Ryan Gavin（Slack CMO）：AIは「シングルプレイヤー」、Slackはマルチプレイヤーに賭ける

What happens if your people can be 3x more productive? That's like 50 to 150 to 200% top-line revenue growth. And there's not a lot of ideas sitting around boardrooms where you walk in and you're like, I have an idea for 200% revenue growth, all while maintaining margins. Companies who are really leaning into this understand that employees are one of our most important assets and empowering them to stop doing the work at work, to do the things that are going to make them not only feel professionally fulfilled, but are going to help deliver more business value by giving them tools to do so. Those are the companies that are figuring it out. Yo, it's the future. Don't hit the snooze. AI is here giving humans the boost. Team humans rolling. Brains in the game with Dan Turchin. Y'all remember the name. People ain't in the bitch. No stopping to blow. Better work, better life. Yeah, we're ready to go. Robots and humans are collab, you know. Okay, let's start the show. Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you're listening.

Welcome back to AI and the Future of Work. As always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin, from PeopleRain, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service. If you like what we do, you owe it to humanity. Pay it forward. Share a link to this episode or any other that you enjoy with one other good human, and they'll know that you care about them, and you care about doing the right thing with AI. You, this community, we call Team Human. And each week you share with me uplifting stories about how AI has changed your life or maybe those of people you know or loved ones. And I thought we'd start a new intro segment. We'll see if it works. You tell me what you think. But I want to share one story with you that will share with me before we go ahead and introduce today's amazing guest. this success story is about Sid Sabranji who is the co-founder and former CEO of GitLab he successfully used AI and data science

to tackle his terminal stage 4 spinal cancer with the help of AI he and his medical team used 25 terabytes of his own data to find a treatment isolate the cancer cells and design a personalized vaccine it worked he's now in remission and he open sourced his medical journey in the form of a foundation All of Sid's data and background on his journey is available at osteosarcoma.com. We'll share a link to that in the show notes, but mostly I want to create more opportunities where, like me, you can be inspired by the growing number of humans who are benefiting from AI. It goes beyond what you read in the headlines. And that's very germane to today's conversation. Let me go ahead and get you introduced to our guest. Ryan Gavin is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Slack, the ubiquitous collaboration platform loved by more than 200,000 organizations in 150 countries. Do I really need to introduce you to Slack? Since Ryan joined, Slack has increased its revenue 250%, and he helped launch the new AI-first Slack bot, which is amazing.

We'll be discussing it today. Previously, Ryan was Chief Growth Officer at Convoy, and he held leadership roles at AWS and Microsoft, where he led multi-billion dollar businesses. Ryan holds a BA from Seattle Pacific University. Go Falcons. I could go on for days about all of Ryan's accomplishments, but then we wouldn't have time to hang out with Ryan. Ryan, without further ado, welcome to AI and the future of work. Let's have the audience learn more about you, that background, and how you got to where you are today. Awesome. Well, thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me. First, I don't know what's more impressive. You're on podcast 410, which I don't think you're old enough to have that many pods. So I don't know what you've been doing. We'll get you everywhere. It's incredible. But no, that story you shared, like what an incredible inspiration. I heard that before and just hearing it even again. It's such an untold story of, you know, we all get the doom and gloom of AI and people who are worried about this and that and rightfully so. but the other side of the equation of what the AI can do is just absolutely inspiring.

So I love that you opened with that. So, yeah, it's nice to meet folks. My name is Ryan Gavins, Dan said. I've had my own interesting career journey. I'm not going to belabor that with you, but I've had the last two and a half years of having the leverage of being the CMO of Slack among some other things here at Salesforce, and it's been an incredible journey. It's an incredibly exciting time, as almost everyone on your pod will say right now, as the transformation that's going on, and we're all just racing to keep up. But one of the fun parts about Slack is we get to see it front-hand as we get to work with all these leading AI companies and who are using and building with Slack to kind of create the next generation of everything. And so it's been an incredible two-and-a-half-year run, and I'm excited to be here. Ryan, when we were getting to know each other, we did a prep call with someone from your team. It was great. I got kind of an early preview of Slackbot. one of the things that we really connected around is the fact that Slack is way more than a tool. It is, and I'm trying to avoid cliches, but it's kind of the front door to the employee experience.

