Speaker 1: 0:23

Welcome to Techzine TV.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Welcome to a new episode of TechSite Dark Zone Tour. We're at the Salesforce World Tour in Amsterdam. We're talking to Peter Dooling. He's Chief Customer Officer at Slack.

Speaker 3: 0:37

That's right.

Speaker 2: 0:38

So, peter, can you tell us a bit what you do all day, because that's for people always nice to know.

Speaker 3: 0:44

Oh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. So I'm the Chief Customer Officer at Slack. That's a fancy title for someone who spends all day with customers. We are in the field, with the customers, understanding what they're doing, listening to them, going deep into the product in their implementations to try and understand what's good, what can we do better, how can we improve? Feedback is a gift, and so I am the ultimate chief feedback officer, trying to get the feedback from around the world. We feed that in into our product process and we try and make the product the best it possibly can be.

Speaker 2: 1:20

Okay, maybe you could share with us what the feedback was over the last two years, or something that you think really went back into the product, that really improved the product.

Speaker 3: 1:32

Yeah, no great question. Thank you for that. So I've been with Salesforce for over a decade. When I joined Salesforce, I ran our pre-sales engineering organization globally. Looking at back then, 10, 12 years ago, salesforce was going through a massive revolution, moving into larger enterprises and making the software as a service promise a reality. And to do that it's not easy, no, and they expanded it quite a bit over the years.

Speaker 3: 1:59

Over the years, and so we learned a lot security, reliability, governance, all of the technical requirements to scale at that level, but also the requirements to work with regulated industries like banking, healthcare, government, and so fast forward a whole decade. Here we are in this room in Amsterdam. I'm in Amsterdam, right, it's in Amsterdam, and we are with Slack. And Slack has had an extraordinary history over the past 10 years, with its initial kind of birthplace inside tech and dev, inside development organizations and companies, and over the last two, three years with Salesforce, we're now moving Slack into Salesforce's core business, which is in enterprises and medium-sized companies and all industries and all types of users. So to do that, there's a couple of things that we've learned.

Speaker 3: 2:52

So, to answer your question, one of the first things customers, when I started in the role about a year and a half ago, started asking around was the coexistence of Salesforce and Slack together.

Speaker 3: 3:05

So where we have a customer that has a big investment in Salesforce and a big investment in Slack, they weren't always connected or touching, and so if you are a Salesforce customer, you are very focused on, let's say, sales or service marketing, commerce, and you want to have the productivity of your salespeople or your CRM people as effective as possible.

Speaker 3: 3:30

But you look at Slack, and Slack is typically for everyone in the organization, and if everyone in the organization is on Slack, isn't there an incredible opportunity to have everybody helping the salespeople, or everybody helping the service center, or everyone helping the marketeers? And so we realized very early that there was a huge unlock with Slack, and the unlock was to unlock the power of the entire company to make everyone focus on the customer, because Salesforce's vision for 25 years has to make you a customer company, make you think more about your customer versus just the product. And so to do that, we decided that it was really important to build integration between the Salesforce metadata and Slack. And if you think about Salesforce for a moment, it's a big metadata database. It describes things like cases, contacts, opportunities and orders and so forth. How do I get that into Slack? And so that was our initial hypothesis about a year, and a half ago.

Speaker 3: 4:31

And we have now made it come true and we are now launching we call it Salesforce Channels which is the ability inside Slack to natively connect into Salesforce and to render and present that incredible metadata inside Slack.

Speaker 2: 4:46

We have these native buttons now for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Exactly.

Speaker 3: 4:50

And it's the objects, not just the clouds. It's the objects themselves, because what we think is that, with Slack, think about what is Salesforce. You could argue. Salesforce is a database of records. It has a record being a case.

Speaker 2: 5:05

Yeah, many different fields within an organization.

Speaker 3: 5:09

Yeah, but fundamentally, the record you care about is what's a lead? A lead is a very important thing for you. Well, what's the outcome of a lead? The outcome of a lead is either a dead lead or it's an opportunity. What's the output of an opportunity? It's an order, I hope. And so you have this database of records and you have all these outcomes. How did those outcomes come about? That answer is in Slack. You have people talking to each other saying, hey, we know about how to convert that lead. I have a reference story of a customer. I have a document or a channel where I have my engineers speaking for the opportunity. I know how to get this approved through my deal desk. I have a great lawyer who can work with their lawyer. Here are the best cases that we've used in the past, and so all that context is sitting over here, we hope, in Slack. Imagine the world, the opportunity we have to connect these two the context sitting in Slack, the records sitting inside Salesforce it's a pretty big opportunity.

