To create a truly unified experience for communications within an enterprise as well as across multiple companies, Salesforce must build-or buy-native videoconferencing and calling capabilities for their platform. While Slack does have many integrations with video and phone providers, it's missing this functionality natively.

2020 saw a massive rise in the use of videoconferencing, and unified communications phone calls are still commonplace.

But chat is just one of many modalities employees use to communicate among themselves and with external parties. Slack is renowned for its innovative approach to business communications, primarily through chat. This will help Salesforce drive the adoption of Slack and finally have a shot at achieving what they were previously chasing with Chatter. Ultimately, by providing employees with a single place to conduct their work, a deep integration between Slack and Salesforce could lead to higher productivity and happier customers. These types of efficiencies not only would lead to higher ROI for enterprises, but also could greatly improve both the employee and customer experience. On top of that, AI- and ML-based integrations between the two platforms can potentially streamline approval processes for everything from closing a new deal or sending an email marketing campaign to resolving customer change requests. By using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to capture crucial data from Slack conversations, customer data is much more likely to be complete-and always up to date. There is huge potential for workflow automation between Slack and Salesforce, and this could significantly reduce the amount of time employees spend finding and updating data on the CRM side. These integrations will also be key to the value proposition of a Salesforce-owned Slack. Slack is well known for its thousands of integrations with third-party applications, including Salesforce. The best part? Slack Connect allows all parties to retain the data relating to their conversations, not just internal users. Now, with the acquisition of Slack, Salesforce has access to Slack Connect, which allows internal employees to communicate not only across their enterprise in one single platform but with vendors and customers as well.

Slack is what