amazing thing with Agentforce is that it’s bringing that Salesforce builder experience to being able to enable you to build your own custom agents. And Mike, I just want to take a second here. Admins, agents, I know it might feel a little overwhelming, but let’s back it up. What is an admin’s number one customer?
Mike:
Our users, always our users.
Gillian:
Our users, and so-
Mike:
Yes, I didn’t know there was a quiz. You didn’t tell me there was a quiz.
Gillian:
Sorry, I can’t just come on the pod and just be a normal guest. You know that.
Mike:
Ugh, I’m going to build an agent in Slack for the quiz now. That’s what it should be.
Gillian:
There you go. Okay, so an admin’s number one customer is the end user, which we also call an employee. Let’s say that, right? If you’re a part of an organization, you’re an employee, what is the best operating system to enable employees to collaborate with each other and with other systems?
Mike:
I feel like I have to say Slack, because you’re on-
Gillian:
Yeah, you do. It is the best one. I mean, we can debate that, but…
Mike:
I wasn’t going to. It’s like being on Family Feud.
Gillian:
Okay, so then, the third question is, so if an admin’s number one customer are the employees, and the best way to bring employees together to collaborate and to interact with other systems is Slack, then where is the best place to bring those custom agents that you’re building in Agent Builder?
Mike:
I mean, you should build them in Slack, right?
Gillian:
Ding, ding, ding. Mike, you pass.
Mike:
I tried. I was fighting really hard, I was going to say Chatter.
Gillian:
Oh, well, you know what? We can actually talk about Chatter for a second, too.
Mike:
We should.
Gillian:
We should. So real quick on the Chatter of it all, so I love Chatter. A lot of us love Chatter. Remember the highlight? What do they call it, a Chatter brag. It was a Chag.
Mike:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a Chag. Yeah, we had templates.
Gillian:
We sure did, yeah.
Mike:
Yeah, formatting.
Gillian:
So Parker very publicly announced that, while he helped build Chatter, he is now going to help kill Chatter. And I know this might give us some heart palpitations, but let me just be really clear. Chatter is getting a major glow-up if you think about it, because we have something called Salesforce channels that are in Slack. And what this is is one of the best things about Chatter is it had a feed on every record, right? So everyone could talk about what’s going on.
Well, we already have Salesforce channels live in Slack, as of Dreamforce. This means that you can have a dedicated record channel that automatically gets spin-up for that record in Slack. So you have a channel there where you can collaborate, you can talk about it, you can interact with folks, you can bring other systems data in right there. Coming in February, that same UI, that channel experience is going to be visible in Salesforce for those records.
Mike:
Well, that’s going to be incredibly useful, because I think that was always the disconnect. You know, I’m over here for one thing, and then I’m over there for another thing. And I mean, Slack is already such a conversational UI. It makes sense that I should think about not only building agents in the Salesforce UI, but in Slack as well, because that’s where people are already talking.
Gillian:
So, yeah, and two things on that, Mike, right? So one, it’s a place where people are already talking. It’s the place where they’re being able to interact with systems beyond Salesforce as well, right? So maybe they have Workday in there, maybe they’re pulling in JIRA tickets. There’s a lot of other systems that integrate with Slack, so that people don’t have to leave and swivel chair out of that interface into something else. So by putting your agent in there, bringing that Salesforce experience into Slack, you’re again making it much more efficient for people to get their work done.
But then, that second piece of it, Mike, is that Slack is going to be the way that you’re going to be able to not just bring that systems and all of that data together, all those people together, but those agents are going to be able to interact there in Slack with you, and you’re going to be able to tell that agent to do things that are pulling from Salesforce, from all of your data cloud sources, and take action right there in Slack. And you’re going to be able to, come March, actually have that in a threaded conversation. So you’re going to be able to interact multiplayer style. So you’ll have a conversation with an agent and other people can join in in that conversation.
Mike:
And they can converse with the agent?
Gillian:
Correct.
