Salesforce Co-Founder Parker Harris reveals how Slack transforms teamwork and brings the Agentic Enterprise to life through Slackbot.
TDX 2026
What Parker Harris said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Parker Harris, CTO of Slack and co-founder of Salesforce, discussed the evolution of Slack from a standalone product for engineering teams to the engagement layer for the intelligent enterprise. He emphasized Slack's product-led growth and user love, noting that foundation model companies live in Slack, making it the place where AI happens. Harris highlighted the major revamp of Slackbot, describing it as an employee superagent that works out of the box, connecting to tools via MCP. He gave an example of using Slackbot to query internal analytics (ATS) without leaving Slack. For developers, he mentioned plans to enable pull request reviews in channels. Looking ahead, Harris said Slackbot can now listen to conversations, transcribe, take notes, and create presentations on G Suite or Office 365. He stressed the importance of discovery and adoption, especially for non-technical users like legal and finance, saying 'if no one's using it, who cares?'
Key takeaways
Slackbot is now an employee superagent that works out of the box, connecting to tools via MCP.
Slackbot can listen to conversations, transcribe, take notes, and create presentations on G Suite or Office 365.
Harris demonstrated using Slackbot to query internal analytics (ATS) without leaving Slack.
Slack is the place where AI happens, with foundation model companies living in Slack.
Slack has always been the place where work happens. But, what if it could also be the place where work gets done for you? Slack bot is changing the game for how teams interact with Salesforce. And there is no better person to talk about what that means than the one and only Parker Harris, who helped build Slack bot, our CTO of Slack and our co-founder of Salesforce. I'm Jillian Bruce, and I also have jumped over to the Slack side of the house.
Harris. And you are Parker Harris. Parker, let's talk a little bit about Slack. I mean, it was what we were just talking about 2 years ago where you kind of came over and started working with the Slack side of the house. You've been seeing Salesforce been built from the ground up for like 27 years now?
Well, I think I first sensed when I joined the Slack unit, which has been 2 years, that I realized that you and I have both been working on the Slack unit for about the same amount of time. The care about the end user. And I think Salesforce does have a care about the end user, but Slack almost takes it to an extreme in their product-led growth way of growing the product. And so, the Slack user base loves Slack. And Slack's mission is to make sure that there's customer love and user love, and that people really kind of have this delightful experience within the product. And so, when I saw that, I realized adoption and user adoption and wanting to be in that surface, it was really important pre-AI, but now in the conversational interface, we have the interface that people want to be in, including all the foundation model companies. They live in Slack. It's the place where AI happens, and you know, it's really our opportunity that we have to capture on.
Yeah. Yeah. And so, when did you realize what the power of that could bring to Salesforce so, like in the context of Salesforce? So, how The combination with Salesforce?
Well, you know, Slack started as this, you know, stand-alone product mostly in engineering groups, right? You know, every engineering group, you know, in all our customers, they like hold on to their Slack. And the vision was just stay in the flow of work if you're a developer. Don't have to log into Jira, don't have to go to get. Just do all your work and it just comes to you. And I think the vision of Slack expanded beyond that. Certainly Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, the founders, had this vision of stay in the flow of work for everything. I don't think when we acquired Slack that it had fully realized that vision. And so, the power of Salesforce and Slack together is that Slack could be that surface area of productivity for doing all your work in Salesforce or almost all of it and that the work comes to you. Your leads that you want to work that day or the trouble tickets if you're in service that you need to work on or if you built some custom apps, you know, we have our bug tracking system called Gus. Have that come to me in Slack and so that Salesforce can actually be the interface for Salesforce can be Slack. And that we can be inspired by that to make Slack the interface for all enterprise work.
Yeah, really having I well, they heard it in the keynote this morning is Slack is really the engagement layer for the intelligent enterprise, which is pretty amazing. And we have our amazing new friend, Slack bot.
