AI Unleashed: Why Every Company Needs a New Operating Model for Work, Now!

Daniel Newman:
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Six Five Summit. It’s day three and we are back, and we’ve got a great day ahead of you. It’s AI Unleashed. This week has been all about how to build new operating models for your business in the era of AI. And this day is going to start out with a very exciting speaker to open up. Sit down with me as the first of the day, I have Denise Dresser. Denise is the CEO of Slack, and she’s coming to us to talk to us a little bit about how every company’s going to build this new AI operating model. Denise, thanks so much for joining. It’s been great to get to know you a bit, and I’m sure everyone out there has so much to learn today.

Denise Dresser:
Oh, thanks Daniel. I’m glad to be here. I’m excited to talk about this.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, it’s such a topic. Look, AI has risen into the conscious of just about everyone. Consumers, businesses, we’re all trying to understand how it can help us be more productive day in and day out, how our businesses can be more efficient. We’re looking at driving new operating models, removing friction from customer experiences, and so much more. And you come from a world where this has been something that’s been the mission of the company for a long time at Slack. Slack’s been about being productive, about helping be more efficient, removing unnecessary friction from workflows. And so first and foremost, before I jump into the main line of questioning, you’re what? About six months in?

Denise Dresser:
Yeah.

Daniel Newman:
How’s that going?

Denise Dresser:
It has been an absolute ride of a lifetime. The funny story about me in this role is I was talking to Brian Millham at Salesforce and we were talking about career evolution. And without even thinking the job was available to me, I said, my dream job is to be the CEO of Slack. And it’s a perfect example for anybody out there in the audience who’s thinking about their career, and when you set yourself in a vision and you know you want something, making something happen like this.

And so first of all, it’s a privilege to be leading this incredible company. As you mentioned, Slack revolutionized the way that the world worked 10 years ago, and it’s exciting to be at the forefront of doing that again. And I really feel that Slack was made for this AI moment, when you think about how AI is going to be such a game changer in the way that we all work. And it’s going to be the single biggest augmenter in the way that we work. And so I take that as a really big privilege and a responsibility to help transform work again. And so it’s exciting.

Daniel Newman:
Sometimes they say it’s all about manifesting. One of the things-

Denise Dresser:
I was going to try to not get too kooky with that word on you.

Daniel Newman:
But you kind of did.

Denise Dresser:
But I kind of did. I told you the truth on that, and I think it’s incredible. It’s been a blast. It’s a privilege.

Daniel Newman:
Look, for the longest time when I get career advice from great people, and I give career advice sometimes to people who have gotten to know. And I always say, do the job you want. And I know that’s a little bit of a, you can’t really just say, oh, I want to be the CEO of Salesforce and start doing that in the morning. But I think within the constraints in the environment you’re in. You’re talking to your boss, I’d really like to help with this. Well, sometimes do the job, get the job, is what I always say.

Denise Dresser:
Exactly. I totally agree. I totally agree. And when you think about, it’s funny how when you put an idea in your head and you want something, you begin to actually move in the direction of what you want. You begin to look at the skills that those people have. You learn, you become curious, you step into different roles, you’re willing to take risks to learn. And I think you also, you do, to your point, you kind of manifest your own destiny.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. So all right, let’s get to the crux of things. Let’s talk generative AI. Look, no one’s talking about this, so… Wait, no, everyone’s talking about this. But generative AI, it is evolving quickly. So the ChatGPT buzz of November ’22, a semi useful product that was there at Microsoft when they launched the big Bing with GPT in it. And you’re like, ooh, is this going to revolutionize search and all these things? It’s cool but what do you think, as you’ve gotten to see this now where we’re more like 18, 20 months from the kind of onslaught? What are you seeing in terms of gen AI and what it means for the future of work?

Denise Dresser:
Yeah, I think this has moved from, as you said, a novelty or a science fiction into true transformation in business. I think it is already showing and it’s going to be the single greatest accelerant from the original vision that I talked about with Slack. It’s going to help make work simple, pleasant, more productive, and I think it’s going to be the single biggest augmenter of employee business outcomes and productivity that we’re going to see. But I still think, to your point, we’re really in the early phases. We just released research that shows that AI adoption at work has increased 60% in the last quarter. We are just, the interest is so strong, but we’re still in the early innings. And I think it’s gone from this novelty, where you go and test it out and try it out, to something that’s going to have to be embedded in the flow of work. That it’s working right alongside of you as sort of this digital assistant helping you be more productive.

