Slack

Slack is a developer of a communication platform designed to help people and organizations communicate through messaging, voice and video calls, workflow builders, file sharing, and related services. The communication platform offers productivity services as well, such as no-code automation, search and knowledge sharing, and communication tools to keep teams connected and engaged.

Slack was incorporated in 2009 as Tiny Spec, Inc. Later in 2009, they changed the name to Tiny Speck, Inc., and in 2014, they changed it to Slack Technologies, Inc.

The Slack platform organizes chats in channels, which can be subdivided and organized by project, topic, or team. Conversations are searchable to help users find relevant information. The platform is developed to be used by individual users, small teams, and enterprises, with different features depending on the users' and team's needs.

Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Slack in late 2020 and completed the acquisition for USD$27.7 billion with the intent of integrating Slack's platform into Salesforce's Salesforce Customer 360 customer data platform. As part of the acquisition, Slack continues to operate under the Slack platform, and the communication platform is still offered under the Slack name while also being integrated into Salesforce's offerings.

Following Slack's acquisition by Salesforce, the platform includes various integrations with the platform's services and applications and also offers several integrations with various commonly used productivity applications, such as Google Drive, Zoom, and Outlook.

The Salesforce integrations include the following:

• Salesforce Platform for Slack—a software development kit to allow developers to bring their own Salesforce apps and workflows into Slack
• Salesforce Flow—allows developers to build Slack-first automations with support for Salesforce data and using low-code capabilities.
• Apex SDk for Slack—allows developers to build for Slack in Apex code and automatically generate Block Kit, a UI framework for Slack apps

Developed by Salesforce and OpenAI for the Slack platform, the ChatGPT app for Slack integrates ChatGPT's AI technology into the Slack platform. This is developed to deliver conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance directly in Slack. The integration allows ChatGPT's AI to combine public and private (from the Slack channels integrated with the ChatGPT app) data sources to help users with contextual intelligence.