Mike:
Oh, boy, we’re going to keep agents busy. Do you think of agents like interns? Somebody said that the other day. It’s like, if you’re trying to think of what to build an agent for, think of what if you had an intern?
Gillian:
Well, I mean, yes and no. I’d like to think that when you have an intern, you’re spending a lot more time training them, and mentoring them, and…
Mike:
Not us, we get smart interns
Gillian:
Giving them unique opportunities.
Mike:
More than just getting coffee.
Gillian:
Well, yeah. Can you find me an agent that can get you coffee? I guess you could probably-
Mike:
That would be awesome.
Gillian:
… build an agent that could order you coffee and get it delivered.
Mike:
That would 100% win every hackathon, an Agentforce that just all of a sudden, out of your screen comes a cup of coffee.
Gillian:
Well, so-
Mike:
You’re like, “Mike, this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”
Gillian:
No, it’s good. Actually, you know what? But having your agent take an action… So one of the things I did want to highlight is when we’re talking about Agentforce and Slack, so there are kind of three main elements when you’re talking about Agentforce and Slack that are important to think about. Number one, deploying your agents in Slack, right. Taking that agent you’ve built with Agent Builder and bringing it into Slack. That second thing is having your agent take Slack actions. So in Agent Builder, you’re going to be able to tell your agent to do things with Slack, like search Slack data, so that unstructured data in Slack. These are going to be actions available in Agent Builder. You’re also going to be able to tell your agent to create or update a Slack canvas, which is pretty great. Again, you’re a fan of canvas.
Mike:
Oh, yeah. We use it a lot.
Gillian:
Great way to aggregate and share information. The other Slack action that’s going to be available is be able to send a DM. So that’s that simple kind of direct, one-on-one, agentic experience of being able to talk to an agent. So those are going to be actions that are available natively in Agent Builder that anyone can use. Additionally, the team is going to be working on a lot more, including… I just heard about this the other day. So they’re actually going to build some template agents, some template employee-facing agents. So things like imagine a product specialist.
So you’re in Slack, and you have a question about how a product works, because you are in a conversation with a customer or you’re trying to answer a question, instead of having to go search all of the documentation and figure out, “Oh, who’s the right product manager to reach out about this?” You can just ask the agent right there in Slack your question and get served up an answer, as well as, “Hey, how do you want me to format this answer? Is this for a sales customer? Is this for a sales engineer?” And that is just one use case that I get excited about, because I’m always knee deep in product, and I can never keep up on everything. So that’s one good example, and that’s a template that’s going to be available, so that people can take that, put that in Agent Builder, and then customize it to sort from their own knowledge base.
Mike:
So when you’re thinking of agents, I mean, you probably know this, like with Salesforce, we can control the agent on the profile, and well, not profile, permission set and perm set group. If you’re deploying agents in Slack, is it to all the users, or can you do the same thing? Can you like, “Ah, I really want a test group of users to have access to this agent”?
Gillian:
Yeah, so the first thing I’ll say is that no agent you deploy to Agent Builder or you deploy to Slack will override any of your Salesforce permission structure. So all the security settings you have about visibility and who’s able to edit and make updates to different records, all of those permissions are going to carry over into Slack. So there’s never going to be a situation where you have an agent in Slack, interacting with someone who doesn’t have access to the data that they’re requesting, things like that, so it will never override.
The next thing to that is you might have a situation where you have part of your company, part of your employee base that actually doesn’t even work in Salesforce. They don’t even need Salesforce seats, but you want to build an agent experience for them, in Agent Builder that extends an agent functionality to them, so you don’t actually have to buy a Salesforce seat for them. Maybe you have a group of, I don’t know, marketers who never go into Salesforce, which is probably a bad use case, maybe, but-
Mike:
We’ll say warehouse workers. Warehouse workers.
Gillian:
Warehouse workers, right? Yeah, who don’t have to log in, [inaudible 00:13:01]-
Mike:
They’re driving forklifts all day, they don’t have time for the Salesforce.
