Ryan Gavin, Slack EVP & CMO on AI-Powered Enterprise Growth

**Grace Gong** (0:02)
We are live. Hi, Ryan. Welcome to Venture with Grace.

**Ryan Gavin** (0:05)
Hey, thanks for having me, Grace. So good to be here.

**Grace Gong** (0:09)
I am so excited to chat with you again because you're such an icon. Before we jump into the show, I want to give a quick shout out to our amazing sponsor.
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**Ryan Gavin** (0:47)
I'll say hi to my friends at Nebius too. I have a team over there, so I'll say hi.

**Grace Gong** (0:52)
Love it. Okay.
I want to start with since the last time we tried, last time we tried was at Dreamforce, and obviously Slack was going everything agent. Honestly, oh my God, I prepared my Slack pin, I'll say.

**Ryan Gavin** (1:08)
Wow.

**Grace Gong** (1:11)
I'm sorry. I think I lost it in my bag or something. I disappeared this morning.
I had the Slack pin ready, so I was playing the games to earn the Slack pin, because it was like you have to do three different questions, right? I remember. Yeah. But eventually I got the Slack pin, so it was very worth it.

**Ryan Gavin** (1:34)
We got you a Slack bot plushie yet?

**Grace Gong** (1:38)
I do have it from the Slack bot conference. I actually have it in my next room, but it was such a cutie. I'll show people at the end of the stream.
I want to start with since I feel like one of the most interesting, obviously there's so many really interesting things going on, and I went to the Slack's developer conference lately as well. Everyone's talking about a Slack bot. Essentially, yesterday, I personally, myself, I was doing a Cloud Maxing video that my biggest idea right now is to connecting.
For example, if I'm tracking down a startup using, basically, if I see a newsletter or news announcement about a startup, that I want to track it, I'll put it in, connecting my Cloud with Slack bot, and connect to Slack, and then connect Slack to Notion. So essentially, I just put it in my Slack, and then the data will be clean on Notion, so that's my current idea. But Slack bot can do so much more. Maybe we could jump into what's new since last time.

**Ryan Gavin** (2:49)
Yeah. Listen, Slack bot is certainly having a moment. It's the fastest growing feature in Salesforce history.
If you just look at the adoption inside of Salesforce alone, you can always see how a product is going to progress sometimes by looking at how quickly something gets adopted internally and grows. I've got a bunch of little stories I could share. But for those who aren't aware, Slack bot is this integrated personal agent right inside of Slack. It's built and runs off of Claude. So think of it as basically you've got Claude backed AI assistant. But what makes it special is it's not just an AI LLM integrated into Slack. It knows the context of everything that you know in Slack. So it knows all of your unstructured messages that you have access to that's set up automatically. So permissions are your permissions, which is really important. Then it goes beyond just the unstructured data, all the conversations that you're having Slack, and to your point, it connects to all your enterprise systems. So whether it be Microsoft and Microsoft Teams, or whether it be your OneDrive account or Google Drive, or Jira, or GitHub, it connects to all these systems and Salesforce on the CRM side.
Now, as you're working with Slackbot, and as you're asking questions, and as you're building together, it can pull and post data across all those systems, connecting the unstructured data into this cornucopia of AI goodness that really is transformative for personal productivity, and now team productivity.
It's just been wild to watch the success of it. One of the recent features that's just recently rolled out, that's going a gangbusters is Slackbot skills. And so this is the way for allowing Slackbot to have reusable skills that can be saved and can be shared across your organization. And these skills can be as elaborate as building out and preparing a multi-stage customer meeting presentation, updating data in a CRM system, pulling data from across the web so that every time you're sitting down for a customer meeting, you have a complete deck built out, you've got a complete briefing, you've got your documents updated, and you've got new data posted in the CRM, all run off a skill. And so, just a little anecdote, we had this meeting earlier today, in fact, and we were looking across the whole marketing organization, we're doing a full review of all the progress that we have against our goal. We call it V2 Mob here at Salesforce. And it was amazing because in every single one of the conversations where people were reporting on their goal and their progress, inevitably, they came up, oh, and we built a Slackbot skill that's helping us do this, and we built a Slackbot skill that's helping us do this faster, or wow, this used to take us many, many hours, and now the Slackbot skill is doing it in seconds. And you can just see the transformation that's happening. Slackbot is an incredible tool because it's approachable, it doesn't make you think, it shows up right in the flow of work, like with you and I, we're having a conversation. And the adoption and the customer success level has just been off the charts. Everyone from the largest companies in the world, like Amazon, all the way through to the entropics of the world. I mean, the value that it's seeing is really showing no bounds right now. So it's pretty exciting.