Opinion Salesforce has begun to position Slack, its business collaboration platform, as the interface through which users can access and act on data in enterprise applications from rival vendors.

In 2020, the CRM giant bought Slack for $28 billion, saying at the time that it would be "deeply integrated into Salesforce Cloud."

The new approach touted this week is as the host for an AI agent – or Slackbot – which can talk to agents in other applications and get information from rival vendors' enterprise software.

It might work as a defensive move for Salesforce, which has been under pressure from the so-called SaaSpocalypse, an investor-led notion that AI will allow companies to create their own business applications in an afternoon, slashing the value of the SaaS companies in question.

Salesforce has liberally cast Slackbot throughout the collaboration platform, offering automated note-taking of meetings and creating workflow for repeated tasks. Crucially, it will also act as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client, an open standard built by Anthropic for connecting LLMs to external data sources, tools, and software systems.

In this way, Slackbot can route work or prompt questions to other bits of Salesforce, including Agentforce, its AI agent platform. All this can be used to talk to agents from other software vendors and get information from "any app in your enterprise," the company claims.

"Employees never need to know which system handles which task. Just ask, and Slackbot finds the right path and gets it done," it said.

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The claim understates the complexity of enterprise systems, and the challenge in ensuring the data held within them is up-to-date and well governed. But it deals with the choices in-house tech management will face as companies come under pressure to adopt AI agents. Offered the option of going with a cloud provider, a service layer like ServiceNow, or their main application vendor to build AI agent systems, users are likely to opt for the last one, as Gartner has pointed out.

Salesforce is not the only company aware that AI agents will be an important battleground for securing customers' workloads. Most users rely on enterprise applications from a number of vendors.

Last week, SAP acquired master data management and data integration specialist Reltio in a move aimed at making Business Data Cloud the data foundation for its agentic AI efforts, including its Joule agent platform.

Salesforce will continue to try to convince users that it will be the center of their world as far as AI agents are concerned. But users have a lot to consider before they make up their own minds. ®

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