AI Unleashed: Why Every Company Needs a New Operating Model for Work, Now! | The Six Five Summit

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 gonna 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, you know, how every company's gonna 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. Oh, Thanks Daniel. I'm glad to be here.

I'm excited to talk about this. Yeah, it's a, it's a such a topic. Look, you know, AI has, has, has, has risen into the conscious of, 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. Um, you know, we're looking at driving new operating models, removing friction from customer experiences and so much more. And, you know, you come from a world where, um, this has been something that's been the mission of the company for a long time at Slack, right?

Slack's been about being productive, about helping be more efficient, removing unnecessary, uh, you know, friction from workflows. And, and so the, the first and foremost, you know, before I jump into the, the main line of questioning, you know, you're what, about six months in? Yeah.

How's that going? I mean, it has been, it has been an absolute ride of a lifetime. It is.

Um, it is, you know, the funny story about me in this role is I was talking to Brian Milam 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, um, making something happen like this. And so first of all, it's a privilege to be leading this incredible company, as you mentioned. I mean, it revolution 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 gonna be the single biggest augmenter in the way that we work. And so, um, I take that as a, um, a really big privilege and a responsibility to help transform work again.

And so it's exciting. Sometimes they say it's all about like manifesting, you know, one of the things I I was, I was gonna try to not get too kooky with that word on you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you kind of did. Don't, but I Kind of did. I I told you the truth on that and I think it's, um, um, it's uh, it's incredible.

It's been a blast. It's a privilege. Look, You know, for the longest time, you know, when I, you know, I get career advice from great people and I give career advice sometimes to people who, who have gotten to know.

And you know, I always say, you know, do the job you want. Yeah. And I know that's a little bit of a, you know, 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, the, the, the constraints of the, in the environment you're in, you know, you're talking to your boss, I'd really like to help with this. Well, sometimes, you know, do the job. Get the job Exactly.

Is what I always say, you know, Is I totally agree. I totally agree. And, 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 that you also, you do, to your point, you kind of manifest your own destiny.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. So, alright, let's get to the crux of things. Let's talk generative ai.

I mean, look, no one's talking about this, so we're, wait, no, everyone's talking about this, but, but by generative, you know, ai it is evolving quickly, right? Yeah. So the chat GBT buzz of, of November 22, you know, a semi useful product that was there at Microsoft when they launched the Big Bing with, uh, you know, GPT in it.

And you're like, Ooh, is this gonna revolutionize search and all these things. It is. It's cool.

But, um, you know, what do you think, as you've gotten to see this now where we're kind of 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? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a, this has moved from, as you said, a novelty or a science fiction into true, true transformation in business. I think it is, it is already showing and it's going to be the single greatest accelerant, um, from the original vision from that I talked about with Slack.

I mean, it's going to help make work simple, pleasant, more productive. And I think it's gonna be the single biggest augmenter of employee business outcomes and productivity that we're gonna see. Um, but I still think to your point, we're really in the early phases.

Uh, we just released research that shows that AI adoption at work has increased 60% in the last quarter. I mean, we are just, the interest is so strong, but you know, 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, 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, um, you know, I think about one of our customers, Wayfair, that's using Slack AI really to tap into, if you 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, um, through Slack ai, there's, we're summarizing 28 million messages and on average saving 97 minutes a week. I mean that, 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 it's going to, we're still in the early phases, it's gonna 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 gonna see the world, I believe, move into the fact that a, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 you know, I think that every company to be competitive is gonna need to do that. And you know, for those who haven't started, I think it's figuring out how to start small and really adopt that in your employee population. Um, and I think it's gonna, it's gonna 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, I'm filled with optimism. As somebody who works hard every day, the idea that it can get a little bit easier, um, and more fun and that work's gonna look a little bit different is really exciting.

Yeah. I mean, look, you hit a lot of key points there. And I always think to myself like, you know what would be optimal?

You know, you put 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 people on a call, you know, and we've heard about these workloads for a while, but like yeah, there's so much that gen AI could assist, for instance Yeah. Of hearing who took different action items on and then summarizing those actions and then Yes. You know, proposal generations and follow up lists and project management and then inputs into your CRM for instance.

Like, you know, 'cause 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 it's, 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 know, 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. Yep.

You won't even need to do this part, but can you quickly summarize in a channel, like we have a channel that's the Salesforce channel. So I went to Dreamforce, I met with an executive. Yep.

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, you know, 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, our phone or whatever. We could have it sitting there listening and doing it all in real time. It's pretty cool.

Um, Or how about this, how about you're in a meeting and you maybe don't remember something and what have you used, like 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. I mean, think about just what AI powered search is bringing to us.

And, and Slack's been a huge combination Of the new recall kind of file 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.

