Dreamforce 2025 | Rob Seaman, Salesforce

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Rob Seaman

Slack Chief Product Officer

Salesforce

play_circle_outline Introduction of Rob Seaman, chief product officer of Slack, at Dreamforce 2025.

play_circle_outline Enhancing Personalized User Experiences and Decision-Making: The Role of Contextual Data and Slack in AI Evolution

play_circle_outline Upcoming features like Slackbot as a personal AI assistant emphasize ease of use.

play_circle_outline Slack’s integration with Salesforce creates a seamless connection for enhanced productivity.

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Rob Seaman, Salesforce

Rob Seaman

Slack Chief Product Officer Salesforce

In this Dreamforce interview, Rob Seaman, chief product officer for Slack at Salesforce, joins theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen to discuss how Slack is becoming the natural home for humans and AI agents to work side-by-side. Seaman explains why Slack’s asynchronous DNA, rich organizational context and “no dead ends” agent design make it a powerful surface for day-to-day automation – from simple wins like name-pronunciation help to bootstrapping executive communications and sales overviews. He shares why teams are “programming Slack” themselves, how prod... Read more

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Rob Seaman, Salesforce

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>> Welcome back, everyone. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Gemma Allen here, my co-host. Live-streaming from San Francisco for Dreamforce 2025. Breaking down all the action from Salesforce as we go into the agent wave, as the AI infrastructure continues to expand. The applications and the data that's going to make agents work is creating a tsunami of new paradigms, new models, and an agentic operating system. Of course, the center of that is one of the fastest-growing apps, almost of all time, Slack, as we know. Now, owned by Salesforce. Rob Seaman, chief product officer of Slack with Salesforce is here inside theCUBE and he's got the keys to the kingdom. Rob, great to see you.

Rob Seaman

>> Thank you for having me.

>> Thanks for coming in. I mean, you're the chief product officer of one of the most iconic, fastest-growing products. The story's legendary in The Valley, of course, but it has become the standard workflow, work product, like email for millennials or gen Zs. It's where people are getting the jobs done. It is work today and a future-of-work scenario, as you guys are building out the future. Slack is a key data source, a lot of data in Slack. Tell us what's going on with Slack? How are you guys taking that to this agentic operating system that you guys talk about? But more importantly, how does that transformation of the data that we use every day in Slack turn into value?

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah. So, first, I got to say it's a privilege and an honor to get to work on Slack. It's a big responsibility with all the customers and users that we have, but we're so excited about this time. We think Slack is the perfect home for humans and agents to live together. And the reason we think that is that Slack started was asynchronous communication. If you think of agents, it's, again, like an asynchronous experience. You ask questions, you get answers back when the agent has that answer. You ask it to go do a series of things, it goes and does them, and it comes back asynchronously when it's done. So, it's just kind of a natural fit. So, we believe they should sit there next to your colleagues. You should be able to DM them, add them to channels. They should just feel like they're part of your team. And so. That's what we're working on. But I think the thing that we have that make agents extremely powerful is the context that's in Slack. And we often say that Slack is reflective of the priorities and culture of a company. It's typically mirrored in the channels that are in Slack. So, all of the most important things a company is working on are actually manifested in channels in Slack. And all of the things that are most important to me as a user and an employee are manifested in channels in Slack as is my voice and tone. And so, it's really just a goldmine for reasoning and figuring out which tools to actually call. And so, we've been really excited to bring agents into Slack in the right way.

>> Yeah, Gem and I were talking yesterday. It's such exciting because if you want to nerd out, there's an engineering story around next-best action, we hear a lot about that with AI and agents. But user productivity is obviously the top-line benefit of AI. And this idea of next-best action, productivity, it's all there in Slack. You have the roadmap, you have a lot of responsibility, a lot of pressure.

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah.

>> How should people think about that? What's going to come next? What the key things you're focused on? Because it is a gold mine, one. Two, I want my work to be easier. I would love to have a recommendation of next-best action. How are you guys looking at this from a roadmap standpoint? What are customers telling you? Can you share with us some of the things you guys are looking at? What are you optimizing for the product?

