Work today demands an operating system that brings AI, agents, apps, data, and humans together in one conversational interface. That platform is Slack.

Slack is no longer just a communication tool, it’s the operating system for your entire organization’s work, which now requires AI-powered workflows and agentic conversation. This is the platform that allows you to eliminate context-switching, improve productivity and speed, centralize and simplify work, and enhance security and governance. That’s why, developers, we’re reintroducing you to the Slack platform, which is built for this agentic era.

This post unpacks the next evolution of the Slack Platform. We’ll walk through the foundational developer experience we’re building so you can ship ideas within minutes, the new platform primitives what will unlock everything from advanced agentic workflow user experiences, to agent-to-agent hand offs. You’ll even be able to offer click-to-create headless agents that can be installed directly to Slack. Lastly, we’re releasing all the APIs and tools needed to make Slack available within your favorite AI apps like Claude and Perplexity.

Needless to say, it’s a new era for Slack Platform, an agentic era.

A Unified, End-to-End Developer Experience

We’re consolidating and simplifying the entire development lifecycle, from the first line of code to the end-user’s experience. Development on Slack is now a cohesive experience, starting with the Slack CLI for lifecycle management and Bolt for building your apps. With these updates you can now get a working agent running in a workspace in under 15 minutes.

We’re also addressing some of the pain points you’ve shared with us. This means streamlining everything from the developer workflow with Canvas API updates and simplified app approval flows and a future-state vision for a consolidated app management experience for administrators.

Consistent, Powerful Surfaces for AI

A great app needs a great interface. We’re providing a complete and consistent set of UI components and surfaces designed for modern, AI-powered interactions. You can build rich, interactive experiences with established tools like Block Kit, Modals, and App Home. These are now enhanced with new components like Block Kit Tables to better display structured data from your apps.

We’re also creating dedicated spaces for AI. A new unified agent DM experience launching later this year that provides a consistent feel for every agentic interaction across all applications. We’re also making AI accessible from anywhere via the “sunroof” which creates a persistent, discoverable entry point for users to engage with your app’s capabilities, situated right in the top right corner of Slack, ready to get the to work.

The First Platform Context Engine for AI Workflows

The most significant challenge in building useful AI agents is managing context. We’re solving that at the platform level. We’re building capabilities directly into Slack for thread and channel context management, and discussing including additional metadata APIs. This will allow your app to build up context as a conversation evolves, dramatically reducing the need for expensive, round-trip API calls to reconstruct a conversation’s history.

When paired with the Real-time Search (RTS) API that meets users where they are with the latest most accurate data they have permission to access and our existing Web APIs for ad-hoc retrieval, this forms a complete and secure data access and management pipeline capable of supporting any AI use case you can imagine, all while respecting enterprise-grade privacy and security. Instead of trying to predict users’ data needs, you can rely on user intent and LLM intelligence based on search results to do follow up retrieval using our APIs, fetching exactly what’s needed to fulfill the request.

Your Complete Stack, Working in Concert

The true power of the platform is realized when everything comes together. Slack is the work operating system where your data, apps, agents, and teams connect, allowing you to focus on innovation while we handle the integration. Industry leaders are already bringing the next generation of apps and agents to the Slack Marketplace, including Perplexity, Notion, Cursor, Anthropic, and Vercel.

We’re also creating a faster path to production. With official support from partners like Vercel and improved deployment guides for providers like Heroku, you can get your apps into users’ hands more quickly. And for those who prefer to manage their own systems, you can always deploy to your own infrastructure using deploy hooks in the CLI.

What’s next on the roadmap for 2025 (and beyond)

The work we’ve shared today is just the beginning, and our roadmap is focused on continuing this momentum by further improving the platform for developers:

• A Better Developer Experience: We’re committed to improving the core developer experience. This includes rolling out Partner Sandboxes and integrating sandbox management directly into the CLI, consolidating our entire web presence into a revamped slack.dev, and a project we’re calling Slack Developer Love, which is dedicated to address pain points and areas of friction from our developer community. Most of the consolidation work is under way right now (check out the new docs site that just launched!) and will be wrapped up before the new year. We’ll be bringing sandboxes to the CLI early next year.
• New Capabilities for Modern Apps: We’re shipping new, agent-native features directly into the platform. Look for expanded Canvas API capabilities, built-in Text Streaming support for a better AI user experience, and AI Message Actions that embed intelligence directly into the message composer. Stay tuned as core agentic UX features roll out over the next 100 days!
• A Smoother Path to Production: We’re making it easier to go from code to deployment. We’re building Seamless Deployments for Bolt Apps directly to partners like Heroku and Vercel. While we’re already tackling this at the surface level, our goal is to provide a smooth create/preview/deploy process, letting you focus on building what matters. Stay tuned for a more tightly integrated experience over the next few months.

These upcoming features are all part of our commitment to providing a complete, end-to-end experience for building and deploying powerful agentic apps.

The WorkOS for the AI Era

The Slack Platform is evolving into a true WorkOS, providing the tools, infrastructure, and ecosystem to help you build the future of work. Because the future of work is connected, and we want to enable that future for you today.

Learn more about the Slack Platform on our new documentation site, docs.slack.dev, and get hands-on with our new quick start guide. Stay tuned for our upcoming deep-dive series where we’ll explore data security best practices, taking your idea and turning it into an app, and building a clear path to production.

We look forward to seeing the amazing things you create. Happy building! 🚀