Slack Gets 30 New AI Features and I’m Already Exhausted

Remember when Slack was just a place to send GIFs and pretend you were working? Those days are officially over. Salesforce just announced a massive AI overhaul for Slack, dropping 30 new features that promise to transform how we work. Or at least, that’s the pitch.

As someone who reviews AI toolkits for a living, I’ve seen this movie before. A company announces dozens of AI features, everyone gets excited, and then six months later we’re all still using the same three functions we always did. But Slack’s makeover deserves a closer look, because this isn’t just feature bloat—it’s a fundamental reimagining of what workplace communication software should do.

What’s Actually Happening

Salesforce revealed these 30 new features at a gathering in San Francisco, building on the January update that gave Slackbot agentic capabilities. That’s tech speak for “it can actually do things now instead of just answering questions.” The new features will roll out over the coming months, and they’re designed to integrate AI deeply into work workflows.

The newly available Slackbot positions itself as a personal AI agent for work, grounded in your company’s data, workflows, and Slack conversations. It’s meant to live right in the flow of work, which sounds convenient until you realize that means AI is now watching everything you type.

The Honest Assessment

Here’s what I actually think: some of these features will be genuinely useful. AI that can summarize long threads, surface relevant information from past conversations, and help you find that one message from three months ago? That’s solving real problems. I’ve lost hours of my life scrolling through Slack history trying to find a specific link or decision.

But 30 features? That’s a lot. And in my experience reviewing AI tools, quantity rarely equals quality. Most users will probably find value in maybe five to seven of these features, while the rest will sit unused, cluttering up the interface and making the learning curve steeper.

The agentic capabilities are where things get interesting and slightly concerning. An AI that can take actions on your behalf sounds great until it takes the wrong action. I’m curious to see how Salesforce handles permissions, oversight, and the inevitable mistakes that will happen when you give AI the keys to your workplace communication.

The Real Question

What I want to know—and what Salesforce hasn’t fully answered yet—is how much of this AI integration is optional. Can you turn it off? Can you pick and choose which features you want? Or is this going to be one of those situations where AI gets shoved into every corner of the product whether you want it there or not?

Because here’s the thing about AI in productivity tools: it’s only productive if it actually saves you time. If you’re spending hours learning new features, troubleshooting AI mistakes, or fighting with an overeager assistant that keeps interrupting your workflow, you’re not more productive. You’re just more frustrated.

What This Means for Users

If you’re already using Slack, you’re going to get these features whether you asked for them or not. My advice? Don’t try to learn all 30 at once. Wait for them to roll out, pay attention to which ones actually solve problems you have, and ignore the rest.

For companies evaluating Slack versus other communication platforms, this AI push might be a selling point or a red flag, depending on your perspective. If you’re all-in on AI transformation, Slack’s new capabilities could be exactly what you need. If you’re skeptical about AI or worried about data privacy, you might want to dig into the details before committing.

The truth is, we won’t know if these 30 features are brilliant or bloated until people actually use them in real work environments. Salesforce is clearly betting big on AI as the future of workplace software, and Slack is their testing ground.

I’ll be watching to see which features people actually adopt and which ones quietly disappear into the settings menu, never to be touched again. My prediction? A handful will become indispensable, most will be forgotten, and we’ll all still be sending too many GIFs.

🕒 Published: April 1, 2026