It's a collaboration platform plus plus. And now with AI embedded, you and the team have had some important decisions to make because it's so influential. How do you think about the new jobs that Slack does that maybe take it beyond what it was when Stuart and the team launched it back in 2013 or something like that. Yeah. No, there's this new chapter that's being written for Slack for sure. And the product, and I don't need to take any credit for this, Stuart and so many people who really built this. What was a beloved collaboration tool that really became not only something that builders love to build around, but then grew much beyond that, obviously. Somewhat interestingly, the things that made Slack, this beloved collaboration tool are now making a purpose for this new kind of work platform or work operating system that we've been talking about it, which is all this AI is being introduced into the world. Agents are multiplying like nobody's business. And the question is, well, where is it all going to work?

And where are these agents going to be deployed? And where are humans going to interact with these agents in a way that's going to be both accessible, going to feel familiar and actually going to deliver the productivity gains that customers and employees are looking at. And, you know, if we're just super, like, honest, there's a pretty big gap between what's happening with AI spending and having that show up on the balance sheets of organizations, particularly when you talk about, like, employee productivity. And it's in part because so much of what's happened is a, you know, a modern version of what's happened in the past, of tool proliferation that's being deployed across these enterprises without people understanding what, how, and when to use it. The software that I had to navigate in the past was a bunch of different browser tabs and clicks, and now I have to navigate browser tabs and clicks plus a dozen different agents or a hundred different agents. And how does all that come together to get employee productivity go from 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x? And that's where Slack is kind of uniquely fitting this new need of it's this missing

piece of your AI spend. where it's kind of bringing the agents in one spot with the humans, all working in the way that is just fundamentally human, like it works the way we want to work. And so we've kind of had this like renaissance moment for Slack, and we got early signals of it from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that were literally building things like ChatGPT and Claw inside of Slack, and we kind of got to see that firsthand, and it's really transformed what the product is today. And so that's a little bit, I think, what you were alluding to. So that's a little bit of a long answer. but I'll stop there. Good answer. As listeners of this podcast know, I have serious issues with AI that is designed to essentially create a wedge in between humans and other humans. You know, things pretending to be a live human SDR, things pretending to be a human booking you a haircut or a restaurant, those violate trust. and when I use Slackbot, it's just the opposite.

It feels like it's eliminating barriers between me and other humans and it's helping me find serendipitous opportunities to collaborate with humans. How do you think about the role that Slack is playing in facilitating rather than preventing human-to-human collaboration? Well, that is, I mean, you've touched on the secret sauce that makes Slack Slack. I mean, so much of AI right now is single player, right? It's you interacting with the system and getting benefit from it. But, you know, so much of what we do in life and certainly in work is multiplayer. It is, you know, working together with humans. All of work is, you know, almost entirely brought together of humans coming together to do incredible stuff. You know, the Margaret Mead quote of never doubt, you know, what a small group of dedicated people can do for the world. because, indeed, it's the only thing it ever has. Like, that is it. And that is the success story behind every major company, AI native or not.

So, you know, Slack has done an incredible job of bringing people together. And so now when you can bring in agents into that conversation, and you referenced Slackbots, so Slackbots are kind of – Slackbots have been around in Slack for, you know, over a decade, but it's got a glow up recently, as the kids would say, to really become this incredible agent that is AI-enabled, And it really understands everything inside you, inside of Slack, respecting your permissions and trust. And what's unique about it, and one of the reasons why it's been one of the fastest adopted features, not just in Salesforce history, but I think increasingly we're seeing it externally as well, is I don't have to teach Slack about who I am. It knows who I am because it has access through this trusted framework to all the unstructured data in Slack. And as we know, the unstructured data is AI gold. It's the years of conversations. And it can access those conversations and do so in a way better than anyone ever could before. And so I just give you an example You know when I recently this was about six seven months ago and I was preparing for a customer presentation and I asked Slackbot