Gillian:
Exactly. But what you could do is build an agent in Agent Builder that enables those warehouse workers to be able to be in Slack, maybe ask questions about inventory, when certain products are going to be available, and all of that information that they’re going to be able to see is, again, permissions that you control in the Salesforce side of what’s publicly available, what are people able to see, what level of permissions are accessed. But that’s a way you can extend all that information that’s otherwise just held within Salesforce, beyond Salesforce, into Slack, in that agentic experience.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve talked about before, and Gillian, this was even back before you joined Slack, but I do think you look at the way that conversational AI and even some of the voiceover apps are going, Slack could be the front door for everything Salesforce within your organization, and then you button up data cloud on top of that. Now, they basically could, via Slack, have access to the right data anywhere in the organization, conversationally.
Gillian:
And not just Salesforce data, but data in Workday, or Asana, or any of the other of the 2,700 integration apps that we have out there in the marketplace that connect all of your systems in one place, and that is Slack.
Mike:
Yeah, that’s crazy.
Gillian:
I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty happy to be over here. I do feel like Slack is the future, and this is why I am extremely passionate about helping every Salesforce admin understand that they should be using Slack, they should be learning how to build in Slack, because it is going to be something that opens up the world beyond just Salesforce for folks in a builder capacity. And it just, I mean, imagine the value you can deliver your organization by saying, “Hey, just by using Slack as our work OS, we can bring in these six different systems that people have to log into at some point every week, and I can deploy these agents there that reduce their time of work by hours every week or hours every day.” I mean, that level of efficiency and productivity you can deliver, I mean, that is one of the number one goals of every Salesforce admin.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, and I don’t know what Slack battles with in the marketplace, but I have to believe the nice thing I like about Slack is, even if you spin up a channel and then you archive it, you can still go back and search it, and you can still… It’s like you never lose that information. And I know we used to have, I don’t know, Google had the instant messenger and stuff. The second you closed your window, it was gone, and that information, it was like Snapchat, it was just gone. But at least with Slack, it’s retained for a little bit that you can actually make it actionable and be like, “Oh, I did need to pull this thing back up,” as opposed to scrolling through a huge Chatter thread or something.
Gillian:
Oh, yeah, I use command K at least 20 times a day.
Mike:
Oh, is that what it is? That’s a shortcut?
Gillian:
A shortcut, and command K is not just search, it’s like recent history search, so-
Mike:
Oh.
Gillian:
Yeah.
Mike:
Oh, I didn’t know this. I just go [inaudible 00:16:22]-
Gillian:
Command K all day.
Mike:
… like old screwball. You know, I still use a mouse. I’m very mouse centric for a reason.
Gillian:
Well, mosey your fingers on over from the mouse to do command K, and you’ll be able to find-
Mike:
I suppose.
Gillian:
… recent things so, so much more quickly.
Mike:
I suppose. I don’t know. Tell me a little bit more about these channels. So one of the things that I think I struggled with as an admin was advising users on how much and what they should follow and when. Because with Slack, it’s tempting you, just like, “I got to pay attention to everything, because FOMO, and there’s this going on.” And it can be that way with your data and records, too. How do you think about channels, and following those, and having that information?
Gillian:
So one of the hardest things that I have experienced in transitioning from the Salesforce core side to the Slack side is the proliferation of Slack channels that I am part of, so-
Mike:
Ah. I mean, you don’t email at all. I can’t imagine you send-
Gillian:
No, I-
Mike:
When was the last time you sent an email? Like, two years ago, probably.
Gillian:
Yeah, I check it maybe once or twice a week, which is really bad, because then, sometimes I miss stuff, but-
Mike:
Eh, don’t [inaudible 00:17:37].
Gillian:
… you can find me on Slack. But for the channel organization, and I think this really relates to kind of, as we were talking about, the evolution of Chatter to Salesforce channels, you might just hear like, “Ugh, the last thing I want is another channel.” But here’s the thing, so there are two things that I think are really helpful for this. Number one, Slack AI is awesome. So Slack AI enables you to do recaps and summaries that you can check when you are ready for it, and it will automatically update, depending on how long ago it was you checked it.
