Slack’s new hustle: From free chats to paid productivity

When Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021, many wondered how a workplace chat app would justify that price tag. Three years later, the answer lies in the way Slack is being reimagined—not just as a collaboration platform, but as a strategic hub for business productivity. And if there’s one market where this strategy is being tested at scale, it is India.

India, as Rahul Sharma, vice president of sales at Salesforce, explains, is one of Slack’s most promising markets. “We’ve seen immense value in tapping into the broader Salesforce ecosystem to drive deeper adoption and business value for our users,” he says.

Slack’s free user base in India—ranging from students at IITs to early-stage startups—is one of its largest globally. Many of these users eventually graduate into paid enterprise plans, creating a built-in adoption funnel that Salesforce is now keen to convert more aggressively.

From chat app to command centre

Slack’s real push lies in transforming itself into what Salesforce calls a ‘Work Operating System’. Sharma outlines the platform’s integration play, “Slack offers deep native product integrations across Salesforce’s clouds, combining structured and unstructured data to unlock productivity that’s not been experienced before.”

For marketers, this convergence solves a long-standing pain point. Fragmented tech stacks—messaging apps, CRMs, dashboards, project managers—create disconnected workflows. Slack’s proposition is to bring all these tools under one umbrella, aided by over 2,600 app integrations. This includes everything from Google Analytics and Asana to DocuSign and Tableau, helping teams eliminate context switching.

“Slack surfaces data from different platforms directly into channels where teams are already collaborating,” Sharma explains. “With intelligent automation and reusable workflows, marketers can focus on strategic and creative work that drives results.”

AI agents, not assistants

Central to this transformation is Agentforce—Slack’s AI-powered digital labour force. Unlike traditional bots, it embeds AI agents directly into Slack conversations, making them context-aware teammates.

“In marketing workflows, Agentforce enhances human efforts across the campaign lifecycle,” Sharma informs. “It streamlines workflows—from campaign management and optimisation to content generation, document briefs, and marketing plans.”

The big promise here is automation without sacrificing context. Slack’s AI doesn’t promise to merely answer questions—it scans conversation history, permissions, and relevant data to produce summarised insights and actionable recommendations.

“Agentforce can tap into public and permissioned conversational data across Slack’s channels, lists, and canvases,” Sharma says. “This makes it a powerful, knowledgeable member of your team.”

For example, a marketing team could ask, “Summarise last week’s performance on our IPL digital campaign,” and Agentforce will scan the relevant messages, reports, and analytics dashboards to deliver a contextual answer—without anyone having to hunt for that info manually.

Turning data chaos into clarity

In the quest to serve customers the right message at the right moment, marketers today are armed with an arsenal of data—from click trails to geotags to every like, swipe and scroll. When stitched together well, this data tapestry can deliver personalised campaigns that truly land. In fact, McKinsey reports that businesses doing this right see up to 40% higher revenue.

But here’s the catch: while data is the fuel of personalisation, it’s also becoming its biggest roadblock. According to a Braze survey, 80% of marketers admit they’re swimming in more data than they can actually use. The problem isn’t collection—it’s coherence.

With brands now spread across more channels than ever, that data is splintering. Majority of the brands are flying blind through the personalisation maze—and risking both relevance and revenue in the process.

For marketers overwhelmed by unstructured data, Slack positions itself as a clarity engine. Sharma cites a Forrester study, pointing out that 41% of work time is spent on low-value tasks due to data silos and disconnected apps.

Slack, with over 700 million messages exchanged daily, already sits atop a vast pool of unstructured data. Its AI layer, Sharma claims, turns this data into usable intelligence. “With Slack AI, marketers can surface the right information, streamline collaboration, and drive action,” he says.

What does this look like in action? A marketer running a multi-city campaign can use Slack’s AI to summarise updates from five different teams, track creative feedback, and review analytics—all from within a Slack thread. It reduces lag, speeds up decision-making, and removes the need for constant check-ins.

The ROI multiplier

In today’s marketing world, speed is strategy, data is currency, and collaboration is the secret sauce. Campaigns can’t wait, feedback loops are tighter than ever, and ROI isn’t a quarterly metric anymore—it’s a real-time scoreboard.

This is where Slack wants to come in; not as another tool to juggle, but as the digital ally marketers didn’t know they needed. Positioned as a work operating system, it brings people, platforms, and processes under one roof—eliminating silos, streamlining execution, and keeping the campaign engine running on high gear. Sharma believes that in a time when marketers are under pressure to show real-time ROI, Slack’s integration into Salesforce’s ecosystem delivers metrics marketers care about: faster campaign execution, improved agility, and measurable impact.

“A Forrester Total Economic Impact study revealed that organisations using Slack saw a 15% increase in the number of major global campaigns delivered,” he notes. This wasn’t just because of AI—but due to a mix of streamlined approvals, centralised communication, and fewer tool-switching moments.

Slack’s Workflow Builder allows marketers to automate repetitive tasks, like creative approvals or lead distribution. More significantly, Agentforce extends this by letting marketing teams scale their output without scaling headcount.

“Employees gain a limitless, always-on digital labour force,” says Sharma. “They can focus on ideation and storytelling, while agents handle optimisation and reporting.”

Beyond internal teams: Rethinking external collaboration

Another area Slack is doubling down on is external collaboration. Slack Connect lets up to 250 organisations collaborate in a single channel, without using email. This has been especially useful for marketing teams coordinating with agencies, freelancers, and media partners.

“Slack Connect is transforming the speed and efficiency of decision-making,” Sharma asserts. “Whether co-creating campaigns, iterating on creative, or aligning on strategy—teams can work in a unified environment.”

In practice, this means that a campaign brief doesn’t get lost in email chains. Feedback loops are faster, version control is simpler, and accountability improves. In a sector where time-to-market is a competitive edge, this can make a meaningful difference.

At the heart of Slack’s India strategy is a classic bundling play—convert high-intent free users by showing them what productivity at scale looks like. India’s startup density, developer community, and enterprise growth make it fertile ground for such a push. The AI integration, particularly via Agentforce, is designed to appeal to productivity-conscious CMOs who need to do more with less.

“Marketers today are expected to move faster than ever, yet they’re often bogged down by a tangle of disconnected tools,” Sharma says. “Slack is solving this challenge as a work operating system that unites people, apps, data, and Agentforce.”

To succeed in India, though, Slack will need more than just integrations and AI—it will need strong customer success teams, local case studies, and sustained value delivery to scale its paid user base. That’s likely where its Salesforce connection—and distribution muscle—comes in.

For now, Slack is betting that marketers no longer want to just communicate. They want a single pane of glass that turns team chat into campaign impact. Whether that’s a message worth paying for, only time—and India's enterprise CXOs—will tell.