I said, hey, go find the original presentation that Stuart Butterfield, who's the founder of Slack, did for this customer way back when, and how did they talk about it back then? Now, like, just think about that. You know, if you just unpack that little symbol of career, like, one, first of all, Slackbot knows it can access information that's shared in public channels. So public channels means anyone can view it. I have access to that. And it can look for customer conversations against that. It can go find that presentation that was maybe nine, seven years ago. And that was lost before. But now instantly with a simple query, I can get that. And then Slackbot goes further and says, hey, would you like me to couple this with all the recent conversations that have been happening around this account? In fact, I can even look at what's going on in the systems of record data like your crm system and pull that in and give you a complete overview of everything this customer might be interested in from the latest opportunities etc and like with this one simple query of just finding an old presentation i came back with this unbelievable like 360 degree view of this customer from past present and future

with unstructured data and structured data and it all just felt seamless like it just felt like i was talking to dan and dan and i were having a conversation and dan just turns out to be wicked smart and be able to access stuff that other people couldn't have had access to before. It just would have been impossible. So when you have those magical moments with AI, and in this case with Slackbot, it goes all the way back to the thing you talked about, the trust of like this now just in the period of one interaction became this trusted tool that I can't imagine not using the next day. Like I can't imagine if someone took this away, I'd be lost. And that's the special software. Like we have a principle inside of Slack that says, don't make me think. And, you know, when we designed Slackbot, it was designed around that. It's like, just make it work, just the way a human would expect. And it doesn't mean we always get everything right. It doesn't mean we have things we won't improve on. We absolutely will. But it's done a pretty darn good job of it out of the gate. So building on that, the boss man, Mark Benioff over at Salesforce, has really gotten conviction around headless software.

Yeah. And I would assume, reading between the lines, that one of the reasons he can say that Salesforce as a CRM or plus plus may recede into the background as a system of record, as a system for analytics, et cetera, is because he also owns the asset called Slack, which is essentially, you know, the headless harness, the kind of the new way of interacting with software. and it's Slack's job to go and surface all this information, like in the story you just shared. How intentional is that in terms of kind of participating in the broader Salesforce strategy and Slack being that, you know, kind of that front door? Yeah, well, I think it's a stupid question. I would kind of give you like two flavors of it. First, like the headless announcement, I think, got a lot of people's attention because it kind of built into this narrative but what's happening with SaaS software and, you know, the SaaS-tocalypse, as Mark talks about it.

And so, you know, it really caught people's attention. But the truth is, like, Salesforce has always been a very open platform with, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of APIs that allow people to build on that platform and bring Salesforce data into various other systems. So this is really maybe an acceleration of an existing trend versus something that's entirely not new. The other side of that, though, is when you can think about why this is important and why this is valuable. I'm going to take customers I was talking to not too long ago, Rocket Companies, or Engine is another one for sale. Today, if you just step back and say, wow, so many companies have invested lots of money in things like agent-first sales or agent-first service, and they've got their customer data in these systems. But only a fraction of the employees at those companies access that data. If you're a salesperson, you get to see the sales data. If you're a service person, you get to see the sales data, and maybe some managers in between. So all that investment and all that rich customer data kind of stays hidden

from the vast majority of the employees out there. They're not going into those systems. So what happens when you can have a conversational interface, an interface that doesn't require you to learn a new UI, doesn't require you to learn anything new, You can simply just ask it a question in natural language. What happens when a conversational interface can have access to all those systems of record? And you can democratize access to that data. You can democratize access to those customer insights. It just took the investment that you made in these systems in Salesforce, and it just made it infinitely more valuable. You know, when the marketing team, the IT team, the finance team, the engineering team can just as easily access the customer insights that are in your CRM system as anyone in the sales team can. In fact, can do it even easier because they can just pull up their phone and ask a question. Now the utilization of that data is far greater across the organization. And when anyone can write into it with permissions, of course, as you go through, the ability to write into those systems becomes easier than ever. Like I now no longer have to go to my CRM.