So let’s say the last time you checked, I don’t know, the marketing updates channel was a week ago. It’ll say, it’ll recap the last seven days in one paragraph for you, versus every day, there’s a recap that you have to go through. That is very helpful. The other thing that’s very helpful is just asking Slack search to summarize for you. So you’re going, “Tell me what’s going on with X, Y, Z project,” and it will give you the highlights, as well as links to all the source information there. That is really useful. I love Slack AI for that. It helps really kind of sift, and sort, and prioritize the information for me. The other thing that we now have, and you may have seen it, this is brand new, is we have what’s called a VIP, so-
Mike:
I have had VIP.
Gillian:
You’ve seen this? Yeah.
Mike:
I’ve tried it. Let’s talk about it, please tell me. Tell me more.
Gillian:
So you can identify specific users as VIPs, and what that does is it gives this little teeny, tiny, little VIP like emoji right next to their name. It’ll automatically prioritize any DM or channel message that that person has that you are involved with to the top of your sidebar there. So it’ll be the first thing that you see. So I put for my VIPs, it’s like my management chain, my Agentforce group that I’m really working with every single day, and that is helpful for me, because then I don’t have to manually update which channels should be in my priority bucket every day. It’s just, “These are the people I have to pay attention to, and I know that I’m working on something hot with them, so I need to prioritize them in how I look at my Slack feed.”
Mike:
Yep. I did VIPs for like a day, and then I need to come back to it, because the only thing I needed is I need to be able to move that list, just where on the sidebar. I wanted to move the list, that would be it.
Gillian:
Oh.
Mike:
Yeah, yeah, because it sticks it right at the top, and it’s like, “Here’s where it’s going to be,” and it’s like chiseled in stone. It’s like, “Yeah, no, can I have it farther down?” I’d also like… Oh, you know what would be really cool? Besides VIPs is just like my team, because that’s one of the sections, I think that’s what it’s called, right? Sections.
Gillian:
Yep.
Mike:
That’s one of the sections I have, is just all my team members in one area, so that when they DM me, I only have to look in one thing.
Gillian:
Yep, yep. I mean, these are all things, so there’s a lot of features that-
Mike:
But it’s so easy to use. It’s so easy to do that that I was like, “Okay, I’ll come back to VIP.”
Gillian:
Well, and there’s, actually, coming out for the next few months, pay attention, because there’s a lot of features that we’re putting in this bucket calling Quiet the Noise for Slack.
Mike:
Ooh, ooh.
Gillian:
And these are honestly, a lot of them are based off of feedback we’ve gotten internally at Salesforce for people who are overwhelmed by the amount of channels or the amount of DMs, and trying to really figure out how to streamline the experience, to make it more pleasant and easier to get the information that you care most about, without having to sort through a whole bunch of different updates.
Mike:
Right, summarize things. Help me summarize-
Gillian:
Summarize things, prioritize them, be smart in terms of how you’re displaying things and enabling… Like, some of the things that you’ve talked about, Mike, just in terms of like, “Here’s a group for my team,” more features along those lines. So stay tuned. Over the next few months, there’s going to be a few more of those coming out, and I think people are going to really like them.
Mike:
I agree. And also, if you’re an admin, sitting there thinking, “How do I get all of this? Where do I start the conversation?” I think a lot of it, we’re working on redoing the core responsibilities. We’ve had a fifth core responsibility, which is product management fits well into this, because agents need to be product managed. There’s no good way to say that, that just-
Gillian:
Agents need managers.
Mike:
Agents need, yeah, whatever. But the thing that I’m thinking of is like, so how do I get this conversation going with Slack, assuming the admin doesn’t have Slack in their organization? And sitting down with the user, saying, “What do you search on?” Because that, to me, sounds like 90% of the benefit of Slack, besides the conversation, is just being able to search for stuff. And then, you throw an agent on top of that, and it’s like, “Good, I’ll be back in three months when you have some real problems.”