Speaker 2: 6:06

But that also raises the question at the other end for customers who are into Slack but not into Salesforce, but chose for a different CRM solution or different marketing solution or different-.

Speaker 3: 6:18

Great question.

Speaker 2: 6:19

Great question, because Slack has become more and more a Salesforce tool, as it may, but yet also still a lot of companies invested in Slack. They're thinking like should we get out? Should we stay, because it's becoming more and more a Salesforce application.

Speaker 3: 6:34

But we are on something else, you made a mistake five years ago, it's okay.

Speaker 2: 6:40

But they can also be more in the ERP, because the manufacturer or Great question.

Speaker 3: 6:47

Let me unpack that. There's two questions in your question. Let's go to the first part, which is it is really important to us at Slack that we are the operating system for work. It's a work operating system, and a work operating system means that for us, the superpower of Slack is that we are a place where attention is collected. And think about it If you're in Slack on your screen at work, I want to keep you inside Slack because you're very productive, You're a flow of work.

Speaker 2: 7:18

You tried to sell it as a digital HQ a couple years ago and now you switch to WorkAware, doesn't it?

Speaker 3: 7:23

Yeah, and it is. If you think about the explanation I just gave you around the connection from metadata to Salesforce, in the past you would have had to task, switch out of Slack Some of the work you could have done in Slack, but most of it you would have had to toss, switch out, go somewhere else and do that work and then come back into Slack. And by bringing in the actual record data into a channel so a new type of channel it meant that I could then swarm my people into that channel and operate on that data. So that's the first phase. The first phase is Salesforce data. What about other data? To your question, what about other data, other systems, crm systems, project management systems, collaboration systems it's the exact same metaphor.

Speaker 3: 8:07

So now we are doing a lot of integration into other places as well, and so we want you to be able to find so.

Speaker 3: 8:14

Through enterprise search, which we've announced a few weeks ago, we are actually building search to other systems we can bring that data in Act. I want to be able to. Then, once I have it inside of Slack, I want to be able to update the data or take an action directly inside Slack, and so we're going to build connectors to different platforms and, last but not least, is collaborate. How do I make sure that if I bring this object in from an external system, you and I can come into a channel and start to collaborate on it? So the first part of your question is we are making sure that we do as many integrations as possible outside of Salesforce because we want to bring those people into that Salesforce ecosystem as well. The second part of your question was around we see this world of Slack allowing us to really maximize any investment the customer has made in Salesforce to bring in other users that would probably not have come into that user experience, but to bring them into the user experience.

Speaker 3: 9:16

Does that help you give a sense of where we're going.

Speaker 2: 9:18

A bit, a bit. Yes, I wonder, because you made these dedicated buttons for Salesforce within Slack. Is it going to be open for third parties as well?

Speaker 3: 9:28

So let me just correct you on something there. So we have created a product called Elevate that was inside of Slack, has a sales button. The integrations I'm talking about are generic across Salesforce, generic across Slack, and so the Elevate feature is more for that salesperson who wants to get alerts and understand what's happening inside of Salesforce, and so that capability is targeted at a specific persona. We are targeting Salesforce we call it Salesforce channels to all personas. So this is something that you will see natively inside of Slack. If I were to bring you into, I could show it to you right now. I could bring you into Slack. You will see a new type of channel, okay, and so in the past it was basically I'm simplifying here two types of channel private and public, yes, and you to us, basically I'm simplifying here two types of channel, private and public, yes, and you have like a hash symbol and then lowercase, you have the name of the channel with some dashes. I think everybody who's a slackers you know. No, she's talking about right now. Yeah, that's not the case with a Salesforce channel.

Speaker 3: 10:31

Okay, a Salesforce channel is, whatever the name, the object is in the source system, wherever it happens to be. So let's say we have an opportunity called Salesforce Customer Success. It's uppercase, lowercase. That's what the object looks like. Therefore, the channel name has changed so you can see visually that this is a different type of channel. So it feels like a channel. You can click on it, go into it, add messages, bring people in, but then you can have new tabs across the top and those new tabs have got whatever the object data is in the source system. So it could be cases, contacts, leads, custom object. We've built something in an external system in Salesforce we want to bring into Slack. That also is included inside Salesforce.

Speaker 2: 11:13

Okay, and it's only for Salesforce, it's not for Salesforce. Today Correct, and in the future, maybe, maybe.

Speaker 3: 11:21

Let's see where we're going. The direction of going, the direction of travel, is this concept we have around. The work operating system is very much grounded in the core of where Slack has come from, which is around. How do we make this experience delightful, simple and pleasant? How do we make it really easy? I think it's fair to say, and we've all experienced this we are constantly distracted at work. There are so many different systems, there are so many different platforms, and we do our own research as well, and you know this. We ask many of our customers what's it like to work, and some of these surveys are coming back saying well, work feels broken.