I just pull out my phone and say, hey, Slackbot, I just met with Nubank. They've got some incredible stuff going on there. Update that opportunity from $100,000 to $200,000. and make sure I do a follow-up call, and can you send a thank you email? Like, boom. Like, think of all the richness that just got entered into a system of record without ever going to it. And that's why kind of the headless strategy coupled with Slack is really, really powerful, not just for customers, but it's also powerful for Salesforce. And I think the customer example that comes to mind, I was talking to Vercel recently, the COO, incredibly bright woman, and she was just telling me, she was like, Ryan, I don't want my sellers to ever have to go into the CRM ever again. Like, I just want them to go through and in Slack, with Slackbot, talking to our data, having that data be co-mingled with the conversations that we're having about our customers and our accounts, and having all that stuff richly accessible to the entire company. And that's not a vision. I mean, that's happening. And that's how some of the most modern companies are transforming right now in this era. And I think that's why the headless announcement, a couple of the Slack, got a lot of people's attention.

And what you just said about the CMO versus self, prior to 2026 that was heresy no software vendor right that's nails on a chalkboard yeah and you know I'd argue that because of the unique position that Slack has that can be a strategic advantage and I'd even go one step further and say Slack was the best bargain ever if you look at the 26 billion or something that Benioff paid I think he did have the foresight to know the importance of owning that access, the access, you know, to where the work actually happens as where the work happens shifts. Now he's in a position to leave the headless that has put everyone else in the back foot. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly, you know, I don't, I wouldn't put any words in his mouth in terms of all the things he foresaw. And, you know, I wouldn't put anything beyond in terms of his ability to look around corners. He does it better than anyone. But, you know, to the point that you're making,

the value in terms of what it means for Salesforce, but the value of what it means for customers. You know, talk about like whether it's Anthropic or the Shopify's or the GM's of the world. Increasingly, these customers are spending massive amounts on AI investment. And I think what they're finding is Slack is like the 2% of their AI budget that's unlocking and helping them to realize more value from the other 98%. And so, you know, we're not going to be the biggest line item in your budget from your cost perspective. We don't want to be. But the value that we unlock because we're there, because, you know, GM can bring in not just agents inside of Slack. They can bring in all their enterprise systems records. So they can bring in their Microsoft Teams data. They can bring in their OneDrive. They can bring in their, you know, all their JIRA, their ticketing systems. All that stuff can be brought to the humans where work is happening. And, you know, maybe, just maybe, enterprise employees can get out of this world of swivel sharing between dozens and dozens of apps and all this lost productivity.

You know, we talk about it around here, like the work of work. Like how much of your day is spending trying to find that button or trying to figure out where that document was or trying to connect the dots between different systems and getting all the work of work just so you can actually go focus on what you want to get done. And we are now getting to this era where you can actually get rid of most of the work of work, but you have to be thoughtful about it. Just dropping AI into the organization actually doesn't do it. In fact, it makes it worse. And we've seen this over and over and over again with companies. But you have to go through and you have to have a strategy. And it's why one of the things I share with, you know, many customers I meet with, and I was talking to another one just this morning. And I said, hey, you know, if you're still running your company out of the inbox, you're going to really struggle in this next era. Like if the inbox is the way that you are orienting and orchestrating work, you're going to struggle. And I always kind of joke. I said, you know, every company needs a kind of a work operating system strategy for your employees.

And if you don't have one, the place where your employees spend the bulk of your time is your thing. And today, for many, many, many customers, that's still an inbox. It's still, you know, a basic chat application and, you know, a browser. And, you know, that becomes the defining work system for you. And that's just not going to stand up in terms of realizing the value of what's happening right now with AI. A word from today's sponsor. IT teams are working hard, buried under alerts and tickets. The fix isn't just adding more people or dumping unguided AI into the mix. It's giving your team an AI force multiplier that handles routine tasks and elevates your people to focus on what matters. Today's sponsor is Freshworks, which builds for exactly that. They train domain-specific AI on a decade of real service data across tens of thousands of customers, helping to deflect more than 65% of employee queries and cutting resolution time by 77%.

