Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

This week at Dreamforce, we gave Slack one of its biggest upgrades yet, the connected interface for AI and Salesforce that works across your whole team. Every company is investing in AI right now, but they’re missing two things. First, the conversational context that adds long-term memory and insight that makes AI more accurate, actionable, and trustworthy. And next, the collaborative interface that allows employees to use these AI tools together and learn from one another.

Most companies focus on securing conversations but forget what’s actually holding those conversations together—the apps themselves. They set up encrypted chat, tighten up file-sharing, and train employees to sniff out phishing emails. Sure, those things matter. But think about all the tools your team uses every day: the messaging app, the company wiki, the approval system, the customer portal. Each one is a web application with its own unique code, dependencies, and vulnerabilities.

Atlassian and Gamma are now deeply connected, so your work, and the context behind it, moves with you from plan to presentation. AI is supposed to understand your work. But it can only see what it can reach, and right now, your work is scattered. Updates live in slide decks, details hide in Jira tickets, decisions are buried in Confluence. We expect AI to “just know” how it all connects, then wonder why the output feels generic.

Governance is one of the four risks enterprises face in digital collaboration, and it's the one that shows up first as a productivity workaround before anyone recognizes it as a risk at all.

Advanced users see the best outcomes from AI, because they know how to prompt, iterate and stitch results together. Everyone else opens the tool and gets something mediocre, then moves on. The tools simply weren’t built with everyone in mind. That’s the challenge Slackforce helps solve: Slack and Salesforce working as one, so you don’t need to be a computer expert to get a real result. Slackforce Surfaces makes it easy for anyone to build.

As AI accelerates work, leaders need to be more deliberate about what technology takes off people’s minds and where human attention can create the most value. AI promises to help organisations move faster. But at two Asana executive dinners held in Sydney and Melbourne in August, a different leadership question emerged: what should we choose not to accelerate? The challenge is not finding more hours in the day, but creating better conditions for the hours people already spend.

Think about everything a smartphone quietly replaced. The camera you used to pack for trips. The alarm clock on your bedside table. The paper map folded somewhere in the car. A music player, a calculator, a GPS unit, and a drawer full of chargers with no obvious owner. None of those things became useless. We just stopped needing each one separately when one device could handle most of the same jobs.

Nobody puts “coordination” on a job title, and yet almost everyone ends up doing it. Work coordination is the virtuous orchestration of internal and external processes – the constant, low-level hum of making sure the right task reaches the right person at the right time, that a decision made in one channel doesn’t get lost before it reaches the people who need to act on it, that a client-facing deadline and an internal review cycle actually meet in the middle instead of colliding.