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    Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

    (skyfall.dev)
    1502 points JustSkyfall | 11 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.917s | source | bottom
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    flunhat ◴[18 Sep 25 02:15 UTC] No.45284272[source]▶
    For whatever reason, Salesforce has failed to capitalize on the AI excitement/craze [1]. Its earnings growth is just not what it used to be (i.e. during the peak cloud era of 2010s-202x).

    A move this aggressive (e.g. pushing companies on Slack to pay 10x more, immediately, or get lost) is not isolated and probably the result of institutional forces. It's not like the random sales person in charge of this decided to be destructive. Salesforce the company is getting squeezed and this is one of the outgrowths of that pressure. And it speaks to the insane dysfunction that must be taking place in the bowels of Salesforce right now, I'm sure it's crazy.

    [1] https://qz.com/salesforce-beats-q2-earnings-ai

    replies(4): >>45284396 #>>45284802 #>>45284807 #>>45286022 #
    1. MontyCarloHall ◴[18 Sep 25 03:11 UTC] No.45284807[source]▶
    It's really surprising -- Slack is the poster child of an app where AI-based semantic search (e.g. RAG) would be incredibly useful. Yet despite Marc Benioff's grand proclamations about AI [0, 1], you barely see any AI integration into one of Salesforce's most universally-used products.

    [0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-09-02/salesforce...

    [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91359024/salesforce-using-ai-art...

    replies(3): >>45284855 #>>45285511 #>>45285776 #
    2. paxys ◴[18 Sep 25 03:18 UTC] No.45284855[source]▶
    Salesforce as a company hasn't been innovative in 20 years. It's no surprise that they can't make anything of AI outside of a couple fancy marketing campaigns.
    replies(1): >>45285575 #
    3. aurareturn ◴[18 Sep 25 04:45 UTC] No.45285511[source]▶
    I don't understand why Slack hasn't fully implemented LLMs. Imagine as a new comer, you don't understand why a product decision was made 3 years ago. You ask Slack to summarize the conversations on why this choice was made based on messages 3 years ago. How powerful is that?

    Slack can probably charge an extra $10/month/user for this.

    replies(3): >>45285824 #>>45285829 #>>45288197 #
    4. Twirrim ◴[18 Sep 25 04:54 UTC] No.45285575[source]▶
    I know a few engineers in different companies within Salesforce. They're under lots of pressure to integrate AI everywhere, and leverage it. The way they've talked about it gives me strong "flailing around desperately" vibes, when the smarter money is on making more minimal but targeted efforts, or at least waiting to see what happens the other side of the bubble.
    5. Schnitz ◴[18 Sep 25 05:26 UTC] No.45285776[source]▶
    They have AI features in Slack but they just aren’t that useful. The RAG search is the most useful one, but it falls short of solutions like Dust or Glean because it only covers a single silo (Slack). AI search is way more useful when it searches across Notion, Linear, Slack, etc so you’ll buy that instead of the Slack AI addon.
    replies(1): >>45285819 #
    6. milkshakes ◴[18 Sep 25 05:33 UTC] No.45285819[source]▶
    Oh, they know, that's why they have banned all other AI from interacting with Slack.
    replies(1): >>45285842 #
    7. SchemaLoad ◴[18 Sep 25 05:34 UTC] No.45285824[source]▶
    Has any company got this feature? Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds good in theory but is hard to actually pull off. To complete this query you'd have to process almost the entirety of the chat history in every channel. Which sounds extremely expensive, and we know LLMs start to go off the rails when you give them too much context.
    8. atemerev ◴[18 Sep 25 05:34 UTC] No.45285829[source]▶
    Because implementing _useful_ AI features is hard.
    replies(1): >>45288046 #
    9. Schnitz ◴[18 Sep 25 05:37 UTC] No.45285842{3}[source]▶
    The API changes are scummy, I agree. It’ll generate some ARR short term but ultimately people will be looking elsewhere, new companies will start on alternatives and others switch when the opportunity arises. It’s also not like Slack is a beloved product.
    10. aurareturn ◴[18 Sep 25 10:48 UTC] No.45288046{3}[source]▶
    What do you think is hard about it? What do you think Slack needs to do to enable this feature?
    11. paxys ◴[18 Sep 25 11:12 UTC] No.45288197[source]▶
    Slack does have this. Basic AI summaries are included in all paid plans, and AI search and other features are part of the $20/mo plan.