How a new Slackbot might help IT

When Sara Bee, senior staff software engineer at Slack, recently visited the company’s New York office, she used the latest version of Slackbot to help connect to the printer.

That might not sound like a big deal, until you realize that in order to accomplish that everyday IT task, the Slackbot needs to pull the answer from conversations on the company’s help-desk channel, which requires it to parse texts for precise instructions. For good measure, the bot added some internal documentation.

“I can get an answer really quickly without having to invoke another human for a question like this,” Bee said.

In theory, a tool that could automatically field all kinds of IT questions could save IT pros a lot of time and effort.

“All the knowledge bases that IT might have on their systems, on the applications for administration,” Jason Wong, distinguished VP analyst on the digital workplace team at Gartner, said, “those would be more available right across this search tool.”

How it works. The new Slackbot pulls answers from conversational data, shared documents, and data sources linked to enterprise connectors like Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and Salesforce. (Parker Harris, CTO of Slack’s parent company Salesforce, told CNBC on Tuesday that the Slackbot uses Anthropic’s Claude model.)

The bot can pull only what the user’s credentials permit, Rob Seaman, chief product officer and CEO at Slack, said during a press conference on January 12, including access to connected systems. Slackbot will be made available in a phased rollout to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers.

No setup should be required, Bee told us, other than an admin configuring enterprise search sources for a user.

As for IT…Bee sees the tool assisting IT professionals who work inside help-desk channels resolve issues faster and spot patterns.

“IT leaders can ask it to review support conversations from the past few weeks to identify recurring issues, escalation triggers, or documentation gaps, and then help turn those insights into runbooks, FAQs, or action plans,” Bee wrote to us, following an interview.

Important IT details—even if spread across a SharePoint repo, a Slack exchange, or even a message board—could be wrangled into an answer for IT pros and employees.

“Let’s say that someone has a question around a SaaS application that was recently brought in by the business, and that’s not really documented by IT anywhere,” Wong said. “Now Slackbot could be able to retrieve that.”

According to a 2025 Gartner survey, only 8% of IT leaders reported “prioritizing a single GenAI productivity assistant over the next 12 months.” (More than nine in 10 respondents are going with at least two products.)

Wong sees Slack’s new Slackbot as a “catch up” to capabilities provided by competitors like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.

“They have to not only win in, say, IT but also the broader horizontal business needs, whether it’s sales, finance, or marketing and operations teams,” Wong said. “They need to win over those departments as well about why Slackbot is going to be better for general business use cases.”