For the love of Slack

Having benefited from growing up as a teenager in the 2010s I was always incredibly comfortable using Slack.

I used it for the first time in 2016 as a part of my university degree, the university saw comms through Slack as a fun alternative, preparing us for the "real world" of software development. It felt the exact same to me as the TeamSpeak servers I used to use while playing video games (too old for Discord, unfortunately).

Throughout my early career I got to use Yammer (Deloitte) and Chime (AWS) both of which I hope no longer exist. As I continued through my career Slack became the go-to, and also served as a litmus test for a "cool company".

In my experience – software engineers don't use Slack that much. You get messages from folks asking for status updates, have a team channel and potentially an async standup meeting everyday. If you wanted to really slim it down I'm sure you could limit your Slack usage to 15-30 minutes per day.

Slack has a mixed reputation. Sam Altman stated that it "creates a lot of fake work", WIRED (remember them!) have a lovely article called "How Slack ruined work".

I take a different view on this – Slack is the interface to your business and the notion that Slack ruined work (or creates fake work) is just a product of your wider business & culture.

Several years back – I transitioned from writing code, to selling & supporting the people who write code. Across the last few years, most digital native businesses have been leveraging the trend of sales and support via Slack.

It made sense. Slack is casual. Channels, threads, and DMs make multi-threaded communication feel natural.

  • – If you have a prospect – juggling a massive email thread is definitely harder than managing 4 slack threads?
  • – Why would you want your customers to be sending you support tickets via some portal if they can just pop in the question into a Slack channel?
  • – Want to grab an exec's attention, just add them to the channel!

This means, for better or worse, I spend multiple hours per-day on Slack. At one stage I thought it was cute to brand myself a "Full Slack Engineer" – no one else thought it was funny.

There are several businesses who have done an amazing job tapping into this directly. Pylon has provided ticketing software that provides structure for your support team where you can communicate with your customers via Slack. Incident (my lovely employer), have enabled people to run their incident management process directly within Slack.

Slack is the new OS

Now that we have AI-models that can understand semantic text – Slack will have a come-back as the "interface". As we train our new overlords, we'll end up with a lot of human-in-the-loop processes, where an AI agent will run a certain set of steps, and then go to a human for approval or modification.

Over the next decade this interface will default to Slack. In the last few weeks alone I've seen the following use-cases where Slack is the interface:

Sales

  • – Managing a AI agent that qualifies inbound leads [1]
  • – Providing a quick search on specific features to provide explanations to customers [2]

Engineering / Product

  • – Cursor fixing a feature and opening a pull request [3]
  • – Pylon telling you how many of our customers have requested X feature [4]
  • – Incident letting you know we've seen similar incidents in the past, and giving you suggested root causes [5]

While most of the config for these exists within app settings, or managed in code, the interface in which the end users interact with the product is through Slack.

Future

I believe we're going to see a massive increase in Slack native apps over the next few years as AI agents cover more and more specialised work and humans end up in more editorial roles. We're going to see the first decacorns built "natively" into Slack + Teams. I would also expect to see the continued sharp elbows behaviour from Slack towards apps built into Slack, acting more like the tax collector we've seen from Apple & their App Store.

Benioff wanted to fight Microsoft on enterprise – he ended up with the operating system of the future.

[1] – https://x.com/lennysan/status/1995622161248387342
[2] – Credal.ai
[3] – Cursor https://cursor.com/docs/integrations/slack
[4] – Pylon
[5] – incident.io/ai-sre