Slack has launched the revamped version of Slackbot, with generative AI (genAI) features that let workers more easily find information and create documents. The feature is generally available for certain paid Slack plans as of today, the company announced Tuesday . Down the road, it will coordinate other AI agents to complete tasks in other apps. “The new Slackbot release addresses a common AI challenge: generating accurate responses that are informed by relevant context,” said Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president at IDC. “Since Slack is often integrated across a large number of enterprise applications, it a logical choice to create an enterprise search that lives within the flow of work.” There are already numerous AI assistants available to office workers, from general purpose assistants such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude to the AI tools built into productivity apps sold by Google, Microsoft, Notion, Zoom, and others. Slackbot’s strength is that it’s built natively into Slack’s collaboration app, said Rob Seaman, chief product officer and interim CEO at Slack. This means it immediately has knowledge of a user’s work life, with access to conversation and files, as well as enterprise data from connected sources. “The advantages are proximity and context,” Seaman said in an interview. “It knows what you’re working on, and it knows what your company’s priorities are because it can access what you have access to within Slack.” Slackbot has been around since Slack launched more than a decade ago. Slack users will likely have received notifications via the bot, or used it for simple tasks such as setting reminders. The previous version relied on rule-based automation, while the updated assistant is powered by a large language model (LLM). (Slack declined to say which LLM it uses; CNBC and Venturebeat reported that it relies on  Claude .) Slack users can converse with Slackbot in natural language as they do with most AI assistants. One of the primary use cases is search: Slackbot can query all data a user is permitted to access across Slack and Salesforce, as well as connected enterprise sources such as Google Drive and OneDrive. This can help users track down files, or get a summary of the progress of a particular project, for instance. Slackbot can also generate Slack canvas documents based on user prompts, and check calendars to help set up meetings between coworkers. Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, trialed the AI assistant internally prior to launch, with 25,000 weekly active users in just a few weeks “through word of mouth,” said Seaman. “We didn’t do any in-product nudging.” Seaman highlighted some of the ways the AI assistant has been used by the Slack product engineering team. Before a recent all-hands meeting, for instance, he asked Slackbot check the meeting deck and provide guidance on how to pronounce the names of more than 60 new hires. The AI assistant has also been used to collate product development feedback from a Slack channel. “In seconds, I have a summarized view of the feedback — positive and negative — which would have taken a product manager hours or maybe a week historically,” he said. Slackbot then turned the feedback into a product brief and a sprint plan, creating canvas documents with information for the engineering team, he said. And sales teams at the company used Slackbot to get a quick rundown of clients they haven’t spoken to yet in relation to a particular product. Seaman also described plans to enable Slackbot to interact with other AI agents. There are already many examples of customers deploying agents into Slack, he said, whether custom-built Agentforce agents or the likes of Atlassian, Cursor, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex. “Users shouldn’t have to think about what agent to go to and for what task,” he said, stressing the company wants Slackbot to “act as a concierge and make hand-offs to the appropriate task or tool or agent in the moment.” That will mean Slackbot acting as a model context protocol (MCP) client as well as server, he said, though the “handoff” will be built into the Slack UI. “We think of it as a super agent that’s going to help you connect with these other agents … and ideally they speak to each other,” said Seaman. These features are still under development and not currently available. Other planned capabilities include the ability for Slackbot to access a user’s screen (opt-in required) to view information such as a canvas document they are working on. Slackbot is now generally available to customers on Business+ and Enterprise+ plans. The rollout follows pricing changes last year that eliminated separate AI add-ons and raised the price of the Business+ tier to $15 per user per month.