You know, 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. Yeah.

And now we don't need to take the time to value of I'll go find out and come back to you. Yeah. Is instant because you're like, I don't know.

And then assistant's gonna be able to say, Hey, this is your answer. Um, and that's why We eventually far, I think it's like we, as I mentioned, like 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 gonna get better and how you can deliver better service to your customers too. Yeah.

I just keep waiting for the Dan bot to come out and it replaces me entirely. That's what I'm saying. I just wanna know if economically my train Oh yeah.

If I train a bot, Denise, that is me, can that bot just do my job? And can I still get paid though? Like, is it like, no problem, Dan, just go to the beach and we'll let you know when the Work that we have to contemplate.

I think it's gonna be very exciting. But I also think, I think it's important though, I think in this conversation, I think that no, it's not gonna replace you, but it's going to help you be more effective, more efficient, probably more innovative. 'cause you'll have more time to think Thinking time.

That seems like a great idea. I, I, I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, my only real thinking time anymore is, is transcontinental flights. I know.

And I can't get wifi. I know. That's my thinking time now.

Um, listen, I kind of alluded to this, how things can work together. It flows from a Slack interaction to Salesforce. Yeah.

You know, slack part of Salesforce, you know, you are not only a significant future of work and collaboration platform, um, you are also a major player in customer data. Yeah. Um, the biggest, arguably, I mean obviously everyone caps differently and as an analyst, I gotta be careful to do the the emphatics, but you can say it.

Um, how are you thinking about that kind of the role, the tie together between data and work and collaboration and, and, and, And I mean, I think, you know, first of all, I, 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, um, that I can't talk about now, but a lot more coming into the platform.

And then you think about Salesforce having the, 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, you know, 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. Um, and it's exciting. It is exciting.

And lemme tell you something, the, um, high value data is in your systems of record. Yeah. It is in your, it is on your employee's devices, in their productivity tools.

Yeah, it is. You know, I think it's funny because everyone, you know, and I kind of talked about the early sort of, um, era of cool novelty, generative ai, but the real value are gonna be these narrower models industry specific, based on deeply, um, valued customer data and ERP data and operational data that can be then used to create, you know, meaningful moops for businesses. Yeah.

And so it is really exciting to see this kind of all pulled together. I wanna pivot, you know, being the CEO of Slack, you are one of the sort of, um, per the, the business is sort of the personification of the next era of work. Yeah.

Meaning Slack kind of hit the market. It was all about this change of work. It was, we're not gonna email anymore.

Like, you know, 'cause none of us do email, we just do Slack now and I'm Yep. Kind of kidding. But the way things get done faster is always these kind of asynchronous more chat like bot driven AI empowered tools.

Yeah. And so, you know, but part of it too has created this really always on, always on world. Yeah.

Um, I grew up, I don't know about you, but I had a, I had a, I had a early in my career, you know, many, many moons ago. Um, I had a gig where, you know, we used to send emails like we, somewhere between like 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM following up on each other's stuff. And it kind of became this really terrible joke about like, proving how hard we worked by when we would send the last email.

I mean, it, there was like a terrible culture, but now it's, it's gotten worse between texts and WhatsApps and emails and chats and the fact that we gotta be real time on social and we get, you know, um, you know, if your telegrams and signals, I mean you all these different places where messages are coming to you Yeah. Related to work, people are burning out now again, you know, 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, you know, the big bad AI might come and get them.

But is there another side to this? Isn't there a way that we can take control back? Yes.

I, here's how I think about it. I, I, I couldn't agree more. I mean, 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 of 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 kind of mission-driven focus that we have at Slack, which is, I mentioned the mantra, you know, um, slack is really all about helping, like 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, 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 Cupra 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 used Slack A 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 in 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, um, and, 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, you know, 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. Um, and I think that's, you know, that's an area that we have continued to focus on and we'll continue to do that.

Um, 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 um, you know, I've gotten to the point now and I have customers send me these notes where it's like they, 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.

Um, so Yeah. Well listen, I mean, there's so much there to unpack. I think it is our jobs to figure out how to give people balance back.

I mean, 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. Yeah. I think with flexibility, there's always gonna be debate of whether flexibility was a win for employees or a win for employers.

There will be a debate. Yeah. And I think it's on us to try to kind of drive that it can be a win for everybody.

Yeah. And Go Ahead. Sorry, I was just gonna add, I was gonna add something to you.

It's funny. So we talked about that cognitive overload and, and things coming at every channel. There's also capabilities that we've put into Slack that I think really kind of speak to.

Part of managing the flow of work is also about how you set your own boundaries, right? And how you actually, for example, in Slack, how you send Notifica or how you put your 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 we give ourselves credit for.