Rob Seaman

>> One of our product principles is that if you make things easier enough, people will dramatically change their behavior. And I don't think agents, frankly, have been made easier enough yet that every single human in the world is using them and that's something that we're working on in an enterprise context. And I think that the enemy of good in this scenario is a lot of companies are... One, there's inertia. Two, there's fear of making mistakes. And so, I think people look for a single big agentic use case when there's a ton of small stuff you could go do that would provide value. Like last week we did an all-hands call and we welcomed all our new hires. And previously, we would've had a human tell us how to pronounce all their names and they'd go do the research. I just fed it to an agent and said, "Hey, how would you pronounce this list of 50 names?" And it gave me the country of origin of those names. It gave me the-

>> Your IQ just went up.

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah. Well, I mean it's like little things like that. So, we often say think of it in a series of hill climbs. You're not going to get to the top of Everest immediately. So, just think in terms of small hills and move faster and I think that's what people really need to do.

Gemma Allen

>> We could really do with that, John. That would be a great feature. We're Slack users at theCUBE.

>> Yeah, I need that.

Gemma Allen

>> So, yesterday the ChatGPT announcement was big. I read something in the news about that this morning and the response has been, as everything is with ChatGPT, either very positive or very negative. There seems to be no middle ground these days in the AI debates. But tell us a little bit about the core interface side of Slack and the future, whereby do you see a future where Slack will be like the internet for a company?

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah, I do. I mean, totally. We think of it a bit as the browser for the enterprise, not necessarily the internet, but the browser in which you experience the internet within the enterprise, we think Slack can be that. And so, just over the course of the last six months, we've seen ChatGPT, Codex, Claude, hopefully soon Claude Code, but Cursor, Vercel, the v0 agent, Perplexity, Google Agentspace all coming to Slack. And so, we think it's a natural home because we think our biggest asset, frankly, is attention. So, the aggregated attention of knowledge workers sits in Slack. So, if it was a consumer product, it'd be a great place to buy ads, but we're never going to do that. But it's a great place to put your software because of that because it immediately gets distributed and used because you're there. And when it's there, it's just easy to use. So, we think we have a chance to be the browser within the enterprise, if you will.

Gemma Allen

>> And I guess one of the main advantages you have too is the context that comes with the data that you can get feeds to workers on a daily basis. It's guardrails to a certain extent. Tell us a little bit about that. I'd love to hear some use cases around how people are using it in their day-to-day.

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah, I mean it's absolutely gold. So, again, it's reflective of your company's priorities, but also you individually and how you work. So, I do a lot of public communications to our team about, "Hey, here's coming at Dreamforce," or, "Here's what's coming up next week," or, "Here's what our priorities are for the quarter." It can help me bootstrap communications because it knows how I write. It also has access to every single feature channel of what we're building, and it's gold, that context. It's really hard to put a finger on the value of it until you see, touch and feel it in your hands. Our account executives are using it for company overviews because all the conversation about the companies are happening. Competitive overviews, like, "Help me get into this happy hour." A guy last night was showing me how to... He actually was using Slack and Slackbot to figure out how to pitch, how to get into a particular happy hour, and it worked.

Gemma Allen

>> Love that.

Rob Seaman

>> It's just like this context is gold.

>> So, people are programming Slack? The users are programming Slack for their benefit?

Rob Seaman

>> 100%. Yep, and they're putting that context to their use and advantage.

Gemma Allen

>> We joke backstage, I was telling Rob that I was once a superuser for Yammer, which I think meant maybe being the only user, honestly, at the time. But one of the ways it was really effective way back then was around collaboration and fun, around sports teams and fantasy football colleagues. And my first experience with Slack actually was using it for a mom group in Brooklyn back when I had my first baby.

Rob Seaman

>> That's awesome.

Gemma Allen

>> And it was a great way for us to communicate. Tell us a little bit about that side of the Slack story and how that's, again, growing and progressing in this agentic age.

Rob Seaman

>> Totally. So, I think Slack was honestly probably still is one of the premier product-led growth stories in the history of Silicon Valley. And if you look at our business, we have have a product-led side where people come in, use it for free, swipe a credit card, start paying more, and then we have the enterprise side. Most of the enterprise side is still touched and sourced from that self-serve side. They grow up and become big companies that ultimately, I think this happened to you at theCUBE as well, that need to get onto an enterprise plan. But we have a ton of it. We see volunteer organizations. We see spikes around elections. We see spikes around sports seasons. To your point, there are fantasy football teams running in Slack. So, we still have that heritage of product-led growth, basically come use it for free, swipe a credit card and grow as your business or organization grows.

