A New Era Begins: Meet Your Personal AI Agent for Work (Slack)

Enthusiasm defines the Indian workforce. We are fast, we are hungry for innovation, and we are adopting AI faster than almost anyone else. In fact, 67% of Indian employees are already using AI tools in their daily grind, and 60% have hands-on experience with AI agents.

But let’s be honest about the other side of that coin. 

Despite this tech-forward attitude, teams are stretched thin. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day to keep pace with demands, leading to delayed innovations and frustrated teams. 

Approvals that bounce across tools, customer escalations buried in threads, “where’s that doc?” to-and-fro, and the kind of context-switching that turns a 10-minute task into a 60-minute safari. We are spending hours “coordinating” work rather than doing it. 

We call this the “admin debt.” And the cost is staggering.

 According to our latest State of Work report, individuals who don’t use agents spend nearly 40% more time on administrative tasks compared to those who do. That is almost two full days a week lost to the “work of work”—time that should be spent on product innovation, market expansion, and building customer relationships.

The solution isn’t just “more AI.” It’s a different kind of AI. 

Welcome to the Agentic Era.

From “chatting” to “doing”: The agentic difference

For the past few years, we’ve looked at AI as a smart reference librarian. You ask it a question, and it summarises an answer. It’s helpful, but it’s passive.

Agentic AI changes the game. These aren’t just tools that offer suggestions; they are specialised digital teammates that can reason through complex challenges and act.

Think of the difference this way:

• Generative AI (The Old Way): You paste a messy email thread into a chatbot and ask, “summarise this.” It gives you a paragraph. You still must write the reply, update the Jira ticket, and schedule the meeting.
• Agentic AI (The New Way): You tell an agent, “Handle the approvals for Project Alpha.” The agent understands the context, pings the right people in Slack, updates the Salesforce record, and flags the one item that needs your human eye.

That’s the promise of AI agents in the workflow: a teammate inside Slack that can reason, retrieve, and act with context. Slack’s core bet is simple: when AI lives where work already happens, it becomes grounded in conversations, permissions, and real business systems and thus, useful, safe, and measurable.

This is a fundamental shift. These agents go beyond basic automation to handle sophisticated tasks with minimal supervision, giving your human workforce the room to focus on what truly matters: strategic thinking and creative problem-solving.

Meet your latest MVP: The new Slackbot

The future of self-service has arrived with major upgrades to Slackbot, evolving past just being a notification centre. Slackbot is an active participant in your workflow. It connects to your enterprise tools and acts as the orchestration layer for your business. Whether it’s managing routine inquiries from employees or streamlining expense approvals organisation-wide, Slackbot is the “always-on” teammate that never gets tired of paperwork.

It turns Slack from a place where you talk about work into a place where work happens automatically.

For CIOs and CTOs, the new Slackbot isn’t just about intelligence; it’s about seamlessness. There is nothing to install, nothing to learn, and no new interface to master. It lives where your work already happens.

Ironing out the wrinkles: The Wolf & Badger story

To understand what this “frictionless” future looks like, we can look at Wolf & Badger, the global retailer for independent brands.

Now layer agents on top of that operating model:

• The same channels that hold decisions become living knowledge-banks for agents.
• The same workflows that route approvals become agent-triggered actions.
• The same cross-functional collaboration becomes measurable cycle-time reduction, not just “better communication.”

That is the power of combining a strong digital foundation with agentic capabilities. You don’t just smooth out the wrinkles; you prevent the fabric from bunching up at all.

The “Shadow AI” trap (And how to fix it)

However, a word of caution for Indian technology leaders: Your teams are already trying to use these tools — but they might be doing it dangerously.

Our research found a concerning gap: 51% of employees in India are using unsanctioned AI tools or aren’t sure if their tools are approved. This “Shadow AI” creates a massive disconnect. Your workforce wants productivity, but without clear policies, they are operating in a grey area that exposes your organisation to security vulnerabilities and compliance issues.

The challenge isn’t employee resistance  —it’s the opposite. Indian workers are ready to embrace AI agents (79% believe parts of their job could be replaced by them). They are just waiting for you to provide the platform.

The “agent-ready” playbook for Indian enterprises

The companies that win in this new era won’t be the ones with the flashiest individual tools. They will be the ones who integrate agents into a secure, governed ecosystem.

To capitalise on this opportunity, leaders must take decisive action:

• Make Slack the secure place where agents live: Bring AI into an approved, governed environment — where identity, access, and auditing exist. Slack positions itself as that work OS: one place to connect people, apps, data, and agents via Slack Work OS
• Start with high-volume, low-glamour wins: Agents cut down admin work significantly. Target workflows like ticket triage, policy Q&A, status reporting, and approvals for immediate and visible impact. Agentic automation guide
• Train leaders and teams to “manage by outcomes”: Reframe and elevate employee roles: people focus on strategy, creativity, and customer moments; agents handle the repeatable glue work. 
•  Put policy in the flow of work: Clear AI policies shouldn’t live in a forgotten PDF. They should show up in channels, canvases, workflows, and through Slackbot, answering “what’s approved?” in seconds. 

The future isn’t about replacing the Indian workforce; it’s about making it limitless. It’s about taking the ambition and energy that defines our market and giving it the ultimate force multiplier.