Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

The U.S. direct-care workforce comprises about 5.4 million workers, including millions of home care and residential care workers, nursing assistants, and other staff providing care across different settings. A large part of this workforce isn’t sitting behind a desk. They are moving between rooms, units, facilities, and patients, often without a workstation of their own.

When everyone was in one office space, locating a document was as simple as asking the person sitting right next to you. Nowadays, that very same document can be in one of many email chains, buried in someone's downloads folder, in an obscurely named file, or even in some forgotten cloud-based folder.

A message lands in a work chat: “Can you update this before lunch?” It is quick, direct, and almost useless without context. Which version needs updating? What changed? Who asked for it? Is there a file somewhere? A fast message can still create slow work when the person receiving it has to reconstruct everything that was left out. Modern teams are very good at moving information quickly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Managing a remote team is easy when everyone is sitting in the same office. You can walk around, check in with people, and get a general sense of how work is moving. But remote work is different. Someone can be online all day without getting much meaningful work done. At the same time, someone else might spend hours in meetings, research, design software, or other work that doesn't necessarily produce a lot of keyboard or mouse activity.