Freshworks is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT service management platforms It the AI unified service operations platform that fast to deploy intuitive to use It enables every employee to be more productive, delivering powerful governance and scale without the operational drag of legacy platforms. Companies like Bridgestone, New Balance, S&P Global, and Sony Music trust Freshworks to deliver quality employee and customer service and manage efficient technology operations. Check them out. Go to Freshworks.com slash Dan T. To learn more, that's Freshworks.com slash Dan T. Now back to this week's amazing episode. You used the word thoughtful, which is an important word. And I know you're not in product, so maybe this is unfair, but I'm going to ask you a question. I'm reasonable at the product. You're quasi. You can hit me. You masquerade. On this podcast, we talk a lot about responsible AI.

And Slack, as you've already discussed, owns so much context and so much history and is aware of everything that happens, even if you restrict the public channels. How do you think about the boundaries where maybe there are things that Slackbot could do, but you or the product team have had to, you know, kind of, you know, see around the blind corner and say, let's pump the brace because this may not be something that will lead to the intended outcome? Any examples of where you've kind of reined in what Slackbot could do? Boy, that's a great question. I'm certainly, there are some, you know, we start with a pretty fundamental premise, which is like if you think of Slackbot like you're this AI teammate, the same governors and the same permissions and the same capabilities that you would put on a human teammate have to apply. So Slack bot that works in my instance works different than the Slack bot that would work in my colleagues' instance

because I have access to some channels that that individual doesn't. I have access to some data that that individual doesn't. And so those systems and all that stuff has to be inherited and you can't compromise that because the minute you do, to your point, you lose kind of fundamental trust. I think as we go forward in this era, there will be more things that can be done with some of these tools that will kind of brush up against the line of what you're saying. Like, all right, where would this start to feel like maybe we want to dial back a little bit? One of the things that's helped us on that, and you've gotten to use Slackbot, is we've really over-indexed on high levels of clarity and visibility of what Slackbot's doing behind the scenes. So, you know, the AI black box, as everyone's talked about it, is a real thing. But one of the reasons why we've gotten such high levels of adoption is part of it because of trust. So when I do a query instead of Slackbot and I say, hey, I'm preparing for this podcast with Dan. I really want to understand my stuff.

I want to understand things he's digging into. Also, have we done any deals with Dan and the team there, or have we thought about it? And I, you know, ask kind of a reasonable query. What you'll see is when Slackbot's thinking, it kind of shows its work. So it'll say, okay, first I'm going to look at all the conversations that have happened in Slack that you would have access to, and I'm looking at that. Then it might say, okay, now I'm going to look at all the documents that are in Google Drive or in Microsoft OneDrive that you've connected. Okay, now I'm looking through your inbox for anything. Now I'm looking in Salesforce, and I'm looking at the systems of record. Now, actually, I want to go out on the web, and it'll stop. and it'll say, hey, I actually want to go do a web search now. Do I have your permission to do that? So then I can say yes or I can say no. So yes, go search the web. So, and then as Slackbot's thinking, you can kind of click these little unfurls that will show all the logical areas that Slackbot went and explored to help answer this question. And then when the answer comes back, I get reference links to go back and I can validate.

Like, okay, it's pulling this information from this conversation. Let me go look at that to see if it's accurate or see if it might have hallucinated on something. So I know I'm not directly answering your question, but as I thought about it, we've been so intentional about the trust and transparency and trying to make sure that Slackbot feels explainable to anyone who's using it just by letting it show how it thinks even, that we haven't really hit those lines where we've got to feel like we dial back. Not so we won't, but we haven't really hit those yet. When I first started using Slack in probably 2014, so very early, and I had the opportunity to meet Cal, who was the founding CTO. Sure, yeah. And I asked Cal what's his favorite feature of Slack. Slack famously was fun. It was a collaboration tool used by Stewart at Glitch, a gaming company. Yeah. And Cal said it's Flash Commands. And I don't know if it even exists. It might have been deprecated. but it was this very nerd feature early on.