>> Rob, one of your customers came on, Salesforce customer, City of Kyle. Great guy, and they're public sector, so a little bit different. But his point was two things. "I'm not going to tell what I'm working on because I don't want my competition..." Like there's competition in public sector. He was so happy with Slack, but he made a comment, it's like, "This is like our brain." And once they get all the city data in there, everyone's more productive. They can answer questions, like you were giving that example about the pronunciations. He was saying that their brain, once the data comes in, it just takes off. You talked about voice or upside potential, and there's a lot of misunderstanding around Salesforce, Slack, how that works together. And I think with agents, it's highlighted, we talked about this yesterday, the data moat that you have one as a company competitively, and probably misunderstood by Wall Street, that's clearly my opinion, but the benefits of the company is huge. Talk about the role of data because this is where it's very nuanced. It's not so much sales for Slack, it's what Slack does for the overall data agent opportunity because an enterprise's brain is Slack. That's where the work's being done, so this is a huge point. I would love to get your vision on this where it goes and share.

Rob Seaman

>> So, Slack is conveniently an for searchable log of all communication and knowledge. And so, we've traditionally spoken of it as the collective intellect or brain of an organization. And so, it's just now I think that these agents are able to finally take advantage of it, and I think it's our duty one to protect it because it is customer's data, but it's also our duty to make it available to these agents in a way that is optimized for agentic use cases so they can effectively reason and make these tool calls. And it's an immensely, immensely powerful use case. Just yesterday, somebody asked me the difference between Data Cloud and DC1, and I didn't know and I just asked and it was like, boom, right there, handwritten answer for me. And I think it's an underappreciated asset. I think two of the most important data assets within any given company are their customer information and the conversations that are happening amongst their employees.

>> Data nerd. It's got structure and it's got unstructured data, a key part of the agentic story.

Rob Seaman

>> Exactly.

>> You mentioned ease of use and making things simple and easy to use, that's the holy grail for adoption. You guys cracked the code on that. Where does that philosophy transform to with agents? Because I mean bots are a great tell sign. People are making bots to go do things. Discord, we've seen the same thing on Discord, bots are very popular. So, I'm envisioning that it's going to be a user-led moment too. So, how do you guys make it easy for me to look at our Slack or a customer to look at the Slack and say, "Hey, harvest the knowledge. Make it available to me"? How do you get that set up? Take us through how you're thinking about that because I think that's going to be instant next year. You'll start to see more momentum around that. It seems harder than it maybe really is, but it seems hard to me, but-

Rob Seaman

>> I think it's hard to do it right and teach people in a way that's not creepy. And so, we have a couple of product principles. One is don't make me think, and the other is be a great host. On the don't make me think side, people have historically had to translate questions into keywords and then put those into keyword search engines to find the things that they want. So, that was one quick easy thing. We just said, "Hey, no longer search by keyword, just ask your questions and we'll answer it." And I think that was a little thing. But we also say, "Be a good host." When you walk into an Airbnb, a well-appointed one, the amenities should be exactly where you expected and we want to do that with our software. And so, we put little touches in. Like if you go throughout Slack now, you'll see sparkles around where AI will be used to just automatically explain things to you, and it's putting that brain that you mentioned and all that data to work on your behalf. So, if I go into an incident channel and I see some technical jargon that I don't understand, I hit the sparkles and it just immediately defines it for me based on our brain within our Slack. It's amazing. I think those little nods really help people understand the power of AI. And then, the agents themselves we're working on basically no dead ends is what we say. So, if you're going back and forth with an agent and it just breaks, that's a really... I don't know, it's like being hung up on in a call center. It's just like you bail and you lose trust. And so, we're working really hard with our agents and with our partners to make sure that there are no dead ends in these experiments.

>> One of the things, Gemma, we were talking about this when we were in New York at our NYC studio a couple weeks ago, AI's changing a lot of roles. As the chief product officer, one of the roles is the PM, the product manager.

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah.

>> So, what's your perspective on that? Because you're customer's zero for Slack and there's many more million of customers. How is it changing your product team? Because you want to be faster. Agents are going to accelerate value proposition. What's the role of the product managers on your team as they want to release stuff and how does AI generally more broadly impact the PM?

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah, I wish I could actually show you something, but we-

>> .

