Slack Unveils Shared Channels and Workflow Builder (Full Transcript)

[00:00:20] Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Everyone, please welcome Chief Product Officer at Slack, Tamar Yehoshua.

[00:00:45] Speaker 2: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our afternoon keynote session. So how did people enjoy the morning session? Serena Williams is really pretty amazing. So I recently joined Slack, and I've worked at many big companies, including Amazon, Intel, and Google. And for most of my career, I've worked on building products that make information accessible to everyone. And one of the things that I've found is that it's really hard to get people in an organization on the same page. So now I feel really lucky to be at Slack, where I can work on trying to solve that problem for everyone. I used to have a day filled with an overflowing inbox, buried emails, chasing down project status, using internal tools that I used not very frequently. So every time I had to relearn them. Have other people experienced this, anyone? I found I spent too much of my time trying to bring people together and keep our teams agile and productive. But unlike many of you, I didn't use Slack. So I'm really happy that I do now. Slack has transformed the way I work. I'm more focused and productive, and the team is more engaged, and I'm honored and humbled to be here today to talk about it with all of you. Ten million daily active users from all across the globe, 150 countries, 500,000 developers. It's the people using Slack that make it so special. Since joining, I've met with many of our customers and have been amazed by their passion, their stories, and the variety of the ways that they use Slack. I've really been pretty blown away by it. And our research shows that 97% of customers surveyed say that Slack improves their collaboration and communication within their organization. All of you have built an incredible community, and I thank you for welcoming me into it.

[00:03:10] Speaker 1: Thank you.

[00:03:16] Speaker 2: I have to say that it's been really fun to work on a product that you use every day, all day. And I see how it's changed how I process information and focus my work. When I joined, I started seeing Slack from a new perspective, how it's used to get people on the same page. So I'm going to give you a little peek into how we use Slack at Slack. So first, it's all about channels. At Slack, we use channels for everything, from HR processes to incident management to sales updates and to company culture, which for a new employee is one of the most fun channels to read. So we use a channel for really everything. So when I'm making an offer to a job candidate, we use a private channel where all of the salary information is, the feedback, the resume, and the approvals are done right there in the channel. Before I go to visit a customer, I look at the account channel for that customer, and I can get all the color and the context of what's going on with that customer without having to talk to a sales representative or somebody from customer support. And our Salesforce integration makes it easy to use a slash command for the account to get all the latest information that I need on that account. How many users they are, who their account rep is, when they started using the product. And of course, we love feedback from all of you on Twitter. Sometimes it's really positive, and we call these love tweets. But sometimes there's quite a bit of room for improvement, and we call these very affectionately beef tweets. So when the customer experience team sees one of these suggestions, they put it into the channel called beef tweets. And then the product team will triage them, and a sub team will take responsibility by using an emoji reaction. So for example, the lifecycle team's emoji is a sprout. So if there's a suggestion that the lifecycle team will take ownership, they'll put the sprout emoji there, and it's automatically routed to their channel where they'll work on the issue. But I think my favorite example is how we use channels for feature development. Every feature we develop has its own channel. This is where the engineers, product managers, designers, marketing come together to work on the feature. But it's also a public channel. So anybody in the company can take a look and see the latest mockups, the status, or engage in the discussion, which, believe me, they love to do. And so this is a way where we bring everyone together to work on the feature. And I've seen this have a really positive impact on how our teams are agile and productive and can bring the features to you faster. And icing on the cake, if there's a new teammate, all they have to do is read the channel. And they don't have to worry about forwarded emails or docs. Slack is where work happens. It's where teams discuss projects, share information, make decisions, and take action. So how do these things make Slack different? Will channels make this possible? Today, many ways that we communicate are fragmented, whether it be email, text messages. We all have an array of different places that we need to look. And emails are only visible to us if they're explicitly sent or received by us. But in a channel in Slack, information is accessible to anyone. The shift from inboxes to channels is profound. Slack connects individuals and teams in a new way. It gives people easy access to information, to past and current conversations. Email-based communication is all about passing data back and forth between individuals, whereas channels is all about teams, as you could see with my earlier example about product development. But communication at work doesn't just happen between people. We need access to data and other workflows. A typical enterprise uses more than 1,000 cloud applications. These software tools fragment attention and make it harder for information to flow across an organization. So whether you're doing... We want to do more and more to connect Slack to the critical tools behind every business, whether that's Microsoft, Google, Box, Dropbox, Zoom, or new products like Donut, Guru, and Troops. These applications are enhancing your businesses, and we want to make it much easier for you to get access to them. And we're seeing that over 90% of teams are using apps. At the same time, Slack also gives you access to information, messages, files, data that live in apps, and all that you need for teams to be aligned. And to navigate that information, search is really key. Search is a central place to discover all the information when you need it. It also makes it easier for a new employee to come up to speed. On my first day at Slack, I used search to find the answer to a benefits question that had been answered before in the Help Benefits channel. We know how important Slack is for our users, so this year, we launched a new search experience that's 70% faster, and our customers are putting more information than ever before into Slack, and with search, we're making sure that finding the right and most relevant information is as easy as possible. This centralized work environment is what allows us to achieve our mission, to make your work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. We like to think of Slack as the heart of your organization. It connects people and lets information flow freely. The Slack teams are more successful, organization is more efficient and productive, it inspires a sense of belonging and makes work more pleasant and fun. One thing I've noticed at Slack is that the employees really love emojis. As you can see by this post here, emoji reactions help us connect to one another in a fun way, and it's a really big part of our company culture. So imagine bringing this kind of profound change, the transformative effect of collaboration in channels, to bringing it to your work outside of your company's boundaries. Today, we're announcing that Shared Channels this summer will be coming to open beta for our largest enterprise customers.

