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Slack Expands Automation Capabilities

Salesforce announced new innovations in Slack that make it easier for users to build automations, no matter their technical expertise.

For example, customers can now build a Slack workflow that automatically starts when an event occurs in a third-party app like PagerDuty, Asana, BitBucket, and more. In addition, customers can now access a more intuitive user experience when creating workflows in Slack and access more than 50 new plug-and-play templates that span common productivity use cases. Developers also now have access to more coding languages and tools so they can create custom workflows and share them with their teams.

Workflow Builder, Slack’s no-code automation tool, allows users to automate their most important processes and tasks directly where they’re already working, without adding to IT workloads. With new Workflow Builder capabilities available today, customers can now:

- Start automations from actions in third-party apps. Previously, a Slack workflow could only start from an action that took place in Slack and Salesforce. Now, an action in a third-party app like PagerDuty, Asana, Bitbucket, and more can automatically start a workflow directly in Slack. For example, if an organization has a critical outage, a logged ticket in PagerDuty can start a workflow in Slack that will create an incident channel, add team members, set up a canvas, and share all of the relevant information from PagerDuty. Team members get the context they need to resolve the issue efficiently in their flow of work.

- Easily build workflows with a new plug-and-play design and access more than 50 new pre-built templates. A new user experience in Workflow Builder allows users to easily create a workflow by completing a prompt, similar to filling in the blanks in a sentence. And with 50 new out-of-the-box workflow templates, users can quickly build automations for common business tasks like starting a project, collecting survey data, and creating IT tickets.

- Make customizing workflows easier with new developer tools. When users need to build a specialized workflow, they can use Slack’s open APIs and developer tools to create custom steps. New tools in Slack’s developer platform make it easier to build custom steps. Developers can now create and manage custom steps on the Slack app settings page in a new, intuitive user experience. In addition, developers can enhance existing custom-built Slack apps with a custom step so that it can be used in Workflow Builder, allowing end users to connect Slack apps to time-saving workflows. Finally, Slack now supports more programming languages to develop these custom steps, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Java.

“At Slack, one of our product principles is ‘don’t make me think.’ We’re applying that to the historically technical and time-consuming area of automation so that it’s an intuitive and delightful productivity driver — for everyone. These new features make the Slack platform even more powerful for every customer, giving both developers and end users the tools they need to easily automate any business process across their work apps, directly in the place they’re already working. As Slack continues to become the destination for getting work done, we’ll continue to make it as seamless as possible for users to create automated workflows and take productivity into their own hands,” said Rob Seaman, Chief Product Officer.

Workflow Builder enhancements are generally available now to all customers.

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

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Slack Expands Automation Capabilities

Salesforce announced new innovations in Slack that make it easier for users to build automations, no matter their technical expertise.

For example, customers can now build a Slack workflow that automatically starts when an event occurs in a third-party app like PagerDuty, Asana, BitBucket, and more. In addition, customers can now access a more intuitive user experience when creating workflows in Slack and access more than 50 new plug-and-play templates that span common productivity use cases. Developers also now have access to more coding languages and tools so they can create custom workflows and share them with their teams.

Workflow Builder, Slack’s no-code automation tool, allows users to automate their most important processes and tasks directly where they’re already working, without adding to IT workloads. With new Workflow Builder capabilities available today, customers can now:

- Start automations from actions in third-party apps. Previously, a Slack workflow could only start from an action that took place in Slack and Salesforce. Now, an action in a third-party app like PagerDuty, Asana, Bitbucket, and more can automatically start a workflow directly in Slack. For example, if an organization has a critical outage, a logged ticket in PagerDuty can start a workflow in Slack that will create an incident channel, add team members, set up a canvas, and share all of the relevant information from PagerDuty. Team members get the context they need to resolve the issue efficiently in their flow of work.

- Easily build workflows with a new plug-and-play design and access more than 50 new pre-built templates. A new user experience in Workflow Builder allows users to easily create a workflow by completing a prompt, similar to filling in the blanks in a sentence. And with 50 new out-of-the-box workflow templates, users can quickly build automations for common business tasks like starting a project, collecting survey data, and creating IT tickets.

- Make customizing workflows easier with new developer tools. When users need to build a specialized workflow, they can use Slack’s open APIs and developer tools to create custom steps. New tools in Slack’s developer platform make it easier to build custom steps. Developers can now create and manage custom steps on the Slack app settings page in a new, intuitive user experience. In addition, developers can enhance existing custom-built Slack apps with a custom step so that it can be used in Workflow Builder, allowing end users to connect Slack apps to time-saving workflows. Finally, Slack now supports more programming languages to develop these custom steps, including JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Java.

“At Slack, one of our product principles is ‘don’t make me think.’ We’re applying that to the historically technical and time-consuming area of automation so that it’s an intuitive and delightful productivity driver — for everyone. These new features make the Slack platform even more powerful for every customer, giving both developers and end users the tools they need to easily automate any business process across their work apps, directly in the place they’re already working. As Slack continues to become the destination for getting work done, we’ll continue to make it as seamless as possible for users to create automated workflows and take productivity into their own hands,” said Rob Seaman, Chief Product Officer.

Workflow Builder enhancements are generally available now to all customers.

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.