Overview
- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on a recent podcast that he uses Slack’s AI to ask what employees are upset about and to pull answers from company chats.
- He described querying Slackbot for items like top deals and priorities, saying the system reads company channels to surface issues in real time.
- After his remarks drew attention, Salesforce and Slack said the AI references only public, companywide channels and will not surface content from private channels or DMs a user is not part of.
- Slack’s policies state that employers control workspace data, and many companies can retain, export, and analyze messages depending on their plan and internal rules.
- Reporters and researchers warn that message scanning can chill speech and affect worker rights, even as similar AI tools spread across Microsoft and Google and monitoring software use grows across large employers.