Speaker 2: 12:04

Too much email usually, huh.

Speaker 3: 12:07

Lots of different systems, lots of applications, data everywhere, and what's the first thing you're asked, or many of the first things we're asked, is I've got to find something. Where is the person, the thing, the transaction, the document, whatever it is? And so one of the areas that we're very focused on is how do we start to make Slack a sort of a portal entry point into all the enterprise systems that you have, be data sitting in Jira or Trello or Atlassian or Google or Workday or Salesforce, and so enterprise search is our direction, where we are bringing that into the search experience inside Slack, so I can now ask generative style questions, I can say who is the best person to understand a certain topic, and you can go search that semantically across these platforms.

Speaker 2: 13:03

And what do you think makes the search from Slack better than many of your competitors? Because, to be honest, I go to a lot of events and I know Atlassian is building an enterprise search, google is building an enterprise search, elasticsearch is building an enterprise search, salesforce is building an enterprise. You know what I mean. It's becoming quite new players.

Speaker 3: 13:24

I need a search engine for all the search engines right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 13:27

So what differentiates Slack? I think it's. I'm going to answer your question. So it's so simple to answer to your question. Are you ready? Because Slack is where work happens. I'm working in Slack, I'm already in Slack. Why would I leave and go someplace else to search? And so we understand that. And this sounds like an arrogant answer, but think about it for a moment. Tens of millions of people are sitting looking at that screen. They're in an interaction, they're in the flow of work. Yes, I could stop you. Go over here and enter another system, log in, go through a single sign VPN. Whatever you have to do, it depends upon your enterprise. You may or may not have to do that, but the hard truth is most people in companies do have to go through multiple layers of security to move between systems.

Speaker 3: 14:10

Luckily it's changing a bit now it's changing a little bit, but it's still the same. So, if you're in the flow of work I'm inside Slack I need to give you a line of sight to a simple user experience where you can find things, and so search is like what. We've been in this industry long enough to know that every few years, search comes around, a new technology comes around. All of a sudden, search is hot again, but work is persistent. We still work in very similar ways we've worked in the past. So there's two technologies that are really interesting to us for the future of Slack. One is search and the other, of course, is generative AI in all of its different forms that can help us to be more productive On the search side. To answer your question directly, because you're already there, and I think that's going to be a really important part of our responsibility is to build the best experience that you can have for this, and you'll see this as we go forward.

Speaker 2: 15:06

And do you focus on integrating with an Octa and Microsoft Earth? It's called different and to our idea. It's called now Azure Active Directory. 1. Did you get to use a wall and you make sure that the data that's being searched is also data you can see?

Speaker 3: 15:22

Great question. So this is a really important part of it is like what's the permission set for what I can do? I need to ensure that I integrate to those various platforms. The answer is yes. So we have to integrate these various platforms and that we are doing permission search natively, and this is a big problem for many of the companies you just mentioned, because they're not doing that.

Speaker 3: 15:45

A lot of these companies are sort of aggregating data, bringing it into a centralized place, building an index over the top of this be it a federated index or a centralized capability and then providing you an answer search experience from that place, and the reason why is trying to get you out of where you're working into that place, that other place. I want you staying where you're working and then I will federate out through a trusted gateway, out to these different platforms in a trusted fashion, bringing the results set back, presenting it back to you, but never persisting that data, Because if I persist the data, I've just broken the rule you just talked about and so making sure that this is done in a trusted way hugely important to us. So customers are giving us a lot of feedback as we work with customers around the world, especially in regulated industries, that this platform of federation needs to respect those privacy rules and security rules and data residency rules, and so we're working very diligently to make that happen.

Speaker 2: 16:44

How good is your search technology? Because, from a customer perspective, they can choose between a domestic search, between Google, the search company as it may, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:55

So this is a great question. So I think what's happening and I'll tell you how it works today how it works today is we're using APIs in those different search engines to sort of marshal back results. We then take that marshal result set and we're using our LLM underneath our platform to generate a beautiful, generated natural language interface experience, so that, again, we're trying to engage the customer, engage them in the action. So, in that case, we're using the power of each of those platforms to do what they do best and they'll have their own uniquenesses that they have inside their platform, and so we will continue to innovate inside our core, but we also expect lots of our partners to innovate in their cores as well, and we'll bring it back into one central place, okay.

