A deep dive into Salesforce Slack AI: Features, pricing, and a better alternative for 2025

Let’s be honest, finding a straight answer at work can feel like an impossible task. Important info is scattered everywhere, a conversation in one Slack channel, a document in another, and key details buried in a thread from last Tuesday. You end up spending half your day just trying to piece things together.

This is the problem every new AI tool promises to solve: cutting through the noise so you can get back to actual work. Salesforce is taking its shot by building AI directly into Slack, the place where millions of us already spend our workdays. The idea is to transform all those chaotic conversations into a smart, searchable knowledge base.

But what does that actually look like in practice? Is it the right solution for your team?

This guide will give you a clear, no-fluff look at Salesforce Slack AI. We’ll dig into what it does, how much it costs, where it really helps, and, more importantly, where its limitations might have you looking for a different approach.

What is Salesforce Slack AI?

First off, Salesforce Slack AI isn’t some standalone app you go out and buy. It’s a set of AI features that are woven directly into the Slack platform. Its main job is to make sense of the mountains of conversational data that pile up in your company’s workspace. Think of it as an intelligence layer that skims through your public channels, threads, and files to give you quick summaries and answers when you need them.

From what they’ve announced, it all breaks down into a few key parts:

• Generative AI tools: These are the features you’ll use day-to-day. We’re talking about an AI search that can answer questions, channel recaps to get you up to speed, and thread summaries that boil down long discussions.

• Automation: The AI gives Slack’s Workflow Builder a boost, letting you create simple automations just by describing what you want in plain English.

• AI agents: This turns Slack into a central spot to chat with other AIs, mainly Salesforce’s own Agentforce (you might know it as Einstein Copilot) and a few select third-party agents.

It’s all built to feel like a natural part of Slack, which is a big win if your team is already logged in all day. But as we’ll get into, tying everything so tightly to the Salesforce ecosystem has some serious trade-offs.

Key Salesforce Slack AI features

The immediate appeal of Slack AI is how it helps you find information without having to leave the app. Let’s take a look at what you can actually do with it.

Search and summaries

The biggest and most obvious benefit of Slack AI is its ability to fight information overload. Instead of spending twenty minutes scrolling through a channel, you get a few tools to do that work for you.

• Search: You can ask questions in a normal, conversational way, like, "What’s the latest on the Q4 marketing campaign?" or "Who’s in charge of Project Phoenix?" The AI scans public messages and files to pull together a concise answer, and it even links back to the original messages so you can see the context for yourself.

• Summaries: This feature is a lifesaver when you get back from vacation. Channel recaps can give you the highlights from any channel over a time period you choose, letting you catch up in minutes instead of hours. Thread summaries are perfect for those monster threads with a hundred replies, distilling them down to the key decisions and action items with a single click.

Here’s the catch, though: these features are only useful if the information you need is actually in Slack. What about the important stuff in your help desk, company wiki, or shared drive? Slack AI has a huge blind spot there.

For teams whose knowledge lives across different platforms like Zendesk, Confluence, or Google Docs, this is a major problem. This is where a more connected solution comes in. A tool like eesel AI is built specifically to unify knowledge from all those different places, giving your AI a complete picture of your company’s intelligence, not just a peek into one application.

Automating tasks with the workflow builder

Slack AI also brings some conversational smarts to its Workflow Builder. Instead of clicking through a bunch of menus to set up an automation, you can just type out what you want. For example, "send a welcome message to new people who join this channel," and the AI will build the workflow for you.

One handy new trick is the "summarize channel" step, which lets you create automated daily or weekly digests for important channels. It’s a nice way to keep an eye on things without feeling like you have to read every single message.

But again, the focus is almost entirely on things happening inside Slack. Most real-world support and operations workflows need to connect multiple tools. For example, a support automation might need to check an order status in Shopify, find the customer’s subscription details in a database, and then update the ticket in Freshdesk. That kind of cross-platform workflow is just not what Slack’s builder is made for. In contrast, eesel AI provides a fully customizable workflow engine, letting you build complex automations that connect to your other tools without needing a developer.

Salesforce Slack AI agents and the Salesforce ecosystem

Beyond the built-in features, Salesforce is setting up Slack to be the command center for a whole network of AI agents. And this is where the connection to the larger Salesforce world really comes into focus.

Agentforce: Your CRM data in Slack

Agentforce is Salesforce’s main AI assistant, and getting it to work inside Slack is a huge piece of their strategy. It’s designed to pull your structured CRM data from Salesforce directly into the messy, fast-moving world of Slack conversations.

For instance, a sales rep in a deal channel could ask, "@Agentforce, what’s the status of the Acme Corp opportunity?" It would then grab the relevant details from Salesforce and post them right in the channel. It can also help draft emails or update CRM records without you ever having to switch tabs.

