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

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

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 Hot ai: Oxford Researcher Warns That AI Is Heading for a Hindenburg-St

Is the AI bubble going to burst? Will it cause the economy to go up in flames? Both analogies may be apt if you’re to believe one leading expert’s warning that the industry may be heading for a Hindenburg-style disaster.

“The Hindenburg disaster destroyed global interest in airships; it was a dead technology from that point on, and a similar moment is a real risk for AI,” Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, told The Guardian.

It may be hard to believe now, but before the German airship crashed in 1937, ponderously large dirigibles once seemed to represent the future of globe-spanning transportation, in an era when commercial airplanes, if you’ll permit the pun, hadn’t really taken off yet. And the Hindenburg, the largest airship in the world at the time, was the industry’s crowning achievement — as well as a propaganda vehicle for Nazi Germany.

At over 800 feet long, it wasn’t far off the length of the Titanic — another colossus whose name became synonymous with disaster — and regularly ferried dozens of passengers on Trans-Atlantic trips. All those ambitions were vaporized, however, when the ship suddenly burst into flames as it attempted a landing in New Jersey. The horrific fireball was attributed to a critical flaw: the hundreds of thousands of pounds of hydrogen it was filled with were ignited by an unfortunate spark. 

The inferno was filmed, photographed and broadcasted around the world in a media frenzy that sealed the airship industry’s future. Could AI, with its over a trillion dollars of investment, head the same way? It’s not unthinkable. 

“It’s the classic technology scenario,” Wooldridge told the newspaper. “You’ve got a technology that’s very, very promising, but not as rigorously tested as you would like it to be, and the commercial pressure behind it is unbearable.”

Perhaps AI could be responsible for a catastrophic spectacle, such as a deadly software update for self-driving cars, or a bad AI-driven decision collapsing a major company, Wooldridge suggests. But his main concern are the glaring safety flaws still present in AI chatbots, despite them being widely deployed. On top of having pitifully weak guardrails and being wildly unpredictable, AI chatbots are designed to affect human-like personas and, to keep users engaged, be sycophantic.

Together, these can encourage a user’s negative thoughts and lead them down mental health spirals fraught with delusions and even full-blown breaks with reality. These episodes of so-called AI psychosis have resulted in stalking, suicide and murder. AI’s ticking time bomb isn’t a payload of combustible hydrogen, but millions of potentially psychosis-inducing conversations. OpenAI alone admitted that ChatGPT that more than half a million people were having conversations that showed signs of psychosis every week.

“Companies want to present AIs in a very human-like way, but I think that is a very dangerous path to take,” Wooldridge told The Guardian. “We need to understand that these are just glorified spreadsheets, they are tools and nothing more than that.”

If AI has a place for us in the future, it should be as cold, impartial assistants — not cloying friends that pretend to have all the answers. A shining example of this, according to Wooldridge, is how in an early episode of “Star Trek,” the Enterprise’s computer says it has “insufficient data” to answer a question (and in a voice that is robotic, not personable.)

“That’s not what we get. We get an overconfident AI that says: yes, here’s the answer,” he told The Guardian. “Maybe we need AIs to talk to us in the voice of the ‘Star Trek’ computer. You would never believe it was a human being.”

More on AI: It Turns Out That Constantly Telling Workers They’re About to Be Replaced by AI Has Grim Psychological Effects

The post Oxford Researcher Warns That AI Is Heading for a Hindenburg-Style Disaster appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com