It still exists. Does it? Okay. Slack is very clearly designed for a developer, someone who liked to find Easter eggs, someone who would actually go through and find all the witticisms in the, famously, in the release notes. Slack has the best release notes ever. But today, you know, clearly as the CMO introducing Slack to the world, it goes much broader than that original target audience of developers who are bringing in Slack put it on a machine under the desk kind of thing it would sneak in through the back door primarily through developer channels and now it feels like it's everyone, it's every corporate worker how big is the TAM, who is your target audience now that it's no longer Cal using Slack commands in a dev team. No, I love that story at an end, because it's so right in terms of what's happening at this moment. And at the heart of it, if you just look back in Slack's history,

the things that made Slack really exciting and powerful for product and engineering teams are because it's such a great platform for builders. And many reasons why. One, it's completely open. Two, it allows you to build and grow and see in the open. We talk about the ton of building in the open and perplexity, their recent product computer. That was built inside of Slack channels with the company in there collaborating together, testing it out, learning, et cetera. ChatGPT was built in a Slack channel. You can hear the stories from OpenAI. So the idea of building in the open and building in these multiplayer environments with your tools and systems connected because you have this truly open platform, and then you sprinkle on top of that what I would call a very intentional consumer-grade UI. One of the things people talk about is Slack doesn't feel like a chore to use. There's things we can always do better, but the UI is delightful.

If you haven't experienced it before, it's just a fun place to work, and many companies build their culture in Slack. We celebrate that all the time when we see companies online and we're doing really cool things because culture is happening there. So for all these, this interesting cocktail of both the product, the technology, the thoughtfulness and the craft that went into Slack has made it a beloved tool for builders. And then something interesting has happened is overnight, seemingly, the whole world just became builders. You know, like the HR team is as much of a builder as the finance team, as the marketing team. Every line of business, every division inside of an enterprise, every employee is now a builder. And so what is your platform for builders? And that's why sometimes people conflate and, you know, think, oh, well, there's things like, you know, other chat tools out there, other collaboration tools and Microsoft Teams, et cetera. You know, lots of great products, lots of great things and use cases for those. But Slack's really evolved into something different. It's why most of our largest customers are actually Microsoft Teams shops.

So they have teams, but they are using Slack as kind of, like I described before, this work operating system for their AI, because it is fundamentally different. And it really delivers a different value proposition. And part of the openness means Slack works great with other products, even ones that people might perceive as competitors, that we really don't think of that way. So it's kind of this cool moment where the world is all turned into builders. Builders need a great home to realize the productivity. And, you know, to take it out of the land of the individual for a second, you know, when I sit down and I'm, like, you know, talking to Wayfair and these customers who are going through major transformations, you know, and meeting the moment where it's at, one of the conversations that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, nearly enough, is what is the return for businesses, top and bottom line, from employee productivity? Like it is one of the most cliched languages out there. Oh, boosting productivity like everyone banners about.

But the truth is most companies spend most their money on what? Their employees. You know, 30 to 60% of a company's, you know, capital is going towards people. And, you know, that's why I love how your point of view and the people centricity of this whole thing and how that's sometimes getting lost in this AI conversation. What happens if your people can be 3x more productive? Like, forget about cutting people and like, oh, hey, I was going to take those jobs. This is a transformation. But think about when your existing people can be 3x more productive. That's like 50 to 150 to 200% top-line revenue growth. And there's not a lot of ideas sitting around boardrooms where you walk in and you're like, I have an idea for 200% revenue growth, all while maintaining margins. Like, those ideas don't come around a lot. So the companies who are really leaning into this understand that employees are one of our most important assets and empowering them to stop doing the work at work, to do the things that are going to make them not only feel professionally fulfilled,

