MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Micro

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

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: China’s hair-thin fiber chips bring computer-level processi

Chinese scientists have developed fully flexible fiber chips that embed complete electronic circuits inside strands as thin as human hair.

The advance brings electronic textiles closer to functioning like computers and displays, while remaining soft, stretchable, and machine washable.

The breakthrough, reported by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), comes from a research team at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Led by Peng Huisheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the group has spent more than a decade rethinking how electronic circuits could exist beyond rigid silicon wafers.

Instead of attaching flat chips to fabric, the researchers built computing systems that become the fabric itself.

Traditional microchips rely on rigid, planar substrates. The Fudan team replaced that approach with elastic substrates capable of hosting complete electronic circuits.

Researchers then rolled these substrates into thread-like fibers, forming what they call fiber integrated circuits, or FICs.

Each fiber measures roughly the thickness of a human hair. Despite its size, the fiber reaches a transistor density of 100,000 per centimetre.

That level matches the industry standard for very large-scale integration used in conventional processors.

At current laboratory photolithography limits, the fibers already support meaningful computing tasks. A 1 millimetre fiber chip can integrate tens of thousands of transistors, giving it information-processing capacity comparable to certain medical implant chips.

Extending the fiber length significantly increases computing power. A one-metre fiber could integrate millions of transistors, approaching the scale of classical computer central processing units.

Future advances in nanometre-scale photolithography could further boost integration density.

Unlike earlier fiber electronics that focused mainly on power delivery or sensing, the new fiber function as complete microcomputer systems.

Each strand integrates resistors, capacitors, diodes, and transistors with high-precision interconnections.

The system processes both digital and analogue signals. It also supports neural-style computing for image recognition tasks, matching the performance of modern in-memory image processors.

Built for real-world wear

The researchers designed the fibers to withstand conditions that rigid chips struggle to survive. In testing, the FICs endured more than 10,000 cycles of bending and abrasion.

They stretched up to 30 percent and twisted at 180 degrees per centimetre.

The fibers also remained functional after more than 100 wash cycles.

They tolerated temperatures up to 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) and survived compression beneath a 15.6-tonne container truck.

These results allowed the team to integrate power supply, sensing, computing, and display functions into a single independent fiber. That removes the need for bulky external chips or wiring in smart clothing.

Toward integrated systems

Over the past decade, the team has developed more than 30 types of functional fiber devices. These include fiber for energy storage, power generation, light emission, display, and biosensing.

The researchers have now demonstrated early scalable manufacturing of fiber chips in the laboratory. That suggests existing infrastructure could support future mass production.

“This fully flexible fiber system paves the way for the interactive patterns desired in cutting-edge applications such as brain-computer interfaces, smart textiles and virtual-reality wearables,” the team wrote.

The study is published in the journal Nature.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com