Gillian:
Well, and it’s, “What are you searching for? What applications are you working in all the time? What are you swivel chairing between?” And then, yeah, “What are you trying to get done?” And if you have those three answers, then you could easily whip up a solution in Slack. And I will tell you, for people who want to get hands-on with Slack who don’t have it at their organizations, first of all, anyone can get access to a free Slack workspace. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles, but you can… There’s plenty [inaudible 00:23:08]-
Mike:
It’s good enough, you can build a demo out of, right? You built demos before?
Gillian:
Totally. And actually, and one of the other thing we have is we have an actual Slack developer program, and admins, don’t get scared that it’s called a developer program. It’s basically just a way that you can go tinker around and build things with Slack, you can spin up a Slack Sandbox, and it’s totally free. You can go to slack.dev, I’m sorry to say it, it’s my new favorite website I just built it-
Mike:
Yes, okay. Eventually, while you’re over there, Gillian, you’ll have Slack admins.
Gillian:
You know, we are already talking about Slack admins quite a bit.
Mike:
We should.
Gillian:
We are. We got a lot of work to do over here, Mike. So we’re starting.
Mike:
That’s okay. I’m going to be busy challenging people to say Slack Sandbox five times fast, not mess that up.
Gillian:
But, so you can get access to a Slack Sandbox, and this is forward-looking statement, soon, you will be able to build an employee-facing agent with Agent Builder that is connected and deployed to Slack in Trailhead.
Mike:
Ooh. Ooh, that’d be awesome.
Gillian:
Yeah, so the team are-
Mike:
Oh, I’m going to do that.
Gillian:
… working on it right now. We’re hoping we might be able to get something out by TDX. So really working towards that. But already, and this was kind of released a little silently, but on Halloween, so trick or treat, we now have hands-on content for Slack in Trailhead. So if you want to learn how to build a Slack app using our Bolt framework, or if you want to learn how to use Block Kit Builder, you now have hands-on content in Trailhead for those two modules that will actually have you spin up a Slack developer environment, do the work in there, follow the instructions, and Trailhead will check it and verify it. So even as someone… I don’t think of myself as much of a developer first. I always think myself as admin first. Believe me, admins, you can all do these modules. They’re not hard.
Mike:
Oh, Block Kit Builder is the coolest thing.
Gillian:
Yeah.
Mike:
I’ve been using Block Kit. We used Block Kit Builder before you even left the team. Block Kit Builder is the closest I can come to understanding code. It’s probably the only thing that would ever teach me how to code, if I had to.
Gillian:
I also remember the first time you started using it to post our podcast updates, and everyone was like, “Oh, my gosh, how do I do that? I totally-“
Mike:
“Oh, how’d you do that? It’s so cool, the formatting.” I’m like, “Yep, Block Kit Builder.” “Wow.” And then, and there’s templates. So it’s literally just copy and paste, and steal from other people’s templates. That’s all developers do, is copy and paste code, too. That’s [inaudible 00:25:41]-
Gillian:
You know, I’m learning that a lot. Yeah.
Mike:
Yep. When somebody has something that works, copy and paste, and then it works for you. Yay, done.
Gillian:
You tweak it, you test it, you break some stuff, and then you figure it out.
Mike:
So let’s see, this is going to be very interesting to see how much new Slack there is for TDX, because I was silently making a list in my head of the number of new stuff that you were talking about that’s coming out, and you’re like, “Well, hopefully March or something.” Like, that’s TDX time. TDX is going to be bigger than Dreamforce for you is what I’m hearing.
Gillian:
It is. And I mean, which is crazy to say, because we actually did five launches at Dreamforce this year.
Mike:
Oh, just a few.
Gillian:
Just a few. But between Dreamforce and TDX, we will be launching Agentforce and Slack, Quiet the Noise, Salesforce channels, and I think there’s like two other ones that I’m not remembering.
Mike:
You know, there’s holidays coming up. You guys should celebrate Festivus with the rest of us.