Rob Seaman

>> Right? So, I think that two things. I would say synthesis and prototyping. So, a lot of what a product manager has to do is synthesize information from multiple places into something that's executable. And then, we always say in Slack, get to code as quick as possible, and there's no time right now is the most exciting time in that regard. So, easy to get to code. And so, I think it makes it easier for them to synthesize. We have prototypes in our hands a lot faster, so we can feel if it's going to be a good product. I mean, we use Slackbot for this all the time. I could go into Slackbot and say, "Hey, give me all the positive and negative feedback over the course of the last 30 days about yourself." And it would spit out like, "Hey, here's all the feedback-"

>> Where's my blind spot?

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah, exactly. And I can say, "Hey, now turn that into a seven-day tweet campaign for social from Slack HQ," and boom, it does it and it's amazing.

Gemma Allen

>> We had Paul Tatum on yesterday from Salesforce from public sector, and he made some great points around the use of how AI has a great proving ground in public sector, but one of the things that is clear about enterprise and government is security. And we've all had those stories or heard those horror stories around WhatsApp threads getting leaked or how it is that we have to be more careful than ever in what we say and what we do and how that might be heard. How are you guys thinking about the security element of Slack in enterprise? How are those conversations playing out with customers?

Rob Seaman

>> I mean, it's been one of our biggest differentiators from day one. So, if you go back to the founders of Slack, from day one, it was very important that this be the most secure messaging system within an enterprise. So, I don't want to go through all the acronyms and stuff that we do, but it's an attractive attack vector. We get attacked all the time. We have teams that that's all they do. But from a data security perspective, I would say the thing that we try to make sure for our customers is that they know how their data is getting used and not. And we're very particular with AI that no data actually leaves the trust boundary. The data's not used for the training of the LLMs, and that just gives large enterprises in the government a ton of confidence in using these AI features.

>> All right. What's on the product roadmap? Tell us what's coming.

Rob Seaman

>> The thing I'm most excited about, we announced a pilot of this week, which is Slackbot. So, it's a personal AI companion in Slack. If you all want to try it, you should. It's awesome. I mean, it literally is having a fun Slack-style personal assistant sitting next to you in Slack that can find things for you, right for you.

Gemma Allen

>> I think the key question is did he get into the happy hour?

Rob Seaman

>> He got into the happy hour. He 100% got into the happy hour.

Gemma Allen

>> I think you're going to have some great use cases in Ireland then. You need to promote that as part of your pitch.

Rob Seaman

>> That's awesome. Let's do it. No, we're excited about that. We're also excited about the integration of Salesforce, so we're going to have... Slack, we acquire a number of new logos on an annual basis, and we can actually introduce people to Salesforce that way. And I'd say those are probably the two biggest things we're working on.

>> What's the elevator pitch for Slack? And how should people think about Slack cutting through, across Salesforce? Obviously, Data 360 moves from Data Cloud, kind of a rename, but there's also some infrastructure platform, harmonization, unification going on at Salesforce. How is Slack fitting in on the more broader Salesforce piece?

Rob Seaman

>> Yeah, I mean generally I would tell people if I had to explain it to my kids as an example, I mean just imagine if an average job was as easy as talking. I mean, I think that's really what we want to make Slack. Is literally, it's just like talking to your colleagues. You'll be talking to your software and you'll be talking to AI. So, as long as you can talk and think, you should be able to have a productive career. So, that's Slack. I mean, it basically puts all of your colleagues and all of your software within, basically, the reach of your fingertips in a simple conversation.

>> And highlight here at the show, Dreamforce this year? What's jumping off the page? People grabbing you in the hallway. What's the big ask? What are the highlights?

Rob Seaman

>> The big highlight so far is, honestly, a lot of people are very excited about Slackbot. I'd say people are also very excited about the determinism we're bringing to Agentforce as part of Agentforce 4. Those are the things that people are grabbing me for.

Gemma Allen

>> And lastly, tonight, are you going to go to Metallica or Benson Boone?

Rob Seaman

>> I'm a Metallica fan, right? I'm not not a Benson Boone fan, but I'm Metallica fan.

Gemma Allen

>> I think we're going to have a generational divide here later on, right?

>> He's checking all the boxes. Rob, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Gemma Allen

>> Thank you so much for having me.

>> Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier with Gem Allen. Again, bringing all the action, the future of work and productivity. One of the best advantages of AI, get that brain, its Slack, in your organization, as it becomes the work product where people are forming the collective intelligence and all the data is in it. It's a data moat for Salesforce, of course, and value creation and extraction for companies. So, doing our part, bringing you the data here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching.