In this interview from the theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts series, Ryan Gavin, chief marketing officer for Slack at Salesforce, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to unpack Slack’s latest AI milestone: the general availability of Slackbot, a personal agent built natively into Slack. Gavin explains why context is the differentiator, arguing that an assistant embedded in the flow of work can understand a user’s goals, permissions and day-to-day realities in a way bolt-on tools cannot. The conversation frames AI not as a novelty but as an operating advantage, one that gives employees time back and helps leaders focus less on the “work of work” and more on revenue, execution and innovation.
Gavin also outlines what it takes to move from AI enthusiasm to measurable adoption: trust, security inheritance from Slack permissions and a user experience that requires no new training. He connects the shift to a broader vision of the future of work as conversational, where employees ask for answers, insights and actions without endless clicking through apps. From orchestration across multiple agents to Slack as a company’s long-term memory, the discussion paints Slack as the nervous system for modern enterprises looking to turn agentic AI into day-to-day momentum.
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Ryan Gavin, Salesforce
In this theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts segment from the New York Stock Exchange, theCUBE’s John Furrier sits down with Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, to unpack how the intersection of technology and finance is shaping enterprise strategy. Verma shares why SingleStore is “on course” for the public markets, reflects on brand-building through the company’s partnership with golf Hall of Famer Padraig Harrington and connects that ethos to how SingleStore helps organizations fix struggling data “swings.” The discussion zeroes in on what’s next as Wall Street watches the AI infrastructure buildout: after chips and systems, the software and data layers set the pace for value creation.
Verma outlines why enterprises must modernize “brown” data estates into “green” ones to safely bring corporate context, governance and compliance into LLM workflows via RAG – and why commoditized data-at-rest puts the advantage at the query layer that unifies data in motion with data at rest. He predicts agentic AI will gain reasoning capabilities in roughly 18 months, cites industry indicators like Google reporting ~25% of its software now built by AI and argues that high switching costs will give way to disruption as buyers reassess legacy vendors. The conversation closes with concrete momentum: ~33% YoY growth, ARR in the ~$135M range, gross dollar retention ~98%, cloud NDR ~130, ~50% of business now in the cloud, landing ~3 new customers per day, a path to cash-flow breakeven in the next two quarters and a teaser for AI-related announcements in the next two months. Listeners will find notable stats, real-world use cases and forward-looking views on how databases power reliable AI at enterprise scale.
In this interview from the theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Mixture of Experts series, Ryan Gavin, chief marketing officer for Slack at Salesforce, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier to unpack Slack’s latest AI milestone: the general availability of Slackbot, a personal agent built natively into Slack. Gavin explains why context is the differentiator, arguing that an assistant embedded in the flow of work can understand a user’s goals, permissions and day-to-day realities in a way bolt-on tools cannot. The conversation frames AI not as a novelty but as an operating advantage,...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What new tool is being announced for general availability today, and what distinguishes it from other AI agents?add
What are the benefits of using the Slackbot as an integrated feature of Slack?add
What are the productivity gains and revenue improvements associated with the use of AI and Slackbot in organizations?add
What factors contribute to the successful implementation and acceptance of Slackbot among pilot customers?add
>> Welcome back to theCUBE here at our NYSC Studios in New York. Of course, we have our Palo Alto connecting Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Tech and Capital. As the innovation with AI continues, with more news hitting Salesforce, Slack has some great news. We've got Ryan Gavin, chief marketing Officer at Slack at Salesforce. Ryan, thanks for coming in remotely as we cover our retail week. And this is kind of a hybrid episode of Mixture of Experts, because you're an expert in AI and Slack, and also retail, perfect use case as well, people working all the time.
Ryan Gavin
>> Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm sorry I'm not there in person. We'll do it in person next time, I promise. But it's great to be here.
John Furrier
>> All right. So, big news. We've been covering Slack's AI implementations hardcore since Dreamforce, and you're starting to see the progression. News coming out on the AI infusion. Take us through the news.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah. So, today we're announcing the general availability of a new tool called Slackbot, and this is unlike a lot of the AI that's out there, this is a deeply personal agent that's built just for you. So, this is your personal agent built natively in Slack. And what makes it unique and what makes it very, very powerful is that, it instantly understands the one thing that many of these agents don't, which is it understands you and it understands your work context. And that's because it lives in Slack and has access to all the same files and contents and data and DM that are all living inside of Slack. And because of that, that context becomes agentic goal and it can instantly turn into your personal assistant that can help you save time, give time back in the day, and that you will trust as an employee because it actually knows you. So, we're announcing the general availability of that today natively built in Slack.
John Furrier
>> Take us through the implementation. We're a Slack customer, small compared to your big enterprises, take us through the use case implementation. Is it embedded in? Do I have to subscribe, click a button? What's the execution of it?
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah, what's beauty about this, and again, unlike a lot of the other AI tools in the market, there's really nothing for you to go do. As a customer, you're going to just admin, you'll just enable Slackbot, it's built natively into Slack. It's part of our paid plans. And then what's beautiful as an employee, it just shows up right in the flow of work. I don't need to go learn a new tool, I don't need to go get trained on how to work on it. I can talk to it just like I know how to talk to teammates right inside of Slack and it comes right along, built natively in. So, this is not an add-on, this is not something that you're going to go and pay extra for. This is a native capability built right into Slack that admins can simply turn on for their organizations.
John Furrier
>> Ryan, we've been talking about this on theCUBE and theCUBE Research as well. The productivity gains with AI are off the charts. Here at the retail event, NRF was seeing people who got involved in agents last year early, are seeing massive record revenue improvements on retail, productivity is up, the power to the people is kind of the theme and small is big with AI. This is a real advancement. I want to, take me through the deepness of this reasoning, because you already had great AI in the sense of summarizing things, not missing anything, but there was still a lot of stuff going on in Slack. Take us through the specific value proposition of the Slackbot.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah. Well, John, I mean you touched on a key piece there that I think doesn't get talked about nearly enough, which is driving revenue. The simple biggest driver of revenue is how do you take what most organizations' number one cost is and it's number one asset, which is this people, and how do you make those people 2X, 3X, 4X more productive? And that is maybe the biggest driver of top line revenue any company can get after. And we look at what Slackbot's doing inside of Salesforce. We talked about Salesforce, we don't ask our customers to use anything we don't use ourselves. We call it customer zero. We're seeing our employees get five hours back a week and some employees are saying they're getting 20 hours back a week. Now, five hours may not sound like a ton, but five hours is a month and a half across of a year, 20 hours is six months. So, imagine if every CIO could give you a half a year back to stop focusing on kind of the work of work, but to focus on driving top line revenue, focusing on driving innovation, improving your margins, that's an unbelievable accelerator for business. And so, employee productivity is one of the most important tools in this AI era and Slackbot's demonstrating not just with Salesforce but with customers like Mr. Beast, reMarkable, Engine, Slalom, all of these pilot customers that we've been working on are seeing similar gains in productivity and improvements across the board.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting, I'm glad you brought that up, because I'm on the same page with you on the whole revenue piece, but I think what's interesting with the Slackbot is, if you connect the dots on what happens next with agentic, you start to see autonomous intelligence kick in. So, for example, maybe a supply chain or some sort of product thing happens. In the flow, so in the Slack channels or the collaboration, not only is it productivity, but that could kick in and feed systems for delivering stuff.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah, I mean 100%. I mean your insight's actually right. Work is happening where people are conversing, where they're sharing data, that unstructured data is the holy grail of this AI era and how can you intuitively tap that unstructured data, all those conversations and then kick off the right action, the right workflow at the right moment, notify the right person, pull in the right agent. One of the things that Slackbot will do going forward is, be able to orchestrate across all your agents, because pretty soon employees are going to have more agents than they know what to do with. Let's be honest. So, Slackbot will be able to work with these third party agents or all these Agentforce agents that have been deployed and know what skills they have and know when to pull them in at the right moment, right when you need it. And that becomes incredibly powerful as we go forward. It's also, we're talking about kind of in the moment, it's also the long-term memory of your company. I'll tell you, just personally, we're writing self evaluations right now inside of Salesforce. It's that time of year we got to write how we did. I don't remember what I did 12 months ago, let alone six months ago. But it turns out, all those conversations in Slack are still there, so that long-term memory, Slackbot can access, read and instantly help me write a performance evaluation for me and that saves me a couple hours. But you multiply that across the entire Salesforce population, that's massive.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. If you're an employee too, if I was your direct report, I'd be like, Hey Ryan, I got to get back to your deliverable. I can go, Hey Slack, based upon my history, what's my top three accomplishments? Or who did I interfaced best with and who do I need to work with? I mean, these are things that are HR-related kind of things. You got to sit down, reflect. You can surface that directly by prompting.
Ryan Gavin
>> And I'll tell you one that I use on a weekly basis. Every Monday, I sit down, I say, Slackbot, where's my team struggling right now? Where are the areas that they need my help, where my focus could be best to help accelerate the team against our priorities? Now, that's a simple question, but if you think about how I'd have had to answer that question in the past, I'd probably have to set up a bunch of one-on-one, maybe have a staff meeting, spend a bunch of time digging through Slack channels, reading some documents. But Slack knows all that context already. I don't have to tell it who my team is, it knows my team. I don't have to tell it what my priorities are, it knows that, because all that information's been shared previously in Slack. And so, it can then come back and say, here are the five areas that you should focus on right now, that your team needs your help, that you can help sell the business. Now, that doesn't just save me time, it's making me a better manager and it's pretty powerful. And that's just one of many, many-
John Furrier
>> I mean, you're highlighting the power of the data and the power of the people with democratization of the productivity. I have to ask you this because I just wrote a post about this and was commenting yesterday on theCUBE here, after CES and now here with work, future of work. Everything that was on the radar a decade ago, the car, the automated living room. I mean at CES, we're always there, but everything that's was a promise, future of work is happening now, if you look at it. So, this to me hits the future of work. So, I have to ask you, in the narrative, you go back five years, maybe eight, maybe 10, the future of work was a hot button issue. Now, it's actually, there's real deal happening. What's your modern definition of the future, knowing what was said, what came to fruition, what changed. Give us an update on your vision of the future of work, given this context.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah, it's a fun question. If I would simplify it down, I'd say it in maybe two things. First, it's conversational. Today, if we're really honest and crosswork, it's learning a lot of tabs, forms, clicks, things, UIs that I've got to learn and master. I got a context switch between this app and this app and figure out how this app works. The future of work is conversational. I ask, I expect an answer, I expect an action. And it's one of the reasons why Slack is so well positioned, because Slack fundamentally is conversational. It's conversational with your teammates, it's now conversational with your entire enterprise, it's conversational with your entire agent force. The second part of it is, while those conversations are the interface, what is behind that is an endless stream of data. And that data is what those conversations can invoke. So, I can bring in my CRM data, I can bring in my Workday data, I can bring in data from OpenAI and ChatGPT and all these amazing capabilities that are out there, but I don't have to go learn all of them. I can just ask and expect answers and insights. And so, the future of work is getting out of taps and clicks and getting into conversations. And that's why Slack is having a real moment right now, because that shift is exactly what Slack is as a work operating system across enterprises.
John Furrier
>> I love it. Thanks for that commentary. I love that definition. Our AI will pick that up and we'll service that in our Mixture of Expert database. I want to ask you a question about risk. I just wrote a post on Substack on the holidays around mostly startups and how AI is going to help the founding teams, but it's really an execution risk on startups, but this applies to the enterprise. I want to get your thoughts on this and see if you agree. It seems like there's not a strategy risk right now for companies, because the message is the same. Infuse AI in all your business, that's kind of a strategy. The execution risk seems to be the number one conversation we're hearing going into 2026. That's proof points, I want to see ROI, all the same signals point to the same thing, execution of how you use AI. So, in context of this news, I could see the Slackbot really enabling that execution risk, because the work is being getting done in these channels and in collaboration. How do you see the execution of the teams, working together? And then how AI will help mitigate the execution risk for whether it's a launch of a new product, the top line or bottom line of the revenue? And this is kind of like, it's just now starting to being talked about, you hear it all the time, ROI, proof is in the pudding. Show me that's what's happening here in retail.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah, I mean we're certainly through that first wave of just AI over exuberance and everything is, AI is going to solve everything. I think enterprises across the border are saying, Hey, I need to see the real returns for my business. To go to your point of, what helps that execution get over the things. And one of the reasons why Slackbot has seen such a great reaction amongst our initial pilot customers, customers like reMarkable or Slalom or Beast Industries that I was talking about earlier is, I've come down to two things. One is trust. Slackbot fundamentally builds on the same security and trust architecture as my Slack permissions. So, it has only access to the same things I have access to, and it inherits all those permissions and all that security. So, I can come in and say, Hey, I know my Slack instance is secure. I know I have an opportunity to engage with these channels, but maybe not this