Slack wants to bring AI bots into the conversation

Driving the news: Ahead of Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference on Tuesday, Slack announced it would support agents from Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Perplexity, Writer and others, in addition to those from Salesforce.

• It is also expanding the Slack AI features it debuted earlier this year to include transcripts of informal video chat sessions, known as huddles.

Why it matters: Slack's announcement comes as Salesforce is pushing the notion that generative AI can power agents that act autonomously rather than simply be a co-pilot empowering humans to work more efficiently.

What they're saying: "This vision around Slack being the AI-powered work operating system is really kind of congruent with the whole vision around agents coming into work," Slack CEO Denise Dresser told Axios.

• Dresser declined to say how many paying customers Slack has gotten for its AI features, which carry their own separate monthly fee.
• The company had originally planned to make Slack AI an all-or-nothing proposition, meaning customers had to either pay for all their Slack-using employees to use the features or none. However, it reversed course after pushback.