📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles M

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: Sam Altman Says AI Will Cause Massive Deflation, Maki

OpenAI is betting in the biggest way possible on a future ruled by AI. It’s committing to spending well over $1 trillion to build out enormous data centers — despite business fundamentals lagging far behind, stoking fears over troubling days ahead.

During a town hall livestreamed on Monday, CEO Sam Altman admitted that the company was looking to pump the brakes, revealing that it’s looking to “dramatically slow down” hiring as the company continues to burn through billions of dollars each quarter.

At the same time, Altman remained characteristically bullish about what his company’s tech will soon offer to the world. When asked if AI can be used to “solve economic gaps that have existed for decades,” the executive argued that it’s “going to be massively deflationary.”

“Given, certainly, progress with work you can do in front of a computer, but also what looks like it will soon happen with robotics and a bunch of other things, we’re going to have massively deflationary pressure,” he predicted.

As a result of this deflationary pressure, Altman promised that things would get “radically cheaper” and the “empowerment of individual people” will go up as money becomes more valuable — which, it’s worth noting, would be an inversion of virtually every economic system in history, which have overwhelmingly been inflationary.

Altman reasoned that these economic changes would be the result of AI allowing individuals to be vastly more productive. He argued that by the end of this year, an individual spending $1,000 on inference — essentially the cost of running an AI — could complete a piece of software in a short period of time, a task that would have previously taken a whole team a much longer period.

It’s not the first time Altman has argued that AI could make money more valuable. In March, he claimed that AI will have a deflationary impact on the global economy during a closed-door Morgan Stanley conference.

The broader argument that AI could lead to an age of “abundance” in which the cost of living starts to decrease — and that we could even choose not to work if we didn’t want to — has long been deployed by tech leaders, including Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk, to drive the AI hype cycle.

But given the current state of the economy, such a point remains little more than a daydream. The reality is that AI is still incredibly far from boosting efficiency enough to offset inflation. Just earlier today, the US Federal Reserve held interest rates steady, citing ongoing concerns over “elevated” inflation.

In fact, AI has more frequently been linked to mass layoffs that make it harder to survive. Long-term unemployment hit a four-year high earlier this year as jobseekers struggled to find new work. The cost of living has also continued to climb, particularly in larger US cities.

Whether AI will come to the rescue and dramatically bring down prices remains to be seen, as uncomfortable questions surrounding the tech’s viability linger.

Researchers have shown that AI is largely failing to boost productivity, at least in its current form. Surveys have found that the number of people using AI at work is falling, a troubling trend that flies in the face of promises made by tech leaders. Many of these workers argue that AI is essentially useless to them, despite their employers’ insistence that it’s revolutionary, productivity-boosting tech.

To AI’s many critics, it’s a dead end. Some have argued that OpenAI itself could be a house of cards that’s one run on the banks away from collapsing in on itself.

In short, there are plenty of reasons to remain skeptical of Altman’s claims that AI will put more buying power into each of our pockets as productivity goes stratospheric. He’s also gone as far as to argue that AI could cure cancer, solve climate change, and alleviate our financial struggles with “universal extreme health.”

Musk has similarly prophesied that “there will be no poverty in the future, and so no need to save money.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also argued that we could one day work far less as a result of AI.

It’s an enormous bet — and Altman and his counterparts have plenty still to prove as reality continues to lag behind their lofty promises.

Even Altman himself isn’t entirely convinced that sudden abundance will actually be a good thing for the average person.

“Massively more abundance and access and massively decreased cost to be able to create new things, new companies, discover new science, whatever…” he said during this week’s town hall. “I think that should be an equalizing force in society and a way that people who have not gotten treated that fairly get a really good shot.”

“As long as we don’t screw up the policy around it in a big way,” he warned, “which could happen.”

More on Altman: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Is Slashing Its Hiring Pace as Financial Crunch Tightens

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🔗 Sumber: futurism.com