Speaker 2: 17:49

Switch it around a bit. Text has been massively important to Slack, but also added a lot of audio and video capabilities. I know many of your customers have asked for a more extensive video support system, maybe even to compete with the Zoom and the Teams in this world. I also learned recently that Amazon has scaled their QIIME project, which you heavily depend on because your whole video is based on Amazon QIIME. Is there any news on that front?

Speaker 3: 18:16

It doesn't, I move forward. Yeah, no, it doesn't. That announcement from Amazon doesn't affect us. Think of Chime. It was an application built on a set of primitive infrastructure that are native with inside the Amazon AWS platform. So we're using a layer of that platform that is not impacted by the Chime decision. So audio is audio, video is video. How they were creating an experience was their experience. We created an experience inside of Huddles, which is our experience. They're very different experiences.

Speaker 2: 18:47

Yeah, okay, but they were using the same SDK as it made to Doesn't impact us doesn't impact us.

Speaker 3: 18:53

Huddles continues on as it is today.

Speaker 2: 18:56

The SDK will stay available, I learned. But I do wonder, because if Amazon doesn't have its own product anymore, there's not much development going in there and with Slack you want to offer the best experience possible. We will always look around.

Speaker 3: 19:11

We will always have the best experience. By the way, just so you understand, amazon is one of our largest customers in the world and so Amazon is looking at the best product and they looked at the best product and they picked Slack. So we will always build on top of whatever we feel is the best infrastructure possible for that platform. What we really want to worry about is the experience. The plumbing infrastructure of technologies is a commoditized game in our industry. However, the digital experience is not. Digital experience is so powerful If we can grab your attention and keep your attention. And so for huddles, it's interesting because people have tried to compare huddles to other platforms and what they're realizing is they're not comparing like for like. What we've noticed is and it's really fascinating to watch is that Huddle's typical Huddle's user is only a few users and a few minutes of attention, and it's one of those sort of in-the-moment type of examples. A good example of this I was with a customer recently which is Rocket companies out of Detroit, united States, and they have a number of different companies in their business. Rocket Mortgage is a good example of that, and with Rocket, they're a huge user of Huddles and I was like but you've got all these other products as well, from the exact companies we're talking about. Why do you use, why is Huddle so incredibly successful within your company?

Speaker 3: 20:42

And, if you think about it for a moment, what is the business of approving a loan, which is what the rocket companies are in? They have different types of loans. They have kind of like loans that are like rotating loans, secured loans, unsecured loans, et cetera. And so think about it. You want a loan from me. I'm on the phone with you trying to sell you a loan, and we're going through a process to get you approved. Well, I have to get an underwriter, I have to get information about you, I have to ask others is this a risk? So I have the risk department, I have the underwriting department, I have the sales department, I have the customer on the phone. I need to close this quickly, I need to get this transaction done, and so you may have to have an in the moment, quick, immediate interaction, and so a huddle is a perfect kind of example of an experience.

Speaker 3: 21:29

Why? Because the button for the huddle is right there in the channel. It's just one button away. You don't have to know who to add to the meeting it knows, because the channel already has the users pre-added. And so again to your initial question why are all these technologies powerful? Why is search powerful inside Slack? Why is video powerful inside Slack? It's not because of search and video, it's because of where it is and how it's done. And that, for us, is the focus as we go forward. How do we build simplicity into Slack? How do I make sure that Slack remains this really powerful place where attention comes in the technologies, for how we add to that will come and go, but attention stays, and that's what we're very focused on, because that's the superpower of Slack.

Speaker 2: 22:12

Okay, okay I don't wonder, though, if you thought about adding external people coming into Slack for the video calls, because that's like a big part of the industry now and there's a lot of questions about certain products. Yeah, yeah, and I do think a lot of your customers would like to see that happen. Yeah, they do today, and I do think a lot of your customers would like to see that happen?

Speaker 3: 22:37

Yeah, they do today. So recently we've improved our integration with Teams and with Zoom and with Google Meet, and so we have third-party support for the different platforms. So if I am sitting inside Slack, I'm in a channel and I can see the huddle button in the top right-hand corner. You can click on that button and if your administrator has turned on integration, you will see the other video providers.

Speaker 2: 23:03

You bring them to an external service. Yeah, we bring them to that service. Why not keep them in Slack?

Speaker 3: 23:10

Well, this is a great question. So there is an ability. That video is a totally commoditized business and if you're doing like a two 300 person video call, it's probably not something that makes sense inside of Slack today.

Speaker 2: 23:30

But people are working at Slack. You want to keep them in Slack. You want to bring data to Slack. Why not keep them for their video calls also in Slack?

