Salesforce has announced Slack Lists, a project and task management tool directly within its renowned collaboration platform.
Salesforce says Slack Lists introduces structure to conversations in Slack, allowing teams to manage projects, inbound requests, and top priorities directly within the platform. This eliminates the need to switch between multiple apps, keeping everything streamlined in one place.
Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack, commented:
With lists, you can turn conversations in Slack into actionable tasks that drive work forward. Now those loose next steps shared in a project channel can be tracked across a team. With project management in Slack, teams across organizations will have everything they need to complete projects faster and increase productivity using the full power of Slack.”
Salesforce said Slack Lists was inspired by how often tools fail to help business leaders achieve their goals. Despite the many solutions available, Salesforce insisted that only 34 percent of projects are completed on time and within budget.
Contributing factors include employees moving conversations outside these tools, teams using different apps creating silos and licensing issues, and excessive time spent managing updates across multiple platforms — which is where Slack Lists comes in.
Salesforce suggests sales teams can use Slack Lists to stay organised in their daily work, coordinate and collaborate on tasks with the entire account team, and plan customer meetings and engagements. Meanwhile, the business outlines that service teams can track all outstanding issues in a list or provide new agents with a curated onboarding plan.
Slack Lists begins its rollout today and will be available to all Slack users in the coming months. It will be included in all paid plans.
More Specifics On Slack Lists’ Feature Set
Lists is designed to streamline collaboration by reducing the need to switch between different applications. This integration allows teams to stay in sync and manage cross-functional projects, requests, approvals, and more directly within their workflow.
With Slack Lists, teams can efficiently manage and track projects from inception to completion, prioritise tasks, move work forward through various stages, and ensure accountability. Whether for marketing campaigns, product launches, employee onboarding, or technology deployments, everything can be organised and monitored in a Slack list.
Additionally, Lists enhances collaboration by enabling team members to engage in focused conversations through message threads linked to specific list items, providing all the necessary context for taking action and maintaining alignment.
Finally, Slack Lists leverages Workflow Builder, a no-code automation tool, to automate routine tasks, transforming Slack into a central hub for managing and triaging work across different applications.
What Else Has Slack Been Up To Recently?
In April, Slack AI became available for all paying customers. Previously, it was only available to customers on Slack Enterprise plans and only in US and UK English. Salesforce stressed that businesses of all sizes can now leverage Slack AI, which uses a business’s conversational data to support users in working faster and smarter.
Slack AI has been updated with new features, including an enhanced AI-powered recap that provides morning digest summaries, personalised search answers, advanced conversation summaries, and expanded language support.
In January, Salesforce cofounder and CTO Parker Harris was named Slack‘s new CTO, replacing the outgoing Cal Henderson.
Henderson, also Slack’s cofounder, stepped down effective immediately. Slack’s recent C-suite shakeup, as capped off by the change at CTO, means that all of its original founders are no longer with the business.
Meanwhile, Slack updated its AI principles last month after a controversy emerged over how its customer data was being used to train its machine learning models.
The story emerged after DuckBill Group executive Corey Quinn posted on X about Slack’s Privacy Principles as they previously were. Quinn pointed out that Slack was using user data to train its machine-learning models and that users had to opt out of this process explicitly.
