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How Can Automating with Slack Transform Your Workflow?
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack. Join us as we chat about automating in Slack and what's coming with Slack AI.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jim Ray.
Slack is more than just a chat toolJim gave a great breakout session at TDX on automating in Slack, so I wanted to bring him on the pod to tell us all about it. "If you're just using Slack for communication, you're overpaying for a chat tool," he says, "there's a lot more you can do to broaden your usage of Slack."
Slack integrations have been around for forever, but it used to be that you needed a fair bit of technical knowledge in order to make your own customizations. With the launch of Workflow Builder, however, you can build automations in Slack without having to code or host an app yourself. This unlocks a whole new level for how Slack can improve your business processes and make everything easier.
Build custom automations with Slack Workflow BuilderIf you've played around with Workflow Builder in the past, you may be familiar with how you can use it to create a new channel or automatically post a formatted message at a certain time each week. But recently, they've added the ability to use custom steps from apps and 3rd-party tools, like Salesforce, and now the possibilities are endless.
Jim gives a few examples that help spell out how big this actually is. For example, imagine you have a weekly status report meeting. You can create a scheduled Slack workflow that automatically drops the relevant Salesforce info into a Slack channel so everyone can refer to it. That can save you a bunch of time you'd spend bringing the room up to speed, or even eliminate the meeting entirely.
We get into a ton of other examples, including adding info to the channel's Canvas document and even using a Slack automation to execute a flow in Salesforce. There's just a ton of great use cases here when you're able to bring your Salesforce data directly into Slack and vice versa.
Summarize and search with Slack AILastly, we talked about Slack AI and that's where things get really interesting. It gives you the ability to search Slack with natural language queries, and summarize or format the results.
Jim gives the example of when he returned to work after some time off for paternity leave. He had a first meeting with a new skip-level manager and needed to do some prep. So he asked Slack AI, "what does this person think about the Slack platform?" It not only found everything they ever posted on the subject and summarized the results, but it also gave him footnotes with links to the actual comments so he could do more digging.
AI does even better with structured data, and that's where Workflow Builder comes back into the picture. The automations you build create exactly the kind of data that Slack AI loves. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities for how you can share information across your organization without the need to put everyone on Salesforce.
Jim shares a bunch more use cases and tips for how to get started building automations in Slack, so be sure to take a listen. And don't forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.
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Published on 1 year, 8 months ago