[New Research] You need Slack to be an effective agent

Purchasesforce Superintelligence is excited to announce some new research. While we do not generally share research on LessWrong, this work was particularly influenced by prior work on LessWrong, so we found it appropriate to share back.

As you know, Purchasesforce Superintelligence is a leading AI R&D laboratory. Recently, our research has focused on enhancing agentic capabilities. Here at Purchasesforce, we believe that autonomous AI agents, fully integrated into modern enterprise tools, will drive the future of enterprise operations.

After reading the nascent literature on LessWrong describing the relationship between Slack and AI Agents, we were shocked by how closely it related with our own research directions.

Of course, as the world's leading AI-first productivity platform, we have always believed Slack is vital to developing capable AI Agents. However, even we were surprised by the strong and absolute claims made on LessWrong, e.g. "You need Slack to be an effective agent", "Slack matters more than any outcome". Raemon claims that Slack is not only important for developing as an effective agent, but also a robust one.

As we know, agentic robustness is a central consideration for modern AI research.

We conducted a number of benchmarking and ablation experiments to rigorously evaluate these hypotheses.

In the below graph, we show our findings on Agentic Effectiveness with vs. without Slack (green for with). As you can see, Agents are only effective when provided access to Slack.

Our internal experiments also confirm Raemon's findings. As you can see, Agents are substantially more Robust with Slack.

Of course, Slack integration is not created equal. Over the past year, we have worked on increasing enterprise adoption of Slack's AI features, as well as increasing agentic integration with Slack.

On our internal benchmarks, this work has paid off. Enterprises that adopt more Slack see substantially elevated Agentic performance.

We are grateful to the LessWrong community for validating that Slack is a cornerstone of developing modern Agentic Enterprise Systems. As we continue improving Slack (and thus Agent performance), we'd love for you to join us.