And I think that’s happening today. That was the philosophy for us in building Slack AI. When you think about that, right in the flow of work when you’re looking at summarization of data and recaps. And also with Einstein Copilot. I think about one of our customers, Wayfair, that’s using Slack AI really to tap into, think about Slack being the collective knowledge of your organization, and really tapping into it using AI right in the flow of work. And we’re seeing that, through Slack AI, we’re summarizing 28 million messages and on average saving 97 minutes a week. Think about that. If you extrapolate 97 minutes of savings in just being more productive and being augmented to be more productive, think about that across the productivity improvements in an organization. So I think we’re still in the early phases, it’s going to have to be in the flow of work and the work that you already do, and making that more effective. And sort of in that mindset of an assistant.

But then we’re going to see the world, I believe, move into the fact that every application is going to have AI in it. And then it’s going to move into what I think, and I don’t think this sounds too far off, I think it’s really going to be taking action or autonomous AI. If you think about sales, the idea that you could be in Slack or in an application and have your BDR, your business development rep, actually surfacing in there and actually making a recommendation for who to call. Or in service, thinking about recommending real-time answers right there as you’re on the phone with a customer, or you’re communicating with them digitally. And so on and so on. So there’s this evolution of standalone, really interesting. Next in the flow of work, I think that will continue, but then it will be in applications and really showing up more in an autonomous way.

And I think for us, that’s the technological element of it, but I think it’s going to help people, or it’s going to drive people to think about how to have a new operating model for work. It’s not just about thinking about simple areas for productivity. I think leaders are going to need to think about how do they bring AI into the flow of work across all of their operations. And thinking about how do you start early so that you can learn from that, have your employees feel comfortable, that it’s trusted, so that you bring it into just the fabric of how you work.

And I think that every company, to be competitive, is going to need to do that. And for those who haven’t started, I think it’s figuring out how to start small and really adopt that in your employee population. And I think it’s going to help work be more fun. And that’s what I really love about it because part of the mission of Slack is helping work be simple, pleasant, and more productive. And maybe bringing a little bit of joy into it. And I think when I think about what this all means, I am filled with optimism. As somebody who works hard every day, the idea that it can get a little bit easier and more fun, and that work’s going to look a little bit different, is really exciting.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, look, you hit a lot of key points there. And I always think to myself, what would be optimal? You put four, five, six, seven, eight people on a call. And we’ve heard about these workloads for a while, but there’s so much that gen AI could assist, for instance, of hearing who took different action items on and then summarizing those actions.

Denise Dresser:
Yes.

Daniel Newman:
And then proposal generations, and follow up lists, and project management, and then inputs into your CRM for instance. Because we all know that, even in the era of generative AI, there’s just more data, which means the garbage in garbage out thing actually becomes a bigger potential problem. Is there’s more data, what’s good, what’s useful? How does it land in the right place? And with Slack, what’s really great and what I’ve always appreciated is that you can build the workflows in such a way where you’re like, okay, I just got out of a good face-to-face, one-on-one meeting.

And by the way, eventually this will be all on device. You won’t even need to do this part, but can you quickly summarize in a channel. We have a channel that’s the Salesforce channel. So I went to Dreamforce, I met with an executive, I had this conversation, these were the things that we talked about. I put it in Slack, it lands in our Salesforce instance, and then the whole experience is fluid. All I did was take a few minutes, did a quick recap on the way out. Eventually with the on-device or using our phone or whatever, we could have it sitting there listening and doing it all in real time. It’s pretty cool.