data. Slackbot inherits those same permissions. So, instantly it knows me and it knows my context and permissions. That gives you a lot of permission to say, I'm really feeling empowered to use this as a personal agent, I'm not worried what it can do or what it can't do. The second thing is it doesn't ask me to learn anything new. John, you and I can be in Slack, you and I know how to have a conversation in Slack, you and I know how to share a channel or a file. You and I know how to look at data and . Slackbot's the same. There's no additional training, there's no place else to go, there's not yet another tool you're asking your employees to go figure out how to learn. Just, hey, this is there right in the flow of work. And that's why customer like Beast Industries I was talking about earlier, they've rolled out Slackbot. They're saying their employees are seeing both instant adoption because it's clear that it knows them and that drives trust and that's driving 90 minutes of savings a day, just in terms of the initial productivity they're already seeing. So, I think those are the things that really get down to the execution when it stops feeling like a tool and it really starts to feel like a teammate. Execution really takes care of itself, because I'll tell you, if you look at, we've rolled out Slackbot internally, obviously everyone's like, I can never imagine a world without this tool, don't ever take this thing away. It is an ingrained part of how people are doing their jobs.
John Furrier
>> And it can replace previous tools that are antiquated and outdated. Certainly I love the conversational versus the tool, that's super valuable in my mind. So, obviously we kind of talked about the business aspect of it and the product. I guess my key question is, I'm a developer, I can see value in this. So, how do I look at this? And I want to code some things, I want to build some agents, I want to get some customization. I want to streamline my business to make everyone even more productive, but also get the work done. I can see this rendering new workflows, new kinds of custom apps. I guess that's a bad word, but I would say unique apps that are domain specific to say, my challenge, my app, whether it's deploying a project or building a new product, a sales motion, whatever the hell's going on. I mean, you could just, I can build on that one. So, take me through the developer aspect of this.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah, John, I love that you brought that up. Slack has been one of the fastest growing AI platforms for work over this last maybe 12 months. Everyone from Claude, building Claude Code with Anthropic right inside of Slack, ChatGPT building inside of Slack. Things like Rider, Cursor, Vercel, all these applications are building Slack as that conversational front end to their experiences and that will extend to what Slackbot can do in the future. As I talked about earlier, Slackbot can be the super agent that cannot only know the things that are in my Slack channel, but can now know all those applications and other agents that are available to me and help orchestrate work across them. So, we'll turn Slackbot into an MCP server over time and that thing will be able to actually go and engage with all these additional agents. So, as a developer, the question that you have is, I want to build something that's incredibly powerful, how do I make sure it's going to be utilized? Well, one of the best ways to do is, bring it into the flow of work, bring it where your employees are, and let those employees then access it via their personal agent. And so, that's exactly what we're doing. It's why Slack has become such a popular development platform right now is because it's bringing those incredible rich data, whether it be a custom app that an employee's building or a third-party app that's coming from an open AI and it's bringing it right into the flow of work. And that's the exciting future and Slackbot will only extend that.
John Furrier
>> It makes Slack even more valuable because it feels like a teammate or a virtual conference room. Maybe that's a bad analogy, but it definitely doesn't feel like email, right? I mean, you don't want email-like experience, in the sense of, it feels like you're grinding. It feels productive. So, I think what I wanted to get at is, okay, if that's the case and with this news, to me it feels like, Slack is like the nervous system. It is the blood flow, it's the vitamins of the company, it's like, everything's happening.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah, it's well said. And we talk about it as this agentic work operating system, it's how you orchestrate work. And I'm glad you brought up email, because that is an interesting one. I spend a lot of time with customers and we talk about this idea of like, hey, how do you evolve your work? How do you get to this kind of future of work? And the truth is, organizations that still primarily run out of the inbox are really going to struggle in this AI era, and they're going to struggle for really two reasons. One, the inbox has been a great tool. It's helped a lot of businesses grow and inbox supported basic chat, but inbox constrains context. And as I talked about earlier, if your context isn't available to your AI, your AI can only be so useful, it won't know you. It may know the public internet, it may know what's narrowly in your inbox, but that's not work, that's not the holistic thing of your organization. Just as an example, Slack's open architecture, I think I have 400 public channels that I'm subscribed to. Do you think I read those 400 public channels? No, I might read a handful.