That's not to say that we aren't always in demand, certainly in large jobs. Um, but I think there are ways that you can also govern yourself. Absolutely.

It's just, it's always gonna be driven Yep. By ambition. Yep.

So what's, what is the ambition that you have? Yeah. And how crazy are you willing to drive yourself to become the CEO of Slack?

Yeah. 'cause you know, 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, yeah, I wanna do the job. And someone's saying, yeah, you know what, you should.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this kind of goes back to the human side of like, you know, 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 know, you love it, it's your passion. You don't wanna shut off.

Some people do and that's fine too. Um, but it's kind of fun when you do what you love, As long as you can figure out how to do it when you need to. Yeah.

Because I, I think you're right. There's never a want to, but there are points where I think just for, you know, my wife will sometimes tell me that the teapot is starting to to boil, you know, like you need to put the device down, like go watch a movie, go kick the ball around with your son, do something. Yeah.

That's not work for a little bit. Yeah. But it is good.

It's fun to do things we love and tech is awesome. It's so fun. Be in This space.

It's so exciting. I mean, there, has there ever been, I can't think, I don't, I really think this is not, 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 gonna change the way we work and live.

Absolutely. So I wanna have a little fun here to kind of ro you know, kind of, you know, finish off this opening keynote and thank you so much, Denise. It's been a ton of fun and thanks everybody for, for being part of this conversation.

Hopefully you found some things you're relating to here. Um, let's do a little speed round. I'm gonna ask you three questions.

We're gonna do three questions and I'm gonna get you, you know, gimme 90 seconds or less. I you chance answer, do your best, count your head while you're answering. Um, first of all, I wanna talk about citizen builders.

Okay. No code. It's red hot.

Um, you hear about it everywhere. Now we're even hearing about image to code, speech to code. Um, talk about the citizen builder and the role in organization and kind of where AI comes into play.

Oh My God, I, I mean I think this to me is one of the more exciting, and I heard the stats. So first of all, I think, 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 outta 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 you know, we take this as a privilege, but of the, of the users who love the product enough that they say, Hey, you know what, slack is our work operating system and we wanna do these two or three other things in this platform and we really wanna 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. Um, 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 gonna be part of these applications and the technology that people are using, I mean, I think it's just gonna 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 op career opportunity for people. Absolutely. I never thought I'd be a developer.

Yeah. Um, 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 could talk about because I think there's a lot of excitement in it. And then there's obviously tons of people who are told, go get a degree and become a programmer and is there a fu?

And by the way, I still believe there is. I think it's an and not an or. Yeah.

We love to be, 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 know, you need Ferrari's, you know, for a small part of the world and you also need lots and lots of Teslas.

Um, talk about customers. Yes. The outcomes.

So you obviously prob 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. Yep.

Yep. Am I saying that out loud? Okay.

Anyways, customers though, the biggest, um, 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. A hundred percent. What are your customers, you know, seeing by making bigger investments?

And I guess I could be an answer here, but I wanna hear yours. Yeah. I mean, well first of all, you are so right.

And that is the, actually one of the, 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, 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 AppSec, 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. I mean, that is really incredible.

And when I break it apart, when I think about companies by function, it's like of the, of the customers that are using Slack in certain, 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. Um, finance is seeing 37% increase in employee productivity. I mean, it goes on and on and on.

And I think that is our true mission is the 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, um, of automation actually in seeing the results of that is Spotify and Spotify uh, used the Slack platform as well as Salesforce to drive productivity in their ad sales and they saw a 40% increase in sales productivity bring 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 that's, I mean, 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, um, and it doesn't make you think. So, you know, those are the great stories. I could go on and on forever, but customers are at the center of what we do.

Um, but the real results are what really matter. Alright. Final lightning round.

Besides Slack ai, what are the some of the innovations that you're really excited about these days? I mean, uh, first of all, I could, there's so much still coming in AI that I can't talk about today, but you can, you can keep your, keep your eyes out for all the innovation that are, are happening in Slack, just advancing the cause for AI and bringing productivity to workers. But what I am really, really excited about that's coming out, uh, 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, 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 kind of 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 you know, 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'm using, 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 'em across every single line of business. Um, 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 gonna 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.

Hey, uh, love to get things early here. You know, it's like a, it's like I Can honor, I make that happen For the analyst folks, you know, to get to play with the toys first. So yes.

If only I knew someone that knew someone could, could make That if only knew someone who could help you out. Well listen, Denise, I wanna 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 uh, 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 gonna have to do this soon. We're gonna have to have you back. Oh, I'm So, thank you for having me.

It's been a real pleasure to talk to you and certainly this topic is, uh, is we could talk all day. It's clear. 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.