📌 TOPINDIATOURS Update ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battle

Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees.

The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete.

"Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce."

From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up

Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche."

The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations.

"It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data."

Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbot brand despite the fundamental technical overhaul. "People know what Slackbot is, and so we wanted to carry that forward," Harris said.

Why Anthropic's Claude powers the new Slackbot — and which AI models could come next

The new Slackbot runs on Claude, Anthropic's large language model, a choice driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack's commercial service operates under FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve U.S. federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was "the only provider that could give us a compliant LLM" when Slack began building the new system.

But that exclusivity won't last. "We are, this year, going to support additional providers," Harris said. "We have a great relationship with Google. Gemini is incredible — performance is great, cost is great. So we're going to use Gemini for some things." He added that OpenAI remains a possibility as well.

Harris echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's view that large language models are becoming commoditized: "You've heard Marc talk about LLMs are commodities, that they're democratized. I call them CPUs."

On the sensitive question of training data, Harris was unequivocal: Salesforce does not train any models on customer data. "Models don't have any sort of security," he explained. "If we trained it on some confidential conversation that you and I have, I don't want Carolyn to know — if I train it into the LLM, there is no way for me to say you get to see the answer, but Carolyn doesn't."

Inside Salesforce's internal experiment: 80,000 employees tested Slackbot with striking results

Salesforce has been testing the new Slackbot internally for months, rolling it out to all 80,000 employees. According to Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, the results have been striking: "It's the fastest adopted product in Salesforce history."

Internal data shows that two-thirds of Salesforce employees have tried the new Slackbot, with 80% of those users continuing to use it regularly. Internal satisfaction rates reached 96% — the highest for any AI feature Slack has shipped. Employees report saving between two and 20 hours per week.

The adoption happened largely organically. "I think it was about five days, and a Canvas was developed by our employees called 'The Most Stealable Slackbot Prompts,'" Gavin said. "People just started adding to it organically. I think it's up to 250-plus prompts that are in this Canvas right now."

Kate Crotty, a principal UX researcher at Salesforce, found that 73% of internal adoption was driven by social sharing rather than top-down mandates. "Everybody is there to help each other learn and communicate hacks," she said.

How Slackbot transforms scattered enterprise data into executive-ready insights

During a product demonstration, Amy Bauer, Slack's product experience designer, showed how Slackbot can synthesize information across multiple sources. In one example, she asked Slackbot to analyze customer feedback from a pilot program, upload an image of a usage dashboard, and have Slackbot correlate the qualitative and quantitative data.

"This is where Slackbot really earns its keep for me," Bauer explained. "What it's doing is not just simply reading the image — it's actually looking at the image and comparing it to the insight it just generated for me."

Slackbot can then query Salesforce to find enterprise accounts with open deals that might be good candidates for early access, creating what Bauer called "a really great justification and plan to move forward." Finally, it can synthesize all that information into a Canvas — Slack's collaborative document format — and find calendar availability among stakeholders to schedule a review meeting.

"Up until this point, we have been working in a one-to-one capacity with Slackbot," Bauer said. "But one of the benefits that I can do now is take this insight and have it generate this into a Canvas, a shared workspace where I can iterate on it, refine it with Slackbot, or share it out with my team."

Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer, said the Canvas creation demonstrates where the product is heading: "This is making a tool call internally to Slack Canvas to actually write, effectively, a shared document. But it signals where we're going with Slackbot — we're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls."

MrBeast's company became a Slackbot guinea pig—and employees say they're saving 90 minutes a day

Among Salesforce's pilot customers is Beast Industries, the parent company of YouTube star MrBeast. Luis Madrigal, the company's chief information officer, joined the launch announcement to describe his experience.

"As somebody who has rolled out enterprise technologies for over two decades now, this was practically one of the easiest," Madrigal …

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: NASA Deploys Orbital Telescope Designed to Do Somethi

On Sunday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stuffed with cargo carried a brand new NASA telescope into space, where it was observed deploying in Sun-synchronous orbit, the agency later confirmed.

Dubbed Pandora, the orbital observatory is designed to hunt for distant worlds called exoplanets orbiting other stars. And though not nearly as large or expensive as the James Webb Space Telescope, the 17-inch lens packs a specialized punch that’ll help astronomers do something that was unthinkable just a decade or two ago: glean clues from individual exoplanets too remote for even the mighty Webb to pick up on.

Pandora’s mission will last a year, during which it’s expected to complete observations of at least 20 exoplanets — as well, in a novel development, of the stars they orbit.

This will “shatter a barrier,” according to University of Arizona astronomer Daniel Apai, whose team helped build the telescope — helping “remove a source of noise in the data that limits our ability to study small exoplanets in detail and search for life on them,” he wrote in a new piece for The Conversation.

Exoplanets are incredibly difficult to find, and even harder to study. Look up into the night sky, and you will effortlessly spot millions of stars. The first exoplanet, in contrast, wasn’t confirmed until 1992; to this day, astronomers have found only around 6,000 planets around other stars, a task hindered because the little-if-any light they reflect is blown out by that of nearby stars.

To espy distant worlds, astronomers look for when a planet passes in front of its star from our perspective. This is called a transit, and it produces a noticeable dip in the starlight. What’s more, astronomers can analyze the light to tease out properties of the planet it passes through, like the chemicals in its atmosphere. Apai, who is also co-investigator of Pandora, compares this to holding a glass of wine up to a candle: “The light filtering through will show fine details that reveal the quality of the wine.”

Likewise, “by analyzing starlight filtered through the planets’ atmospheres,” he continued, “astronomers can find evidence for water vapor, hydrogen, clouds and even search for evidence of life.”

Astronomers have relied on this clever trick for decades, but recent research, some of it spearheaded by Apai and his colleagues, has shown that it can have a serious flaw. Cooler, volatile regions on the surface of stars, called starspots, can fudge the signals astronomers see, even tricking them into mistaking the water vapor around a star for being present on the planet. Essentially, “we were trying to judge our wine in light of flickering, unstable candles,” Apai said.

That’s where Pandora comes in. Being purpose-built for exoplanet hunting, it can spend far more time observing them than Webb, whose precious time is always in hot demand. Even better, Pandora will observe the stars themselves for 24 hours at a time with infrared and visible light sensors, closely monitoring how the starspots form and evolve. Over the course of its year-long mission, the telescope will revisit each star ten times, racking up hundreds of hours of observations.

“With that information, our Pandora team will be able to figure out how the changes in the stars affect the observed planetary transits,” Apai wrote.

More on exoplanets: James Webb Discovers Planet Shaped Like Lemon

The post NASA Deploys Orbital Telescope Designed to Do Something Incredible appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com