Slack announced it has rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up, repositioning the familiar in-app helper as a “personal, context-aware AI agent” designed to reduce the time employees spend searching for decisions, summarizing conversations, and tracking down files across channels and tools.
The company framed the update as a response to what it calls the “work of work”—the overhead of catching up on scattered messages and documents before real work can begin. By living natively inside Slack, the new Slackbot is designed to use a user’s existing context—such as the channels they participate in, the people they collaborate with, and the files and canvases they access—to answer questions and produce outputs that match team workflows.
Slack emphasized that the new Slackbot only draws from information a user is authorized to view, relying on existing Slack permissions and access controls. The company said this context-first approach is intended to improve accuracy over generic assistants that require repeated prompting and background explanations, and to help users move faster from information gathering to decision-making.
According to Slack, Slackbot can generate personalized briefings, clarify complex threads, draft content in a user’s voice, and surface insights across conversations and connected enterprise systems. When queried, Slackbot evaluates signals including recent conversations, calendars, shared documents, and project decisions, then synthesizes results into structured outputs such as meeting prep, stakeholder alignment notes, emails, briefs, onboarding content, summaries, and other workplace materials.
Slack highlighted three everyday use cases: quickly synthesizing cross-channel discussion into themes, risks, opportunities, and next steps; producing first drafts in a user’s style by pulling relevant context from channels and files; and analyzing long documents such as transcripts, spreadsheets, PDFs, and slide decks to extract insights, locate specific data, and identify trends—while cross-referencing file content with Slack conversations for added context.
The company also positioned Slackbot as part of a broader AI stack that combines native AI features—such as in-the-moment summarization and translation—with enterprise search that can retrieve information from connected apps and drives. Slack said Slackbot merges these capabilities into a conversational workflow that can adapt as context changes in real time, with the goal of shifting from “help me find information” to “help me identify, plan, and act.”
On security, Slack said Slackbot is protected by “Slack AI Guardrails,” describing a multi-layered safety framework aimed at securing customer data, enforcing strict permission checks, and mitigating threats such as prompt injection, unsafe content, and phishing attempts. Slack added that user interactions with Slackbot remain private to the user, and that the tool adheres to Slack’s security and compliance standards.
Slack said Slackbot will roll out to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers via a phased deployment beginning now and continuing through January and February. The company also promoted a January 29 webinar to demonstrate new features, and said users will be able to access Slackbot from an icon near the search bar once it becomes available in their workspace.
KEY QUOTES
“AI has raised expectations in our personal lives, but work is fundamentally different. To truly be useful at work, AI needs context: an understanding of your conversations, your tools, and how decisions actually get made. With Slackbot, we’ve built an intuitive, deeply native experience inside Slack that people can trust to help them move work forward, not just answer questions.”
Slack (company statement)
“Slackbot is saving me, at bare minimum, 90 minutes a day. I ask it to create a canvas for a meeting tomorrow, and in 17 seconds it’s better than I could ever do. It tells me next steps, saving time and money.” “Slackbot is my brilliant colleague whose status is always green/available and is working right next to me in Slack. Instead of switching between multiple applications and windows and losing my train of thought, I can ask Slackbot questions and have it conduct research and create content without ever leaving Slack, the place I am working all day. It’s transformed how efficiently I move through my day — no context switching, no friction.” “Slackbot has been an absolute chaos tamer for our team. It’s not just for simple tasks; it’s like having a virtual assistant, with far more context based on our business than any external tool.”
Slack users (identities not provided)