This is a fantastic feature for companies that run their entire operation on Salesforce. But for everyone else, it’s a big red flag for vendor lock-in. What if your customer data is in a different CRM? Or what if your support team uses Intercom or Gorgias? That’s when a platform-agnostic tool becomes essential. eesel AI is built to connect to dozens of help desks and CRMs, making sure your AI works with the tools you actually use. It brings intelligence to your current setup, including a smooth integration with Slack, without trying to pull you into a single ecosystem.

Third-party AI agent integrations

To be fair, Slack isn’t a completely closed-off system. The Slack Marketplace does have integrations with other AI agents from companies like Adobe, Anthropic, and Perplexity. You can add these to your workspace for specific tasks, like generating marketing copy or doing quick web research.

While this looks like an open approach, it can quickly become a bit chaotic. Every new agent is another tool to manage, another subscription to pay for, and another interface for your team to learn. Instead of one unified AI that understands your business, you get a collection of specialized bots that don’t necessarily talk to each other.

Pricing and data security

Alright, let’s get down to the two big questions everyone has before adopting a new tool: how much does it cost, and is our data safe?

Pricing

Salesforce Slack AI is not included in the standard Slack plans. It’s a paid add-on, and you have to be on a paid Pro, Business+, or Enterprise+ plan to even get it. It’s not available on the free plan.

Specific pricing for the AI add-on is usually quote-based, but the main thing to know is that it’s an extra cost on top of what you already pay per user, per month for Slack. This can make your budget a bit unpredictable since you’re paying for the platform and the AI features separately.

Here are the standard Slack plans you can add the AI features to:

Plan	Price per user/month (Annual)	Key Features (Pre-AI)	AI Availability
Free	$0	90-day history, 10 app limit	Not Available
Pro	$7.25	Unlimited history, unlimited apps	Basic AI Available
Business+	$15	SAML SSO, data exports	Advanced AI Available
Enterprise Grid	Contact Sales	Enterprise-grade security & compliance	Enterprise-Grade AI Available

This model contrasts with the transparent and predictable pricing of a solution like eesel AI. Instead of adding extra, sometimes hidden, costs for AI, eesel AI offers straightforward plans that include all its products. This means your bill won’t suddenly jump after a busy month of support requests.

Data security

Salesforce and Slack are quick to say that trust is their number one value. They state that your company’s private conversations are not used to train third-party AI models and that all the AI features run on Slack’s own secure infrastructure.

However, it’s worth pointing out that a recent report from Reuters mentioned that Salesforce has made it harder for other AI tools to access and index Slack data. This move strongly hints at a "walled garden" strategy, where the incredible value of your company’s conversational data is kept primarily for Salesforce’s own AI. While this might improve security within their ecosystem, it really limits your freedom if you want to use a best-in-class AI that works across all of your tools, not just the ones Salesforce picks.

The Salesforce Slack AI alternative: A truly unified AI for support and internal knowledge

If the idea of a walled garden, ecosystem lock-in, and add-on pricing doesn’t sit right with you, then it’s worth looking at an alternative that was built from the start for flexibility.

eesel AI was designed to solve the very problems that a single-platform tool like Slack AI can’t. Here’s how it’s different:

1. Go live in minutes, not months: Getting started with most enterprise tools is a whole song and dance of sales calls and mandatory demos. With eesel AI, you can do it all yourself. Sign up, connect your knowledge sources, and start testing your AI agent in less than an hour.

2. Unify all your knowledge: This is the biggest difference. eesel AI doesn’t just look at one app. It connects to everything: your help desk (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom), your wikis (Confluence, Notion), your shared drives (Google Docs, SharePoint), and your past support tickets. This gives your AI a complete brain, so it can answer questions accurately no matter where the info is.

3. Test with confidence: It can be nerve-wracking to let a new AI talk to your customers. That’s why eesel AI has a simulation mode. Before going live, you can run it on thousands of your past support tickets in a safe environment. You’ll see exactly how it would have replied, get a solid forecast of your automation rate, and find any gaps in your knowledge base before a customer ever sees it.

4. Total control and flexibility: eesel AI lets you decide exactly what gets automated. You can start small by having it answer only simple, specific questions and escalate everything else to a human. As you get more comfortable, you can let it handle more. With custom actions, you can build workflows that are genuinely useful for your business, not just workflows that are stuck inside one app.

Is Salesforce Slack AI the right AI for your workspace?

Salesforce Slack AI is a powerful tool for teams that are already deep in the Slack and Salesforce world. If your company runs on those two platforms, the native feel and deep CRM integration will make your internal information much easier to find.

But that strength is also its greatest weakness. The whole thing is designed as a "walled garden," which isn’t a great fit for businesses whose knowledge and workflows are spread across a bunch of different best-in-class tools. If you need an AI that’s flexible, tool-agnostic, and can be set up quickly to unify all your company knowledge, you’re going to hit its limits fast.

For teams looking for an AI platform that connects to all their knowledge and works with their existing help desk, try eesel AI for free. You can connect your tools and see how it works in just a few minutes.