Denise Dresser:
Or how about this, how about you’re in a meeting and you maybe don’t remember something and what have you used? For me, what I used to onboard when I came on board was Slack AI, because we had it before we released it. Finding information at your fingertips about that customer or about a product information. Think about just what AI powered search is bringing to us. And Slack’s been a huge-

Daniel Newman:
Combination of the new recall feature inside of it. Then with the ability for it to sort and sift through all the different conversations, meetings, documentation that exists, to get an answer. And by the way, we will hit the era. The number one thing I always used to tell salespeople early in my career managing salespeople, was don’t ever say yes. Say I’ll find out. And now we don’t need to take the time to value of, I’ll go find out and come back to you is instant. Because you’re like, I don’t know. And then assistant’s going to be able to say, hey, this is your answer.

Denise Dresser:
And that’s where we [inaudible 00:10:45], I think it’s like, as I mentioned, we’re still early, but I think for people like you and I, who think about the future of work and we think about what technology brings, I think it’s never been a more exciting time to think about how work’s going to get better, and how you can deliver better service to your customers too.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, I just keep waiting for the Dan bot to come out and it replaces me entirely.

Denise Dresser:
That’s what I’m saying.

Daniel Newman:
I just want to know if economically, if I train a bot, Denise, that is me, can that bot just do my job and can I still get paid though? Is it like, no problem Dan, just go to the beach and we’ll let you know when the work’s done.

Denise Dresser:
These are the things that we have to contemplate. I think it’s going to be very exciting. But I also think it’s important though. I think in this conversation, I think that no, it’s not going to replace you, but it’s going to help you be more effective, more efficient, probably more innovative, because you’ll have more time to think.

Daniel Newman:
Thinking time. That seems like a great idea. My only real thinking time anymore is transcontinental flights. I can’t get wifi.

Denise Dresser:
I know.

Daniel Newman:
That’s my thinking time. Now listen, I kind of alluded to this, how things can work together. It flows from a Slack interaction to Salesforce. Slack, part of Salesforce. You are not only a significant future of work and collaboration platform, you are also a major player in customer data. The biggest, arguably. Obviously everyone counts differently and, as an analyst, I got to be careful to do the emphatics, but you can say it. How are you thinking about that kind of the role, the tie together between data and work and collaboration?

Denise Dresser:
I think first of all, thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about this point, because I think that was one of the things that really excited me about the future of Slack and Salesforce together. If you think about it, Slack is like the long-term memory of your organization where all of your conversations can happen. And we talked about how you can now, with Slack AI, synthesize that, recap, search for information, and so much more that’s coming that I can’t talk about now, but a lot more coming into the platform. And then you think about Salesforce having some of the world’s most valuable customer data that is being used in the flow of work. And it is high valuable data.

So the idea that AI helps you unlock not just your unstructured data that we talked about, but structured data. And really combine the power of that, which hasn’t been possible before generative AI. It not only drives the value home to every organization, of the value of the data that you have, but really how you now have this potential to unlock that to get even more meaningful insights. And in years past the combination of that, really those have been silos of data that have been trapped. And now this is a huge unlock for Slack and for Salesforce, as we bring the platforms together and deliver this integrated AI solution. It’s the power of structured and unstructured data together that’s really valuable and it’s exciting.

Daniel Newman:
It is exciting. And let me tell you something, the high value data is in your systems of record. It is on your employee’s devices, in their productivity tools. I think it’s funny because everyone, and I kind of talked about the early sort of era of cool novelty, generative AI, but the real value are going to be these narrower models, industry specific. Based on deeply valued customer data, and ERP data, and operational data, that can be then used to create meaningful moats for businesses. And so it is really exciting to see this kind of all pulled together. I want to pivot. Being the CEO of Slack, you are one of the… Business is sort of the personification of the next era of work, meaning Slack kind of hit the market. It was all about this change of work. It was we’re not going to email anymore because none of us do email.
We just do Slack now. And I’m kind of kidding but the way things get done faster is always these kind of asynchronous, more chat-like, bot driven, AI empowered tools. And so what part of it too has created this really always on world. I grew up, I don’t know about you, but early in my career, many, many moons ago, I had a gig where we used to send emails somewhere between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM, following up on each other’s stuff. And it kind of became this really terrible joke about proving how hard we worked by when we would send the last email.

