Slack Is Now Salesforce's Front Door for AI and Productivity

Sean Nolan: Hi there. This is Sean Nolan from UC Today, and we are here at Dreamforce 2026. I'm joined by Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, and we're going to talk about some of the key takeaways and our perspectives on the week so far. So Irwin, how have you found the event so far? Irwin Lazar: It's been great. It's 5,000 people. Irwin Lazar: It's chaos in a controlled way. It really is impressive how Salesforce has such a connection with the city of San Francisco. They easily could have moved this event to Las Vegas or Orlando, or a place better suited for a large audience. But they keep it here, and they keep it in the heart of the city, so it's always a good event to come to. Sean Nolan: Great. Yeah, and yesterday we had a really mega keynote and a lot of new announcements and new product launches came out. What stood out from the keynote yesterday and from the announcements that Salesforce made? Was there anything that really stood out to you in terms of UC and productivity and the workplace? Irwin Lazar: Yeah, I think AIforce, specifically Slackforce, was really, for me, the key takeaway. I cover the collaboration and unified communications space. Irwin Lazar: It's been a few years now since Salesforce bought Slack. We spent years having this discussion of Slack versus Microsoft Teams, and I think Slack was almost wandering a little bit in the darkness, trying to figure out what it turns into under the Salesforce umbrella. And I think that's really clear now. It was front and center in the keynote. Irwin Lazar: The fact that now Salesforce views Slack as this place where people can not only just work together, but they can work with AI agents, they can bring their AI agents into it. The agents can communicate within channels, people can communicate with agents in channels. So I think it really ties nicely into the headless strategy that Salesforce unveiled, I guess, about a year ago now, where they want to make all of the data from Salesforce accessible by a variety of different user interfaces. Irwin Lazar: And Slack is really ideal as a primary user interface for that. Sean Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that we heard many times yesterday, and in the briefings before the event, was about this idea that you don't need to log into Salesforce anymore, and that actually the interface was exactly where you are working. So whether you're working in Slack or whether working in Claude, you'll be able to access Salesforce and its capabilities from that, without having to go to the interface, which I think for a long time was the main focus for a lot of SaaS companies. Sean Nolan: You've got to get the people to your interface, to your homepage, and then once you've done that, you're set. But actually now what we're finding is that that interface is no longer as important. And with this headless strategy, people can start work and access Salesforce from where they're actually doing their work day to day. What do you think is the impact of that in terms of productivity, and helping people to smoothly carry out their work day to day, and the flow of work generally in the enterprise? Irwin Lazar: Yeah, I think it reduces task switching. So like you said, the goal has always been: get people to work within my application, versus into their application, my competitor's, as an example. And that's not the way people work. People work across different applications, depending on what it is that they're working on. And if they have to go and copy information into Slack because I've hit a challenge... Irwin Lazar: I need to talk to somebody, I need to share something, that may not be as easy as it sounds, or it just creates some additional challenges. So I think Slack's had this vision for a long time of being the place where people work. And we've seen that they hook into just about any kind of application you might be able to use today. Irwin Lazar: But there's always been some limitations. I could get notifications in Slack, I could get messages into Slack. But now what you're seeing is that ability, through AI, through MCP, through AIforce, is to actually manipulate data and be able to engage with other applications. So again, obviously here it's mostly focused around Salesforce, but it could potentially be around other agents. Irwin Lazar: And I think, in the broader story, you're seeing platforms like Claude and Workday, as an example, where a coworker has that same kind of capability — I can build a dashboard, I can build interfaces into the applications I use. But at the end of the day, if I need to chat with somebody or ask a question or share, I'm going back to a messaging platform. Irwin Lazar: So being able to do all of that within Slack, I think, offers some real benefit to their customers. Sean Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. As you say, with the developments around Slackbot as well, I think definitely Salesforce are trying to make Slack that hub of where work happens. And actually from there, you can go and have access to all these different capabilities and tools to help you along that journey. Sean Nolan: But yeah, staying all in one hub helps the enterprise worker, and cuts out unnecessary time from their day-to-day workflow. So, looking ahead, I wanted to get your perspective on what you expect from the rest of the year. Are there any kind of predictions that you have, based on what we've seen at the event this time around, and the conversations you've had? Irwin Lazar: I think the biggest issue in the rest of the year is overcoming challenges that people have to adopting and using AI. There's a whole other set of issues that we've heard talked about here, related to AI run amok, or controls and guardrails. Obviously, that's going to — whether that leads to regulation of AI, or a slowdown in AI, remains to be seen. Irwin Lazar: How that plays out over the next few months, I think, again, more practically, is how do I take what's being talked about and actually implement it. What we see is companies really struggle with getting their data right, getting their governance and security strategies in place, training people, sharing best practices, working with the right partners to take from planning to execution. Irwin Lazar: So, you come out of an event like this with all of the ideas of what's possible, and then turning what's possible into realism is always the challenge. I think that's where we'll be focusing in the next few months. Sean Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. I think with these events, it's easy to come out with a lot of optimism, but then it's going back to the grindstone and actually putting all this into practice — adopting it and making sure that it meets all the kind of criteria in terms of security and regulations and things like that. Sean Nolan: That's the real stepping stone, the real challenge for people to look ahead to, but still very exciting times. Thank you so much for your time today, I really appreciate it. Irwin Lazar: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.