If you’re a Salesforce employee who complains about work in Slack, CEO Marc Benioff might already know.
On a recent episode of his All-In podcast, Benioff touted Slack’s AI tools as a way to analyze employee conversations, surfaced grievances, company concerns and operational blind spots in real time. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021.
“You run your company in Slack, in all your DMs, in all your channels, so through AI we can read that and tell you more about your business than you know,” Benioff told interviewers.
The billionaire CEO said he personally uses Slackbot to query information about Salesforce in real time.
“So when you’re using Slackbot, you can ask any question you want about your company,” Benioff says. “What are my top five deals? What are my employees frustrated about? What are the top three things I need to focus on?”
“And because we have the data, we have the information,” he added.
Salesforce isn’t the only company leveraging AI to gather enterprise intelligence.
Microsoft has integrated Copilot into Teams, Outlook, Word, and Excel, allowing the AI assistant to summarize meetings, scan messages, identify action items, and answer questions using company-wide data.
Google is pursuing a similar strategy with Gemini within Workspace, where AI can analyze emails, documents, calendars, and chats to generate insights and automate workflows.
Start-up companies are also competing to enter this field.
Glean, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest enterprise AI startups, positions itself as a workplace search engine that pulls answers and insights from Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, and other internal systems.
Benioff’s comments also serve as a reminder for workers to be careful about what they say on workplace messaging platforms.
Legally and technically, employers typically own the data generated within their internal Slack workspaces and can retain, export, and analyze messages depending on their subscription level and company policies.
Slack itself states in its Privacy FAQ that “Customers own and control all content submitted to their workspaces.”
This means that employees should assume that anything they write on any communication platform their job provides, including direct messages, can be accessed, retained, and reviewed by their employer.
Employers are increasingly leveraging technology to monitor their employees.
Business Insider previously reported that Meta recently introduced internal tools to track certain employee behaviors, such as keystrokes and mouse movements, to help train its AI agents, while Microsoft has added a workplace tracking feature to Teams that can automatically update an employee’s office location based on the company’s WiFi connection.
AT&T also uses technology to track in-office attendance, while JPMorgan tracks software engineers’ use of AI through a dashboard.