It was a terrible culture, but now it’s gotten worse. Between texts, WhatsApps and emails and chats and the fact that we got to be real time on social and we get, if your Telegrams and signals, all these different places where messages are coming to you related to work. People are burning out. Now again, yes, automation and augmentation can help, but people are also scared. So they’re burning out, but they’re also scared that if they slow down, the big bad AI might come and get them. But isn’t there another side to this? Isn’t there a way that we can take control back?

Denise Dresser:
Yes. Here’s how I think about it. I couldn’t agree more. It’s a known fact that we have more tools and ways of communicating ideas with people at all hours of the day. And keeping up with that and consuming information and finding information is a challenge. Which, kind back to the point of what we started with with Slack AI, was all about finding information, summarizing information. But I think you’re getting at a broader mission-driven focus that we have at Slack, which is, I mentioned the mantra, Slack is really all about helping make life simple, pleasant, more productive. But it’s bigger than that. Slack is where work happens. It’s not just channels and messaging. And so what we are really building, and have built, is an operating system for work. And now it’s infused with AI and will continue to do that. But the real story about that is reducing the context switching, so that you can have one platform where everything comes together and you can integrate with all of the capabilities across your organization.
So I do all of our approvals, all of our Workday approvals, all of our Coupa approvals, we do all of our Jira integrated and so many other amazing partners in the ecosystem. But helping to reduce the cognitive load so that, when you’re in Slack, things come to you so that you’re in the flow of work and you can really think about, this is my operating system, this is where I need to be. And then within that construct, using things, like I mentioned when I onboarded, I use Slack AI to find things. But what I also used was a capability called Recap, which is there’s so many channels that you may need to know about but you can’t follow all day long. So starting my day with coffee and a Recap makes just that cognitive, where do I go to find everything? It’s kind of like all of a sudden everything’s really clear for me.

I start my day in Recap and I can see everything that I missed. If people are sending me notes overnight. And using something that I love, called Catch Up, which is just catching up. It’s sort of like a swiping right on your mobile phone to just find everything. So giving those capabilities and innovating really in the human-centric design of Slack, and how people are consuming information, to quiet that and really make it easy to find everything all in one place. And I think that’s an area that we have continued to focus on and we’ll continue to do that. And it’s our mission right now, particularly to use AI to drive that productivity, to provide one place where you can go that reduces cognitive load. And I’ve gotten to the point now, and I have customers send me these notes where it’s like they run their business on Slack because they can and because they want to. And that’s really a privilege for us, and that’s our mission and mantra.

Daniel Newman:
Yeah, well, listen, there’s so much there to unpack. I think it is our jobs to figure out how to give people balance back. Look, in the connected world we live in, I don’t think we’ll ever work a tight schedule like we once did, especially knowledge workers. I think with flexibility, there’s always going to be the debate of whether flexibility was a win for employees or a win for employers. There will be a debate and I think it’s on us to try to kind of drive that it can be a win for everybody.

Denise Dresser:
Yeah.

Daniel Newman:
Go ahead.

Denise Dresser:
Sorry, I was just going to add something too. It’s funny, so we talked about that cognitive overload and things coming at every channel. There’s also capabilities that we’ve put into Slack that I think really speak to part of managing the flow of work is also about how you set your own boundaries, and how you actually, for example in Slack, how you send notifications or how you pause your notifications, how you set your time zone, how you let people know what you’re doing. So I do think we have more autonomy in our life in thinking about how we work and when we work, than maybe we give ourselves credit for. That’s not to say that we aren’t always in demand, certainly in large jobs. But I think there are ways that you can also govern yourself.

Daniel Newman:
Absolutely. It’s always going to be driven by ambition. So what is the ambition that you have and how crazy are you willing to drive yourself to become the CEO of Slack? Because as much as you may have manifested it, I’m sure there was quite a bit of work that you did in between being able to say, I want to do the job, and someone’s saying, yeah, you know what, you should.

Denise Dresser:
Yeah. Well, I think this kind of goes back to the human side of do what you love. Do what you love. And I do feel like for me, it doesn’t feel like work because I love it. And you probably feel the same way as a founder of the company. You love it, it’s your passion. You don’t want to shut off. Some people do and that’s fine too, but it’s kind of fun when you do what you love.

