Almost three years ago, at Dreamforce 2022, a conversation with Jacob Gross — then Slack’s Community Lead — planted a seed I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.
Not long after, I earned my Slack Administrator and Slack Consultant certifications and became the first Slack chapter leader in Oceania, right here in Melbourne — building a community from scratch in a part of the world that didn’t have one yet. It’s been a consideration in every role I’ve taken since. It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t always obvious where it was leading. But bit by bit, that first chapter grew into a real, active community of people who saw the same possibility in Slack that I did — and it’s kept growing ever since.
At the AgentForce World Tour in Melbourne, all of that came into focus.
Standing in that room, I watched companies talk about Slack not as a side tool bolted onto their tech stack, but as the front door to how their teams and their AI agents actually work. The conversations weren’t about whether Slack mattered — they were about how central it had become. Businesses are starting to understand, in a real and practical way, what a Slack-first approach can do for their teams and for their clients.
It was a genuinely exciting moment. Watching a room full of businesses arrive at a conviction I’d held for years, on their own, through their own experience of what the platform can do, was something else entirely.
And it’s not just that more people are catching on — it’s how quickly the platform itself has developed. Slackbot has evolved into something genuinely different from what it was even a couple of years ago, and with Slackbot now acting as an MCP client, we’re only just starting to scratch the surface of what’s possible. The pace of change has been remarkable to watch up close, let alone be part of.
I feel that shift in my own day-to-day, not just in the broader market. Searching across platforms used to mean jumping between tabs and tools just to piece together an answer. Now I can ask Slackbot a question and have it pull together what I need from across the systems I work in, without leaving the conversation. And with Salesforce and Slack increasingly designed to work as one connected platform, the two worlds I’ve spent years working across are finally starting to feel like a single, coherent workspace rather than two systems I have to bridge myself.
What excites me most isn’t being early. It’s what comes next. If this is where the conversation is now, the next few years of what Slack-first companies build — for their teams, for their clients, and now for their AI agents — are going to be worth watching closely.
If Melbourne was any indication, we’re just getting started.
Sync Savvy 