Speaker 3: 23:38

Well, it's an interesting idea. We've thought about it Extensively. I guess the integrations are the key. How do we get all of that data about those video conference calls? That's what I'm focused on right now. You could do that, but again, slack in a channel and what we're doing with channel-based work is we want to keep people inside of a channel-based work.

Speaker 2: 24:03

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 24:07

But you're telling me that it's an important act. I'm listening to the feedback.

Speaker 2: 24:12

I think for your customers, it's really important to keep looking at that, because I really think that you're trying to get everything into Slack and sending them out to an external server doesn't feel right yeah no, I hear you.

Speaker 3: 24:25

I hear you. Thank you for the feedback.

Speaker 2: 24:27

Okay, you also see a lot of movement towards the suite. In the past, best of breed has been popular for quite some years and now you see a kind of movement that people want to move back to a suite position. In some cases that's beneficial for you because you have Salesforce and Slack. At the other side, it's not so beneficial because you don't offer an office environment or Google Workspace or whatever. Is that something you're looking at in how you can keep your position in that market?

Speaker 3: 25:05

It's a great question. I mean there's a lot of attraction to having a large and broad, as you say, sort of suite of products. Our focus inside Slack has been like I keep saying it's. I can keep your attention inside of the channel. I have a much better chance of giving you an experience that will be sticky to you and that you'll be focused on. I think that, fundamentally, all these different, even in a suite, as you say, you and I both know you're using 5% of the functionality of the suite. You end up in the two or three features that you really like, and so for us what's really interesting is how do I integrate those products? So another example of a good customer is General Motors, and with General Motors they have everything. Like all big companies, you have a choice.

Speaker 3: 26:07

They probably buy all products yes, they buy everything and you have optionality as a user as to where, how you work. And this is why constantly working with our partners to integrate to them so that I can launch into a meeting in that platform or I can launch into a document, is very important to those customers. And so I think the suite has the middleware, the attention middleware, to a lot of these platforms, because those suites are at war with each other right. So if I can find a path through so that I can say to you well, if you want to use for this division, you want to use this tool, I can connect to it. That division of business, I can use a different tool, I'll connect to it.

Speaker 2: 27:07

Salesforce did try to become active years back.

Speaker 3: 27:10

That was a long time ago.

Speaker 2: 27:12

There's no focus on that.

Speaker 3: 27:13

No, no, there's a whole new world called agents. There's a whole new world called agents. Yeah, I know there's a whole new world called AI, yeah, and so actually an even better answer to your question is those suites and those platforms fantastic, but there's an incredible disruptive technology that just landed in planet Earth called generative AI. We've written a lot of stories about it. No-transcript.

Speaker 2: 28:04

That's coming all the agents into Slack is also. You are adapting the workflows, as it may, to become more intelligent with agents as well.

Speaker 3: 28:12

So there's kind of like three fronts. If I kind of summarize it for you, there's just thank you. There's LLM inside and generative technology inside of Slack itself to make Slack smarter, faster, simpler to use, continuing to innovate, and so that's what we call Slack AI, and so you'll see Slack AI continuing to make it even more pleasant and simple and productive, and that's an ongoing train that we're constantly working on. It's very exciting. On the other side of the fence, of course, is the Salesforce agent force, where, if you're a Salesforce customer and you've invested a lot of time in Salesforce infrastructure, you're building agents there. I can now deploy and surface those agents inside Slack so I can actually have them as a first-class citizen in a channel that I can now deploy and surface those agents inside Slack, so I can actually have them as a first-class citizen in a channel that I can interact with and ask questions that are relevant to the Salesforce platform and portfolio directly and natively inside of Slack. That's quite exciting.

Speaker 3: 29:10

And the third one is everybody else. There's hundreds of these things popping up every weekend, and so we have given over a what we call this, the sunroof, which is a privileged part of our user experience on the right-hand side of Slack and there's a button, if you notice, right at the top right-hand corner, and in there we've set a set of APIs that we can integrate, and so we can give context from the channel that we're in to that LLM or that API or that AI app. Excuse me, I know we used to call them wrappers at one point in time. Now it's not du jour, we're calling them AI apps, and so, whatever language we're using, the point is I want to be able to surface this within Slack for our customers, because everyone's out there experimenting and using these different AIs.

Speaker 2: 29:53

Okay, thank you, peter, for your insight into how Slack is evolving. It's evolving quickly. And where is it going. Maybe we'll talk again in the future.

Speaker 3: 30:03

I look forward to it.

Speaker 2: 30:03

I look forward to it. Thank you for watching TechSign Talks on Tour. See you at the next one.

Speaker 1: 30:10

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