Daniel Newman:
As long as you can figure out how to do it when you need to. Because I think you’re right, there’s never a want to, but there are points where I think just for… My wife will sometimes tell me that the teapot is starting to boil. You need to put the device down, go watch a movie, go kick the ball around with your son, do something that’s not work for a little bit. But it is good. It’s fun to do things we love and tech is awesome. It’s so fun to be in this space.

Denise Dresser:
It’s so exciting. Has there ever been, I really think this is not an exaggeration. I don’t think there’ll ever be a more exciting time for all of us in tech, working in tech, thinking about how we’re going to integrate tech into our lives, and how it’s going to change the way we work and live.

Daniel Newman:
Absolutely. So I want to have a little fun here to kind of finish off this opening keynote. And thank you so much, Denise. It’s been a ton of fun. And thanks everybody for being part of this conversation. Hopefully you’ve found some things you’re relating to here. Let’s do a little speed round. I’m going to ask you three questions. We’re going to do three questions and I’m going to get you, give me 90 seconds or less on each answer. Do your best. Count in your head while you’re answering. First of all, I want to talk about citizen builders. Okay, no code. It’s red hot. You hear about it everywhere. Now we’re even hearing about image to code, speech to code. Talk about the citizen builder and the role in organization, and kind of where AI comes into play?

Denise Dresser:
Oh my God, I think this to me is one of the more exciting, and I heard the stats. So first of all, I think everybody knows this, but Slack is a platform where there is a citizen developer community. We have over a million developers and there are 2,600 integrations in the platform out of the box, which is truly incredible. But in the last year, 13,000 AI powered applications have been built by our citizen developer community within Slack. This is a huge part. Number one, I hope, and we take this as a privilege, but of the users who love the product enough that they say, you know what? Slack is our work operating system and we want to do these two or three other things in this platform. And we really want to evolve it in new ways. And so this is a huge part of our ecosystem and the evolution of our product.

We have customers bringing their own large language models to innovate and drive processes across the entire business. And we need our citizen developer communities to help us all shape the AI revolution. And I think the way that, when you think about AI generated code and AI powered workflows and all the things that are going to be part of these applications and the technology that people are using, I think it’s just going to explode. It already is, as I mentioned, just in what we’ve seen in the last year for us. And I think it’s a really exciting opportunity. It’s also a great career opportunity for people.

Daniel Newman:
Absolutely. I never thought I’d be a developer. There’s a whole bunch of other implications, by the way, that maybe next time you and I get on and have a conversation we can talk about. Because I think there’s a lot of excitement in it. And then there’s obviously tons of people who were told go get a degree and become a programmer. And by the way, I still believe there is. I think it’s an and not an or. We love, as a society, to be binary, but I actually think there’s a place for very highly skilled programmers that can do very complicated programming.

And then there’s citizens that understand workflows and can build it with things. And I think just like you need Ferraris for a small part of the world, and you also need lots and lots of Teslas. Talk about customers, the outcome. So obviously if you understand anything, there’s only two groups in the world that can really influence buyers. One is customers talking about their great success, and then of course analysts.

Denise Dresser:
Yep, yep.

Daniel Newman:
Am I saying that out loud? Okay. Anyways, customers though, the biggest focus of Salesforce, at least as I’ve always understood it and seen it, is that you’re a customer-centric, customer-driven organization.

Denise Dresser:
Hundred percent.

Daniel Newman:
What are your customers seeing by making bigger investments? And I guess I could be an answer here, but I want to hear yours.

Denise Dresser:
Yeah, well, first of all, you are so right. And that is actually one of the things that I find very similar between Slack and Salesforce, is just this absolute customer love and dedication to thinking about the customer first. And I think first of all, when I think about customers that are getting such value, one of our largest customers is IBM. They are wall to wall with Slack and a huge Salesforce customer. And they’ve been a customer of Slack since 2015 and they’ve gone wall to wall. And you think about 250,000 employees, 9 million Slack messages sent a day, 3,500 apps, 3,400 workflows. Back to your point of just citizen developer. And I think this is just a story of a company that is automating their entire business on a platform. But then I think about just in general, the stats for our customers, and we are seeing that teams that are using Slack are 47% more productive.

