DEVOPSdigest

Salesforce announced the next evolution of the Slack platform, giving partners and developers the tools to securely connect AI with the rich corpus of customer-owned and -controlled conversational data in Slack.

With a new real-time search (RTS) API, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, and enhanced developer tools like prebuilt Block Kit Tables, Slack provides secure, flexible, agent-ready access to conversational data. This context enables agents to move beyond generic responses to deliver context-aware, user-specific conversations, making AI more relevant, more accurate, and far more powerful in unlocking productivity.

Developers and partners are taking advantage of the Slack platform’s breadth to create AI apps and agents directly in the flow of work, allowing companies to:

- Unlock Unstructured Data: Slack is enabling organizations to safely and securely tap into the vast amounts of collective knowledge stored in Slack conversations to enrich AI and agents, saving customers an average of 97 minutes a week.

- Accelerate Decision-Making: By connecting app data, like Agentforce Sales or Workday, with Slack conversations, the platform provides complete context, enhancing search and AI for faster insights and action, resulting in 37% faster decision-making across teams and 36% faster responses to customers.

- Increase Productivity: Businesses most able to use AI have three times higher growth in revenue per employee. By integrating apps and agents directly into human workflows, Slack eliminates context switching, enabling teams to cut hours of manual research and get straight to action.

- Solve the Adoption Gap: Slack brings partner and developer apps directly into the flow of work, helping overcome one of developers’ biggest distribution challenges — getting employees to actually use them — by making apps accessible where employees are already working. Over 1.7 million apps are actively used in Slack each week, and 95% of those users say using an app in Slack makes those tools more valuable.

- Ensure Security and Compliance: With Slack’s enterprise-grade security, privacy features, and granular permissions, businesses can safeguard their data while providing a secure foundation for agentic collaboration.

Slack fundamentally redefines user interaction by establishing AI agents as trusted companions. Slack’s expanded developer platform is purpose-built for agentic AI, making it easy for any company to build powerful, custom AI agents that can access rich, contextual conversational data to get more done, securely.

The real-time search (RTS) API and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server provide secure data access on your terms for developers and third parties:

- The RTS API gives apps real-time access to one of a company’s most valuable assets: the rich, contextual conversational data within Slack. By surfacing the most current discussions, files, and channels, the RTS API makes the Slack platform more flexible and empowers AI to act on information in context. It unlocks your organization’s collective intelligence, securely connecting agents to conversations and decisions that were once trapped in silos. The RTS API is designed with enterprise security at its core, enabling tools to interact with customers’ conversational data without needing to bulk download it or store it elsewhere. It always respects existing access permissions and retrieves data in a focused, use-case-driven way, returning only the specific messages or files relevant to a query. The result: AI agents and apps get the precise, contextual information they need — nothing more, nothing less.

- The MCP server simplifies and standardizes how large language models (LLMs), AI apps, and agents discover contextual information and execute tasks on behalf of Slack users, reducing complexity for developers. With its unified communication layer between the LLM and Slack, it establishes a universal way for AI systems to connect to data sources and tools. Fragmented integrations are replaced with a single, consistent protocol that adheres to the user’s specific permissions. Developers don’t have to manually define every possible task an agent can perform or implement complex, service-specific integrations for each LLM.

The RTS API and MCP server transform how partners build on Slack by giving their AI-powered applications secure access to real-time conversational data. With this foundation, developers can move beyond basic integrations to create contextual, intelligent experiences that automate complex workflows. Their agents can now search, analyze, and act on Slack data to deliver more accurate, relevant, and personalized outcomes — reducing hallucinations and increasing reliability. The result: smarter, more stable agents that users can trust and adopt at scale.

In addition, the Slack platform continues advancing the fundamental building blocks available to admins and developers with new innovations:

- Slack Work Objects: Developers can now build apps that deliver dynamic experiences by connecting app data directly to Slack conversations through rich app previews that include everything from file descriptions to embedded images. Slack Work Objects standardize how third-party data — like detailed information, images, and documents — is displayed in Slack, creating a much deeper connection between apps and conversations. Teams can‌ also take action, like marking Asana tasks as complete, without ever having to leave the Slack workspace. This allows users to communicate, share, and act on work without switching applications, directly within Slack.

- Agentic Developer Tools: Developers have everything they need to build and customize Slack for their business. From apps and agents to automated workflows, new capabilities include AI best practices, prebuilt Block Kit Tables, and updated resources like the CLI for Bolt apps. These upgrades streamline the entire development lifecycle, from the first line of code to the finished end-user experience, making it easier than ever to build for the agentic era.

The RTS API and Slack MCP server are currently available in closed beta, with general availability in early 2026.

Third-party AI agents using the capabilities are available on the Slack Marketplace today.

Slack Work Objects will be generally available to all developers in late October.

New agentic developer tools are available now.