Gillian:
Well, it’s Agentforce. Everyone’s really excited.
Mike:
I’m going to Agentforce an aluminum pole and send it to your team.
Gillian:
Send it to our product team, my team’s okay. It’s the product team that’s burning the midnight oil, so shout out to them.
Mike:
Oh, I have to imagine. And they also, I know we have a unique instance, but it’s really cool, the relationship that we have, that your product team has with all of Salesforce, because they’re super responsive. Any time you submit something, they really… I submitted something on VIP and one of the PMs was like, “Help me understand this.” And I don’t think anybody had given them feedback. I’m like, “I am always a wealth of feedback.”
Gillian:
You know, one of the things I’ve noticed since coming over to Slack is Slack, even though we’re part of Salesforce, is still kind of a small company and it’s very human and people first, because that was the foundation of why Slack was created, was to connect people, right? And that is very much in the culture and inherent to how Slack thinks about building everything, is thinking about that user first, and how do we make it more pleasant? How do we make it more fun? How do we give you more custom emojis? But it’s a really great place to be, and again, I’ll just, not even shameless, just full on, if you are listening to this and you have not built anything with Slack, please take a beat, do a favor for yourself, go to slack.dev. There is a super simple workshop right there.
It’s called Build an Automation with Slack. It walks you through building your first workflow automation. That’s a great place to get started. There’s also great content on Trailhead. There are so many ways to get your hands on Slack and start building things beyond just responding in channel, and I really, really hope that you do that, because it’s going to set not only yourself up to be super valuable to your organization in this era of agents, but it also is going to open up so much more possibility for you career wise, because so many organizations are going to be using Slack as their employee agent delivery mechanism and an operating interface, that it’s just, you got to get on. This is the time, I’m telling you right now, everybody get on board with Slack.
Mike:
I’m thinking of the number of community, the Dreamin’ events, almost all of the Dreamin’ events I go to have a Slack channel, is that right term?
Gillian:
Yeah.
Mike:
Workspace?
Gillian:
The Slack workspace, yeah, and the Trailblazer community. I know there’s Ohana Slack. We have almost 100,000 people just in the Slack workspace alone who are Slack community members. And you mentioned Dreamin’ events, one of the big goals I have this year for us as a Slack marketing team is to be present and to deliver really valuable Slack content at most of those Dreamin’ events. So we want to be there, we’re going to work on a way to get there.
Mike:
Well, I’m also thinking of all the cool hands-on Trailhead module stuff that’s coming out. Like, if you build something, this is worth going to one of those community Dreamin’ events and presenting it, A, but B, also getting in touch with the coordinator and saying like, “How do you put this in your workspace?”
Gillian:
Exactly, yes.
Mike:
Especially for the Agentforce stuff. Can you imagine that? You could maybe even be in a workspace and just register for a Dreamin’ event, using an agent.
Gillian:
Look at that. Mike, you’re thinking next level. I like it.
Mike:
Just thinking ahead. I mean, I’m always thinking what I can ask my agent to do next. I also like saying that. That’s what admins should think of, like, “I’m so cool, I have my own agent.”
Gillian:
Well, once you start understanding what an agent can do, there’s a zillion different agents you want to build. I was just thinking this morning, “How great would it be if we had an agent in Slack that knew Slack, knew Salesforce documentation and developer stuff,” and you could literally ask it, say, “Hey, I want to build an agent in Agentforce that does X, Y, and Z, and give me the recipe for how to build it,” and it would give you like, “You need this flow, and you need this channel, and you need to enable this in your workspace, and you need to have…” It would basically tell you all the things you need to do, to then have that employee agent deployed and ready to go.
Mike:
Yeah. I am thinking of a Jarvis for Slack. That’s what I want.
Gillian:
Of course you are.
