IDC MarketScape Names Slack a Leader in Worldwide Team Collaboration

“Consider Slack when you need to bring all your applications together as a functionally rich, intelligent collaborative workspace that evolves with your business.”

Just announced, the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Team Collaboration Applications 2024 Vendor Assessment (doc #US51405624, October 2024) recognizes Slack as a Leader. “Slack enables an ease of channel-centric collaboration across different modalities in a way that few products can,” said Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research Vice President of Collaboration and Communities. “Slack customers cited the wide adoption of Slack’s no-code workflows that can use a wide array of integrations to make their work easier and faster to accomplish.”

The IDC MarketScape is a highly anticipated and authoritative guide for technology buyers. It evaluates work platforms using a rigorous methodology across a wide range of technical and business criteria, as well as extensive customer interviews.

“The world’s most innovative companies build and grow their businesses in Slack, and now Slack is where our customers can scale their impact with AI and Agentforce,” said Peter Doolan, Chief Customer Officer at Slack. “We’re honored to be recognized by the IDC MarketScape as a Leader in Worldwide Team Collaboration.”

The IDC MarketScape considers vendors in the context of an enterprise’s entire technical landscape, including their ability to integrate with other applications, low-code or no-code capabilities, security, governance, and compliance. In describing Slack’s capabilities, Kurtzman wrote, “With integrations to the vast majority of critical enterprise systems and apps, Slack acts as an orchestration layer for work, saving teams and individuals time by aligning and adding visibility to work with the stream of conversations.”

Redefining how work happens with AI and agents

We believe the IDC MarketScape’s recognition underscores Slack’s pivotal role in a big shift in the market for work platforms, as companies look for ways to lower overhead costs and grow revenue with AI agents. Bundled office suites and siloed collaboration apps aren’t built for a world in which desk workers will need to work alongside AI agents with seamless access to the data they need to take action. Companies are turning to Slack as their work operating system because it brings together people, apps, data, and workflow automations with AI and agents in one conversational interface.

In the report, Kurtzman pointed to Slack’s flexibility for customers: “Slack offers collaboration, native project management, AI apps and agents in an AI-powered conversational layer that connects data, organizations, streamlines and automates processes to drive business outcomes, regardless of which office suite you are using.”

Employees aren’t just collaborating in Slack. Innovative companies such as Ford, IBM, Target, Capital One, Accenture, and Rocket Companies run mission-critical business processes and connect their global organizations with partners and suppliers in Slack. Customers see accelerated performance in sales, customer service, product development, IT, finance, and HR, with a reported 47% increase in productivity and 31% faster issue resolution time. Slack’s native integrations with Salesforce, such as Slack Sales Elevate and Salesforce channels, are helping sales teams beat revenue goals with a reported 37% increase in win rate.

Slack also counts leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, and Perplexity among its customers and partners, which spurred the creation of over 13,000 AI apps on the Slack platform since March 2023. Now, Slack’s integration with Agentforce is turning agents into teammates, where they can collaborate in Slack channels and perform tasks equipped with the full context of conversations and connected data. Slack’s recently announced partnerships with Box, Adobe, and Writer.ai further solidify Slack’s position as the natural home for AI and agents. Slack customers are free to choose the AI solutions that make sense for their business, work with multiple AI assistants and agents at once, and build and deploy their own custom AI apps using proprietary LLMs. Slack is also becoming a powerful AI enterprise search tool because it can tap into a company’s collective knowledge and long-term memory, along with data from connected apps, to deliver highly relevant, succinct answers.

Innovation, velocity, and customer love propel Slack

The publication of the IDC MarketScape report comes on the heels of several new feature launches and strategic partnerships for Slack:

• Agentforce in Slack: By deploying Agentforce in Slack, agents become teammates. Teams can now talk to their data, surface insights, and take action on tasks in Slack with Salesforce’s Agentforce.
• Third-party AI agents: AI agents and assistants from leading enterprise apps can be deployed in the same trusted, secure environment in Slack.
• Slack AI: Slack AI is an intuitive generative AI experience built natively in Slack that provides intelligent responses based on messages and files shared in Slack, summarizes conversations in channels and threads, and delivers daily morning recaps of channels. Enhanced capabilities such as huddles notes, simplified automation, and improved search allow teams to work smarter, faster, and with greater focus.
• Salesforce channels: A new type of channel that connects Salesforce CRM records to channel-based conversations in Slack gives teams a comprehensive space to collaborate on every account and opportunity, increasing alignment to move work forward. Coming soon, Salesforce channels will be embedded in the Salesforce user interface.
• Slack templates: Collections of ready-to-use templated channels, canvases, lists, and automated workflows speed up work in any department so teams can be more productive.
• Slack lists: Lists brings project and task management directly into Slack, giving structure to conversations and enabling teams to manage projects, inbound requests, and top priorities right where they are already working — without having to jump between multiple applications.

The IDC MarketScape advises technology buyers to consider a variety of factors when choosing a work platform, including its feature velocity, the passion of its customer community, and the simplicity of its user experience. The report noted, “Slack has fans, some of whom had their careers accelerated by using Slack. Often referred to as ‘how we pull all our work together,’ Slack has become mission critical for global and regional companies to streamline processes for cross-functional teams and accelerate work with external partners and customers.”

Slack’s commitment to simplifying work with the help of AI and agents is resonating with leaders facing an increasingly complex enterprise technology landscape. As Ben Ryrie, Technology Experience Lead at Canva, said, “Everything I need is integrated into Slack. It’s meeting me where I am, so I don’t need to log in to different systems or jump between screens.” Companies that reimagine how they work with Slack reap benefits that go far beyond productivity: distributed teams become more engaged and aligned, processes become orders of magnitude more efficient, and performance measurably improves across every line of business.

In the IDC MarketScape’s conclusion, Kurtzman recommended that technology buyers “consider Slack when you need to bring all your applications together as a functionally rich, intelligent collaborative workspace that evolves with your business.”

Learn more in the IDC MarketScape report excerpt here.