[flunhat]

For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x).

A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.

[1] https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai

[MontyCarloHall]

It's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most universally-used products.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...

[Schnitz]

They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t that useful. The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo (Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.

[paxys]

Salesforce as a company hasn't been innovative in 20 years. It's no surprise that they can't make anything of AI outside of a couple fancy marketing campaigns.

[aurareturn]

I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How powerful is that?

Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.

[Hobadee]

Slack added AI features for something like ~$5/user/mo. Nobody got the addon because it was stupid. So Slack bundled AI and increased the base subscription by ~$5/user/mo. Nobody uses the AI features still, and we are all $5/user/mo poorer.

Source: I work at an MSP and we have a ton of clients on Slack.

[tomrod]

I mean, they really really tried to be the low code provider. But, as far as. I'm aware, no one really likes Salesforce as a product, it's integrations are poor generally.

[delfinom]

It's a CRM. AI won't help there, customers already hate getting harassed by cold calls and endless AI support bot loops. They are just hitting market maturity.