A new Slack CEO sees upside with Salesforce

She faces challenges but Lidiane Jones finds Slack is perfectfor the times.

Liidiane Jones, global head of Slack

Lidiane Jones is the new CEO of Slack, tasked with continuing its integration with Salesforce, which bought the chat and messaging platform for $US27.7 billion in 2021. She’s been described as the “glue” that will bind together two very different cultures.

Jones has spent years in tech, including 13 years at Microsoft, four years at Sonos and the last three at Salesforce.In a video conference interview she talked about the generational shifts around work which, she argues, make Slack the perfect product. The company has just announced a deal with OpenAI, the producers of ChatGPT which allows Slack users to draft material using the bot.

Have you seen a big change in your own working life around the need for this
generation to be really emotionally engaged in purposeful work?

What I have seen is that more than ever employees want to be able to express their talents at work. Historically productivity has been structured and that constrains people to certain boxes that they have to work in, or certain meetings they have to attend. What I’m seeing is people want to express their creativity, they want to be the best marketers that they can be, they want to be the best developers that they can be.

Companies will have to embrace this flexibility. And to be candid, it’s not just so employees can be happy. That’s a great benefit, but it will yield better results for organisations as well, because we haven’t fully unlocked people’s potential (yet).

The reason Slack has been so powerful - it’s almost like a light bulb when suddenly employees can be freed from so many meetings. Leaders who think of it as something to be optimistic about will see just a massive explosion of innovation.

What you’re saying is if we really want to be productive in this time in history, we have to empower individuals to be productive, not to think in terms of structured work, for
example?

That’s exactly what I’m saying: we are walking away from this super-rigid, structured work.

When I was in Sydney recently I asked a group of customers, how many of you are measuring productivity in the number of hours (worked) or meetings? And how much work do people actually do? Are there multiple meetings? We let ourselves construct productivity in a set of tasks that isn’t actually the work. Employees want to be more engaged, and we are trying to figure out how to walk away from the rigidity into more flexible, more exciting workspace. It’s a phenomenal opportunity.

And what’s interesting is the way that it changes your role as a leader, you can’t be so hands on, can you?

I genuinely love every bit of innovation that we’re working on, but I just don’t have as much time for that anymore.

So it’s a big shift for me, which has also been very exciting … because I’ve had the opportunity to meet phenomenal customers (for example). (But) my team needs to be inspired as much as our customers do. One of the pieces we’ve been spending a lot of time on is developing generative experiences in Slack. Slack is a conversational experience, where people are exchanging ideas … so we have announced a partnership with OpenAI (producers of the revoutinary bot, ChatGPT). But that’s just the beginning ... because we can really shift these paradigms. So it’s been a very exciting shift.

Microsoft is often cited as your main competition. What have you got it doesn’t offer?

People compare us to Teams but Teams is largely used for video conferencing. When we think about productivity, we think about every part of what you have to do. And so we’re a platform in which Teams is one component. But we have over 2600 apps built on Slack. And that’s why it’s so powerful .

What are the challenges in integrating Slack and Salesforce?

I worked at Salesforce for three a little over three years before coming to Slack. So it gave me an opportunity to remove any myths of cultural differences. Integration for us is intentional integration. We want to maintain our consumer grade experiences (and ) we actually believe we can help the rest of Salesforce with it. But there are other portions that we certainly want to learn from Salesforce - the amazing storytelling and marketing to business users.

Salesforce is phenomenal at that. It’s been a wonderful partnership so far. Salesforce is going through the same economic challenges as everybody in the world but we are a very meaningful part of the Salesforce portfolio. And there’s two things strategically exciting for Salesforce Slack (that are) so critical to the future of Salesforce.

One is we have a very healthy and very rapidly growing self-service business. So we have a huge pool of very small companies. That’s very complementary to Salesforce, which has been historically very enterprise grade. Now Salesforce has a very healthy spectrum of small customers and large customers so strategically that’s really exciting.

At Slack we have a lot of customers … but not so much yet with some industries, so there is strategic expansion on both sides. Slack should become the critical engagement layer (for customers) for everything at Salesforce.

What do you mean by generative
experience?

ChatGPT uses a very specific type of AI called generative AI based on its learning of large language models.

They can process billions of different inputs, which means we can ask very complex questions and get very complex answers. It’s never been possible before because the ability to compute the internet for that kind of input is really expensive. So what we believe in is large language modelling, generative AI. Our belief is that large language models like ChatGPT, are going to become very pervasive. And customers are going to have choices - they can choose ChatGPT or they can choose something else.

And our goal is to have the best option for our customers, intimate conversational AI using a large language model, really to be the best in class, especially because people already are conversing in Slack.

It’s a very natural interaction model so conversational, generative experiences in Slack using ChatGPT and other models is going to become a game changer in how people do their work.