That is really incredible. And when I break it apart, when I think about companies by function, it’s like of the customers that are using Slack in certain functions, 36% increase in win rate in sales, and 32% faster resolution using Slack in service. And marketing is 37% faster decision making. Finance is seeing 37% increase in employee productivity. It goes on and on and on. And I think that is our true mission, is making sure that we aren’t just giving a platform where work is happening, but outcomes are being driven and businesses are growing. One of my favorite stories of automation actually, and seeing the results of that, is Spotify. And Spotify used the Slack platform as well as Salesforce to drive productivity in their ad sales, and they saw a 40% increase in sales productivity bringing Slack into the fold. And think about how they work with all the different parties involved in advertising.

And so that’s actually been the really fun part of thinking about Slack. Not just that it’s simple, pleasant, more productive, but companies are seeing real value and real productivity improvement across all functions. And for me, I think that’s what AI is also unlocking for us, is there’s even more that is out there for all of us to deliver to our customers, and for us to experience. And so it’s kind of become the guiding light of how do we do it, and also how do we innovate and bring AI in a way that’s democratized, so that you can get that immediate benefit. It’s in the flow of work and it doesn’t make you think. Those are the great stories. I could go on and on forever, but customers are at the center of what we do. But the real results are what really matter.

Daniel Newman:
All right. Final lightning round. Besides Slack AI, what are some of the innovations that you’re really excited about these days?

Denise Dresser:
First of all, there’s so much still coming in AI that I can’t talk about today, but you can keep your eyes out for all the innovation that are happening in Slack, just advancing the cause for AI and bringing productivity to workers. But what I’m really, really excited about that’s coming out in June is Slack Lists. And I’m so excited about this because what I think about with Lists is it brings projects and task management directly into Slack. So this is how I think about it in real simple terms. You can turn those conversations that you’re having in channels into true actionable work, right there in the flow of work, to get things done faster. And this gets back to the point that we were talking about earlier, that customers feel like they’re bogged down. Where they have too many tools to track what they’re doing.

And there’s a stat out there that only 34% of projects are completed on time. And so we’re bringing Lists right into Slack, so that you can bring structure into Slack, so that you can actually make the work actionable. You can tag colleagues for the work that you need them to do. You can have a conversation around that list. I’ve been using Lists across all of our functions, not only how we set our strategic plan, but how we think about our engineering sprints, and our resourcing, and our projects, and a lot of our marketing efforts. And they’re customizable, so you can use them across every single line of business. They’re collaborative and it really kind of takes, I almost think about it as it’s like the last mile in Slack. It’s not going to be the last mile for innovation, but it’s that conversation really turning it into actionable work and bringing people into that. So I’m really excited about it for the productivity improvements and I’ve been using it. I can’t wait for you to try it out. Let me know what you think.

Daniel Newman:
Hey, love to get things early here. It’s like a badge of honor for-

Denise Dresser:
I think I can make that happen.

Daniel Newman:
… For the analyst folks to get to play with the toys first.

Denise Dresser:
Yes.

Daniel Newman:
If only I knew someone that knew someone, that can make that happen.

Denise Dresser:
If only you knew someone who could help you out.

Daniel Newman:
Well, listen. Denise, I want to thank you so much for being part of the Six Five Summit, for opening up our day three, talking about the future of work, sharing your personal and professional insights as to where it’s going and what’s going on, not just at Salesforce, not just at Slack, but really in the enterprise. We’re going to have to do this soon. We’re going to have to have you back.

Denise Dresser:
So thank you for having me. It’s been a real pleasure to talk to you, and certainly this topic is we could talk all day. It’s clear.

Daniel Newman:
We absolutely could. And everyone out there, thank you so much for being part of this. It is the beginning of day three. It is the final day of this year’s Six Five Summit. It has been an absolute blast. We appreciate each and every one of you for tuning in. We hope you’ll stay with the programming all day long. Studio, I’ll send it over to you to get the rest of this day started. Thank you all.