but are going to help deliver a bit more business value by giving them tools to do so. Like those are the companies that are figuring it out. That's what you see at some of these leading AI companies, and it's what you're seeing at some of the biggest companies in the world who are going through some of these transformations. as I mentioned General Motors earlier So that a pretty exciting thing So there reasons to be excited about this transformation at the highest level in the boardroom in terms of what can mean for your top and bottom line all the way through to what does it mean to show up to your team and be like, cool, we're all builders. Here's the tools that are going to help us get after it. Now, you got me excited, so I rambled on for a while there. Oh, hardly, hardly. You mentioned teams in there, so I get to ask about kind of the landscape. One of the biggest challenges for us in the AI vendor community is just that the Cambrian explosion of really credible AI products. And while, as you indicated, kind of creativity, ideas, inspiration, they're limitless. They're infinite, right? Sadly for you and I, enterprise budgets are not.

And so you're talking to a lot of enterprise executives on this show, in the community, thinking about whose share of wallet is Slack taking? because to the extent IT budgets are a zero-sum, it is a zero-sum game. What AI investment should I be thinking I can consolidate into using Slack so I can expand my usage of Slack? Yeah, it's a great one. And it's a conversation I actually have quite regularly with lots of folks on the C-suite level. And it typically follows this pattern. I get introduced, I walk in the door, shake some hands of a lovely customer, and they're saying, hey, just to be super straight with you, like we are a Microsoft shop, we have teams, not really looking to change that, it works just fine. Like, so I appreciate that you're here, but kind of not interested in your pitch. I'm like, cool. And, you know, in that world, that's an IT budget conversation, right? That is a, here's the spend that we have, this thing kind of works.

I don't think I need to really transform it. And then, you know, we'll go through and I'll, you know, start to show how companies that are AI native are working and how they're building and how their employees are building. And I'll start to show some of the capabilities of what does it mean when you have this like truly work operating system that works across all your enterprise systems. And you can kind of show, Hey, like all your line of business systems, your ERP systems, all these agents that you're bringing in, all this AI, this all can come together in one place. That's really going to maximize employee productivity as we've been talking about. And you start to show this, and you'd be like, oh, and by the way, the data that you've invested over here, whether it be in Snowflake or others, can now be instantly accessible and queriable and done so in a safe and permissioned way, so your employees are going to be smarter coming into every meeting. In fact, let me just show you how I prepared for this meeting, and I'll pull up my slack pot. And, you know, the eyes just kind of go from saucers, and, like, what happens in the heads of these leaders is this stops being an IT budget conversation. This starts being an AI strategy conversation.

They all have goals and ambitions around how are they going to deploy AI to transform their companies, their people, their outputs. All of them are looking at the budget they're spending on AI very closely in terms of what they need to go do. And, you know, the customers who really get it, like, it stops being an IT budget. You know, this is a collaboration tool. And it moves into a critical part of their AI strategy. And then they look and it's like, okay, great, so how do we get the most out of this? And where do we start? And then we'll usually pick a department or a line of business that is leading the transformation, whether it be in sales or service or in their engineering team, and we'll get them going on it. And then it kind of just goes like wildfire from there, to your point. Once you've spent some time in this new way of working, it's kind of hard to go back. In fact, one of the most common things we get on social media is customers or employees who worked at a company that used Slack, and then they left and went to a company that didn't. and they're just like going through withdrawal and they're like reaching out to us like, hey, I don't know what to do.

I don't want this. And how do I come back? So we have some fun with that online. But it's a pretty common pattern. But I think that's the switch. It's, you know, it's asking people to stop for a minute and understanding that they've got a perception of what they think you are when you walked in the door. And you have to show them the real value of this new way of working in this new era for them to kind of mentally take you out of that box and put you in a different box. And it's in part why Slack's been doing so well so recently, because that box and what's happened with AI has only accelerated that. Good answer. I hope you're right. I think you're right. Still challenging, but I think you're right. Always challenging. So, Ryan, we're almost out of time, but I'm not letting you off the hot seat without answering one last very important question for me, and that's that channel your inner Gen Z or your inner college cake. who's hearing Ryan and Dan talk, and we're getting eye rolls. We're like, look, guys, I think I'm excited like you are about AI and the future of work,