Mike:
It’s basically, I sit down, when you sit down at your desk, and it would be like the whole screen, the whole Slack screen would just turn white and say, “Good morning, Mike.” And it would say it in the Jarvis voice, not my voice, because I’m like George Costanza. If it was in my voice, it would be very weird. But it would be like, “Good morning, Mike. Here’s what you missed overnight,” because you know, we’re global companies, we work on different time zones, and it would just give you your morning recap that you could have over coffee, until the agent can build you coffee. That’s what I’m thinking. That would be the agent I want to build. I don’t know if I’ll get there, but I will try.
Gillian:
It’s pretty good. I mean, basically, what you need is an agent with a Jarvis voice to read your Slack recaps in the morning.
Mike:
I mean, I have to believe, leaning on some of the accessibility stuff, that you’re probably in that territory? We just really haven’t perfected that voiceover, because there’s other stuff too that can do text to speech, right?
Gillian:
Mm-hmm. Well, and one of the things that we rolled out earlier this year was Slack AI for huddles. So huddle is basically a Google Meet, but with Slack and-
Mike:
And a way more pleasant ringtone.
Gillian:
Oh, yeah. And you could choose your own hold music, it’s great. But what we have now is AI can capture the conversation, not only transcribe it, but then summarize it, and then continue to alter that summary based on the feedback you give them.
Mike:
Smart. That’s the best thing, that’s literally the best thin about some of the AI stuff is meeting summaries, especially when you can’t join them. You can just read through. We did that as a team a couple of weeks ago, when most of the team was out, and we sent the meeting summary, and Josh was like, “It was amazing.” I read it, and I was like, “Yep, that was 100%, I could envision what the meeting was like, but I didn’t have to sit through the hour and a half recording.”
Gillian:
Yeah, and then, it gives you suggested, like, “Here are the next steps. So-and-so should do this and so-and-so should do that.” It’s great.
Mike:
Gillian, you have a bunch of links that you’re going to send me, so I can include those in the show notes, and it was great to have you on. Thanks for coming back over to the platform side.
Gillian:
Hey, I am so happy to be back, and I am very happy to be at Slack, but I want all of you to know that Salesforce admins are still in the center of my heart. So as I’m thinking about everything we’re building over here, I am always thinking about, “How do we enable Salesforce admins to do all this cool stuff, too?” So thank you so much for having me, Mike, and it’s so nice to be back.
Mike:
So that was a fun episode, it was great to chat with Gillian. They are doing a lot of things over in Slack. I mean, I am all about Agentforce, and they are on the Agentforce train. Is it an Agentforce train? I’m going to say it’s an Agentforce train. And the amount of cool things that Slack has going on, and just thinking of the possibilities not only of what you can integrate for applications in Slack, but also then, once you have Data Cloud hooked up into Salesforce, the integrations across your entire organization, you can basically make your conversation or your data conversational, which to me sounds really cool. I can’t wait to see all of the stuff that they’ve got rolling out in the next few months. And boy, if you’re not registered for TDX, this to me seems like one of the many reasons to come, on top of just all of the Agentforce stuff that you got to learn.
Anyway, that was fun. I hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast. If you do, can you do me a favor? There should be like three dots in the app that you’re listening on. Usually, you can hit those, and then you can share the episode. You can share it via social. There’s a lot of different social channels out there, share it on your favorite social channel. Text it to your friends, or, hey, you know what? Post it in Slack. That seems very appropriate, to post the Slack podcast in Slack.
Of course, if you’re looking for more resources and all of the links that Gillian mentioned, your one stop, your one place to go, admin.salesforce.com is where you can find that, including a transcript of the show. That ought to be fun to read. You know what we didn’t talk about? We didn’t get a recipe this time. There’s always been a recipe with Gillian. I’m going to have to maybe go back and see. You know what, we’ll have to have her back on again, just to get a recipe for some holiday thing, because I feel like that’s what we used to do when she was on the podcast. So anyway, remember, also, join the conversation. The Admin Trailblazer group, that’s over in the Trailblazer community. Don’t worry, like I said, links are in the show notes. So with that, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.
Gillian:
I’m back.
Mike:
Oh, boy. I don’t even know how to begin this podcast with like… This is old pair of shoes, like weird.
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