Slack has introduced Surfaces, a feature that lets anyone in a workspace describe the dashboard, deck, report, calculator or poll they want and get a working version back, built by Slackbot from a plain-language ask. The company says the tools can pull from source data and refresh themselves as a pipeline or a set of cases changes, and that users can pin one to a channel so teammates filter it and comment on it together. The announcement was published on September 11.
The pitch is aimed at the gap between the few people who know how to get good results out of AI tools and everyone else, who Slack says tends to get mediocre output. Building a dashboard or a deck used to mean filing a request and waiting, and the results often went stale within a day, according to the announcement. Surfaces are meant to remove the analyst, designer or BI queue from that process.
Slack's examples lean on everyday business scenes. A sales rep could keep a daily prioritized view of the pipeline, with deals drawn as objects moving at a speed that reflects the trend. A marketer could turn a go-to-market document into an executive deck holding pilot proof points, targets and sign-offs for approval. An IT team could track AI adoption and token spend, with a fresh spend and ROI version landing in Slack on its own. A service leader could run a support queue as a live triage board that flags SLA breaches, case severity and customer tier, while a finance leader could build a forecast that sets tailwinds and headwinds side by side from budget and variance data.
Surfaces are not tied to Salesforce. They work with any system connected to Slack, and each one shows where its numbers came from so they can be traced. The announcement also folds Slack and Salesforce together under the name Slackforce. The prompt Slack offers as an example is simply "Create a surface report for…".
The live auto-updating behavior is listed as coming soon, and the document gives no general availability date beyond that. Slack did not disclose pricing or regional availability.
Two early users described the change in how work gets built. Elia Wallen, founder and CEO of Engine, said the company handles millions of customer inquiries a year and needs to get people the right context quickly, adding that Surfaces lets anyone on the team describe what they need and get a working interface built from data the company already has. Matt Roy, founder of 21b, said he found Surfaces by accident and that within a week it changed how his company shares metrics internally, replacing decks and exports with live views in the channel where the conversation happens.
