Slack has announced new capabilities that make it easier for organisations to build, deploy and manage AI agents directly within Slack, helping businesses bring AI into the everyday flow of work.

As companies in Sri Lanka and across the world continue to explore AI adoption, one of the key challenges is ensuring that AI tools are practical, secure and connected to the way employees already work. AI agents often sit in separate browser tabs or disconnected platforms, limiting their usefulness and forcing teams to switch between multiple tools. Slack’s latest updates aim to address this by bringing apps, automations and AI agents into one collaborative workspace.

The new capabilities allow teams to orchestrate work through Slackbot, deploy agents faster, manage trusted agents through Salesforce’s AgentExchange and Slack’s consolidated agent browser, and create richer AI experiences using Block Kit.

With the upcoming Slackbot MCP Client and AgentExchange, Slackbot will act as a conversational interface for the enterprise, connecting apps and agents across an organisation. Employees will be able to make a request in Slack, have it routed to the right specialised agent, complete multi-step workflows and receive the final output within the same conversation.

Slackbot will also support richer, app-specific experiences within chat, allowing users to move from a question to an actionable outcome without navigating multiple dashboards. For example, a team preparing for a customer meeting could ask Slackbot for a briefing, with different agents pulling together analytics, sales insights, relevant documents and calendar coordination into one organised thread.

Slack is also simplifying agent deployment through updated developer tools and “Add to Slack” options from platforms such as Vercel and Lovable. This will allow developers and non-developers to build agents externally and bring them into Slack with fewer technical barriers.

For developers, Slack is introducing the Slack Agent Kit, which includes enhanced frameworks and new command-line tools to help build sophisticated agents using any platform or framework. This allows technical teams to focus on the tasks their AI agents need to perform, while Slack handles much of the chat setup and background configuration.

AgentExchange will provide a unified marketplace for trusted agents from Salesforce, Slack, Agentforce and partners including Google, Anthropic and Box. Slack’s consolidated agent browser will allow users to discover, manage and continue agent interactions within the platform.

Slack is also expanding Block Kit with components such as cards, alerts, carousels, data tables and charts, allowing AI responses to become more visual, structured and actionable. This enables teams to move beyond long text-based responses and interact with data in clearer, more useful formats.

For businesses moving from AI experimentation to real workplace adoption, Slack said its enterprise-grade security features, including permission controls, audit logging and AI exclusion controls, will support safer deployment at scale. The company said the future of work depends on bringing AI into the shared context where teams already collaborate.