On average, people switch between 10 apps per day
This translates to 100 minutes a day lost to refocus.
Chapter 4
The best place to deploy agents is inside a work operating system
To create a limitless digital workforce, agents need to become teammates in a secure, conversation-first platform containing all of your people, tools and contextual data in one place.
Employees switch between ten or more apps every day to do their work, on average, wasting precious time tracking down the information that they need to do their job. If companies indiscriminately throw their AI tools into this mix, they'll doom their workforce to an even more tangled web of work 'solutions'.
To be successful, companies will need to implement a work operating system that integrates AI agents into their workflows.
Slack, by Salesforce, is the most natural place to deploy agents to search, act and collaborate with humans.
The best way to use agents in Slack is Agentforce, the digital labour platform for enterprises. It lets anyone build and customise trusted, autonomous agents to support their customers and employees around the clock. With Agentforce in Slack, businesses can bring people together with all of their data, enterprise apps, workflow automation and agents in a single command centre.
Expert AI users are almost twice as likely to envision themselves as managers of a team of agents.
% who envision themselves
as future agent managers
as future agent managers
31%
Non-expert
AI users
AI users
59%
Expert
AI users
AI users
Expert AI users are 3x more likely to say that they'll be able to focus on more strategic and creative work with the help of agents.
What an agentic work operating system and digital labour platform should do:
1
Have a conversation.
Slack's core design is built around discussion. Talking naturally reduces training time and costs by allowing employees to interact with AI agents just as they would with human colleagues.
2
Turn agents and people into teammates.
Agentforce, deployed in Slack, builds on this conversational foundation by integrating AI directly into team workflows, empowering agents to automate tasks, providing real-time insights and supporting decision-making while humans focus on higher-level strategic work.
3
Connect your people, data, workflows and apps.
Slack's work operating system connects to a huge range of enterprise applications and data sources, providing AI agents with the contextual awareness that they need to perform effectively across different systems.
You go to a single, conversational interface in Slack and you can interact with humans and AI. Agents are doing the work, and we've dreamt of that for decades in computing, and now we're finally seeing it.
CEO, Box
With agents, I can see a future where we'll be able to respond faster and more accurately, making our dispatch process seamless. Agents will help us get the right information at the right time, so we can operate more efficiently and deliver better service to our customers.
Managing Director
McLeod Cranes
McLeod Cranes
Our vision for translation agents is simple: make it easier for businesses to connect with the world. By combining human expertise with AI and embedding these workflows right in Slack, at Straker we're breaking down barriers to communication.
Chief Revenue Officer
Straker
Straker