John Furrier
>> You got the early beta for the Slackbot, of course.
Ryan Gavin
>> But Slackbot, Slackbot knows all that context. So, it can see those conversations that are happening maybe four divisions over, that I don't even spend any time on, but that context shows up for me as part of my personal agent. So, the transition out of the inbox is going to be a very, very critical one for many customers as they think about how do they modernize work into this kind of Slack work operating system that we've talked about.
John Furrier
>> Ryan, I'm glad you brought that up, because things happen in evolution. People who aren't in the industry might not know the ways, but paper to email, email to Slack, Slack to AI. I mean, I remember early days of Slack when people were trying to figure out what it was, they would say, "Oh, it's email for millennials," so it was kind of a comment. And then what you're getting at now is the convert and why they like it is because it's conversational, but it's got the value of the data. I'm seeing people, and we use it for projects. I mean, it's loose, unstructured data, I guess, but it's all there, right? So, if you just get it going, it is the bloodstream of the company, at the end of the day.
Ryan Gavin
>> That's a hundred percent right. It's the long-term memory of the company. I joined Slack and Salesforce a little bit, almost two years ago. And I'll tell you, just very honestly, when I started using the enterprise search AI feature in Slack, it was my number one onboarding tool. And why? Because it knew the whole context of 10 years of Slack that I had not participated in. And so, I could ask it all the simple questions, maybe the questions I was a little embarrassed on, maybe the question is like, hey, what was the original presentation the founder did to this account? All that's there, but it's historically been inaccessible. We've had these conversations, the data's there, but who's going to be able to find it? But now you can with these powerful AI tools, and Slackbot only takes that to a whole another level, where I can feel like I've got a real personal work agent that's there for me, that helps me get my job done faster.
John Furrier
>> And it's very timely with the whole retail event going on in this week to cover the news. I guess my final question for you is, how would you describe the feedback from the pre-GA of Slackbot? What's been anecdotally some of the commentary from the customers? Can you share some anecdotal stories from the customers? Stories drive movements, so share a story and some anecdotes.
Ryan Gavin
>> I love that you brought that up. Stories do drive movements, and it is very, very true. And we've seen that too. We've seen customers, reMarkable saying, "This is calming the chaos." We've seen, one of my favorite stories I'll just share was at Mr. Beast Industries, which is one of this growing incredible media empire. There was an employee that was using Slackbot, and she just said, "Are we normal?" And Slackbot came back with this incredible answer that showed that it knew her, because it said, "Well, I'm not so sure, but that's okay that you're not normal. And because not being normal is great."
And in the response, Slackbot used the word y'all and her reaction was, "I say you all, that's me." And it used the emojis that she likes to use. So, it instantly connected with her because it knew her, and it came back just not only just a playful answer, but in an insightful answer and something that she's like, "I love this." And work should be delightful, work should be fun. And I think powerful AI can also have a little bit of personality, and that's what we built with Slackbot, and that's what customers are seeing and saying today.
John Furrier
>> Well, Ryan, certainly our original slogan of SiliconANGLE from 16 years ago is, extracting the signal from the noise. This is what it does, it gets right to the signal, puts all that noise. It would've been discovery, clicks and navigation, frankly, and comprehension around, oh, I don't need to look at that. So, congratulations on the news. Looking forward to using the feature and-
Ryan Gavin
>> Hey, thank you....
John Furrier
>> thanks for being part of our Retail series and our Mixture of Experts.
Ryan Gavin
>> Yeah, John, we appreciate you guys as always, thank you so much for having us on and I'll see you in person next time, I promise.
John Furrier
>> All right, Cool. Cheers.
Ryan Gavin
>> Take care.
John Furrier
>> I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE's NYSE Studio here, breaking down all the action, talking to the leaders where AI is moving the needle, not just on productivity, but it's going to start connecting the dots on work, deliverables, it's going to make the life easier. And also business operations, things of that nature, it's all coming down. And power to the people, that seems to be the theme. Productivity is impacting people's jobs, and it's going to continue to happen this year. We'll see more action. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier