Salesforce just announced dozens of new Slackbot capabilities — including a note-taking capability across the entire desktop, reusable AI skills, and voice input. But of course, Slackbot is already saving users dozens of hours of work a week. The Salesforce Newsroom spoke to two Slackbot customers just before the launch event in San Francisco: Demetri Salvaggio, VP of Customer Experience and Operations at Engine, a travel platform designed for small and medium businesses, and Brandon Metcalf, CEO and Founder of Asymbl, a workforce orchestration company that helps businesses assemble hybrid teams of human and digital workers. (As in, helping people work with tools like Slackbot.) Here’s what they said about what Slackbot does for their businesses — and their peace of mind.
How Slackbot Helps Leadership
Slackbot is a meaningful time-saver for leaders (and anyone else navigating information overload). At Engine, Slackbot has become a daily companion for catching up after back-to-back meetings — surfacing action items, pending questions, and missed threads without anyone needing to manually comb through dozens of channels. At Asymbl, the impact is felt at both leadership and employee levels: preparing for meetings, organizing thoughts, and getting smart recommendations about what to prioritize.
Demetri Salvaggio, VP of Customer Experience and Operations, Engine: “We were early adopters with Slackbot, and in the early days, it helped calm the chaos of all the different things that are going on at any given time in Slack. Now, it’s saving a lot of hours in my week; Slackbot helps synthesize the dialog taking place across all of our channels. It’s great to come out of a meeting and ask Slackbot, ‘Is there something that’s waiting for my immediate response?’”
Slackbot and Other Digital Workers
As a workforce orchestration company, Asymbl has built a team of some 170 digital workers — named, managed, and measured like employees. (Teddy, for example, is an agentic sales development representative that engages with sales prospects and leads; Polly helps with People Operations, answering questions about benefits.) Slackbot sits at the center of that ecosystem, and those digital workers even consult Slackbot as part of their workflow. At Engine, Slackbot’s integration with Salesforce CRM has given the whole team a single place to pull account insights and case information without leaving Slack — a natural extension of a culture that was already Slack-native from day one.
Brandon Metcalf, CEO and Founder of Asymbl: “Slackbot, if you ask anyone on the team, is the favorite. It just gets how we work, why we work. Who we are. It works with other digital workers or agents. We’re not supposed to have favorites, but it’s by far our most favorite digital worker.”
Key Use Cases (and Unexpected Ones Too)
Both said their teams found their planned use cases — channel summarization, CRM integration, meeting prep — are delivering exactly as hoped. Engine has seen a 40% drop in sales rep research time, thanks to Slackbot’s ability to pull Salesforce data and synthesize conversations. But the surprises were just as compelling. At Engine, employees organically started using Slackbot to prepare for meetings — nobody assigned that use case; it just happened. At Asymbl, Metcalf stumbled on a more personal discovery while exploring what Slackbot knows about its users.
Metcalf: “The use cases for Slackbot are endless, if you will. It’s got a sense of humor, which makes it relatable as a co-worker and not just an AI bot. I asked it what animal I am, and apparently I’m a dolphin.”
AI Is About More Than Speed
The goal, Salvaggio said, shouldn’t just be speed — it should be capacity and clarity. Slackbot reduces the anxiety of falling behind, whether after a vacation or a string of back-to-back meetings, because people can get caught up without feeling overwhelmed.
Salvaggio: “Can Slackbot summarize and synthesize 40 channels? Sure, and it can do that really quickly. But it’s also giving clarity and freeing up capacity for folks to not have to go read 40 channels — to not have to put all that energy into understanding what’s going on in 40 different places.”
Advice to Other Companies
Start with the problem, not the technology. Salvaggio recommended defining what “better” looks like before deploying anything — whether that’s faster resolution times, sharper leadership decision-making, or reduced context switching — and then measuring exactly those things, quantitatively and qualitatively. Metcalf encouraged companies to treat AI not as a tool but as labor: Give it a job, understand why that job exists, define what success looks like, and manage it accordingly.
Metcalf: “You have to think about what you’re really trying to accomplish when measuring AI impact. It’s not just the technology. If you think about these AI tools as workers, and you give them jobs to be done, and you understand their motivation for success for those jobs, then all of a sudden you approach it differently. How do you onboard them? How do you coach them? How do you make sure they’re doing what you need them to do in the flow of work where you need them to do it?”
Everyone, in other words, is a manager now, guiding their digital teammates to perform, even as their own performance and impact continues to rise.
Go Deeper:
- An advice column for the agentic age: Ask Slackbot
- Watch the keynote recap from the event
- For Gen Z workers, software has to be as intuitive as social media
Just For You
Connect with your team in new ways with Slack
Just For You
Connect with your team in new ways with Slack
