Marc Benioff uses AI to find out what employees are complaining about on Slack

• Marc Benioff said Slack's AI agent can identify what employees are upset about.
• The Salesforce CEO said the AI scans Slack chats to surface company concerns and key decisions.
• Anything written on workplace Slack channels could be reviewed by employers.

If you're a Salesforce employee venting about work on Slack, CEO Marc Benioff may already know about it.

In a recent episode of the "All-In" podcast, Benioff touted Slack's AI tool as a way to analyze employees' conversations, surface frustrations, company concerns, and operational blind spots in real time. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021.

"Because you run your company on Slack, all your DMs, all your channels, we're reading that now through the AI and we can tell you more about your business than you know," Benioff told the interviewer.

The billionaire CEO said he personally uses Slackbot to query information about Salesforce in real time.

"So, when I'm on Slackbot, I can ask it any question about my company," Benioff said. "What are my top five deals? What are my employees upset about? What are the top three things I need to focus on?"

"And then boom, I get the information because it has the data," he added.

Salesforce is not alone in leveraging AI to gather company intelligence.

Microsoft has integrated Copilot across Teams, Outlook, Word, and Excel, allowing its AI assistant to summarize meetings, scan messages, identify action items, and answer questions using companywide data.

Google is pursuing a similar strategy with Gemini inside Workspace, where the AI can analyze emails, documents, calendars, and chats to generate insights and automate workflows.

Startups are also racing into the space.

Glean, one of Silicon Valley's hottest enterprise AI startups, positions itself as a workplace search engine that pulls answers and insights from Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, and other internal systems.

Benioff's comments also serve as a reminder that workers should be cautious about what they say on workplace messaging platforms.

Legally and technically, employers generally own the data generated inside company Slack workspaces and can retain, export, and analyze messages depending on their subscription level and internal policies.

Slack itself states in its privacy FAQs that "a Customer owns and controls all content submitted to their workspace."

That means employees should assume that anything written on work-provided communication platforms, including direct messages, could be accessed, retained, or reviewed by their employer.