but I don't have access to it. I feel like I'm being suffocated by AI. It's not this world-changing opportunity for me at work because I don't know what's left for me to do. how do you start that conversation with someone who feels like AI just inherently is an adversary and they're kind of being crowded out of this conversation by a few billionaires or trillionaires that increasingly own access to the opportunities I love this one, I don't know how great my answer is but I at least get to practice this answer a bunch, I have four kiddos I've got two of them in college currently, one of them going to college, and in about a week I'm flying down for my oldest daughter's graduation from college. So this is a topic that's near and dear in the Gavin household, and I've certainly had it with a number of my kids several times.

I hope I'm not being too like Pollyanna or like naive, but I try to lean back on the things that we know are going to endure. Like, I can't look my kids in the eye and say, I know what work's going to look like 10 years from now, let alone five years from now. Like, it's just moving and changing so fast. And I'd just be lying if I said I did. But I do know, like, creativity and the desire to learn and get in there and, you know, abilities to think about innovation and how do you go and create something new. And I also know that there's, you know, despite all the headlines, there's still not enough great people out there to go do great work. And, you know, we look for that all day long here at Slack and Salesforce. And there is so much opportunity in this new era that's just we don't know what it looks like yet. And so it's hard to point an individual at this job or this function and say, oh, this is safe.

You know, I don't know if that exists. But I know that if you're coming at it and remaining open, and I think if you're remaining curious, those opportunities are going to show up. Like, you know, it is the easiest time in the world to be a small business. Like, in the history of the world, this small business was always structurally disadvantaged against any company at scale. Now, a handful of people can show up to the world like they're a 10,000-person company. It's incredible. Like, that's amazing. So that access and that democratization of, you know, the art of the possible because of these tools, it's very, very real. And just to go back to how you opened the segment, think of all the areas where AI is going to open up a new channel that no one even thought was possible. Like genetically engineering your own cure or your own personal remedy for what ails you. like we weren't talking about that at scale in any meaningful way and now we are and that is an

exciting time so if you can embrace the optimism if you can brace the possibilities and stay curious we're going to find that path through this and there's going to be plenty of i think incredible things for for our young folks to go do even if we don't know exactly what it's going to look like right now well make sure that your four kids listen to this so that uh you won't get eye rolls I think that was a good answer, and I'll make sure that my two kids listen to this. Congrats, by the way, on the pending graduation of your daughter. Ryan's been wonderful. I rushed this one to the front of the queue just because I loved our conversation when we met and wanted Team Human to meet you. Where can our audience learn more about you and the great work that you and the Slack team are doing? Sure. Please never hesitate to come up to Slack.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I try to be as active as I can. And, yeah, we've got lots of cool stuff to share. So if you're at all interested, just go up to our site, hit contact us, and we'll be in touch.

Brilliant. Brian, thanks for hanging out. It's been a lot of fun. Dan, I really appreciate it. I love what you're doing, and I think your audience has got something very special with you. So thank you for having me be the small part of it. Thank you. You bet. Let's see. A couple show notes. There are two episodes related to this great conversation with Brian. We'll share links to both. One is episode 297 with Silvio Savareza, who's the EVP and chief scientist at Salesforce. Somewhat related conversation, but he was an academic and then was tackling some great hard challenges at Salesforce. Great conversation. Another one also with an exec from Salesforce. This is back from season three, a long time ago. Kai Nunez was the vice president of research and insight at Salesforce. And great conversation. and talk about a charter member of Team Human. Kai's wonderful. Anyway, so enjoy this one with Ryan and click those links and get introduced to more of the execs at Salesforce.

That is all the time we have for this week on AI and the future of work. As always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin from PeopleRain. And of course, we're back next week with another fascinating guest. Yo, it's the end of this show. Time to power it down. AI consists, but humans wear the crown Team human in the house, got the vibe so clever Then churchin' from people, rain makin' us better We learned about AI for humans We're ready to conquer the future, that's all for now See you next time