[00:11:01] Speaker 1: Thank you.

[00:11:01] Speaker 2: Shared Channels bridge your Slack community with someone else's. This means you'll no longer have to email with contractors or communicate with vendors on the phone. Instead, you start a Shared Channel with anyone you're working with inside or outside of your organization. That means every single Slack customer will be able to sign up to start collaborating across organizational boundaries in Shared Channels. And we're already seeing over 13,000 paid customers using Shared Channels, even though it's only in a limited beta. And Shared Channels have proved invaluable at Slack. Our workplace team uses Shared Channels to communicate with service providers for things like food and beverage and to design a new office. Our engineering team uses Shared Channels to communicate with our accessibility testing vendors to make sure that Slack works for everyone. And our IT team is using Shared Channels with service providers for tasks like ticket management. With Shared Channels, Slack isn't only at the heart of your company, but it's at the heart of your relationships with other companies. I look forward to seeing how this will enable work done across companies to be more agile and efficient. With all of these features, our goal is the same. To help your organization reach its full potential by changing the way we communicate to make your work lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. We have a great afternoon in store for you. You'll be hearing from Bob Fratty, our Senior Vice President of Sales and Customer Success, who will be hosting our Customer Spotlight. But first, we're going to share with you some inspiring stories of how some of our early adopters are using Shared Channels, and then some exciting new developments in the product. So please help me welcome to the stage Brian Elliott, Slack's Platform General Manager. Thank you.

[00:13:19] Speaker 3: Thanks, Tamar. At Slack, we want to help you do your best work. The features I'll be sharing with you today are designed to break down barriers between your teams inside your company and across companies, to reduce friction between people, the information that they need, and the tools that they use, and to make us live through our entire mission statement, making your work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive in Slack. These new features are Shared Channels, making it possible for multiple companies to work together in Slack, Workflow Builder, enabling anyone to build custom apps that make it even easier to share information and automate routine tasks. And we're making it even easier for you to access and use all of the productivity tools that your team uses every day right from Slack. As Tamar noted, Shared Channels are incredibly powerful. Channels are where work gets done. It's where you have conversations with your team, it's where information is shared, and it's where decisions get made. But we know that your work doesn't exist only within the four walls of your own company. Everyone works with customers, vendors, and external partners. That's what makes Shared Channels so powerful. Today, in Slack, you can do that adding a guest. A guest is someone you add to your Slack workspace. But you have to add them one at a time. They have to log into your workspace and remember the login ID. And when you're done working together, you have to remember to remove them back out of your workspace. That's great for an individual user, but it doesn't really work for team-to-team collaboration or company-to-company work. That's what makes Shared Channels as powerful as it is. With Shared Channels, teams can work together seamlessly from inside of Slack. Each of them in their own respective Slack workspace, but working and collaborating together hand-in-hand with all the power that Slack brings to them seamlessly. Let me give you a simple example. We've used the same audit firm for a number of years. The audit firm can actually sit in their Slack workspace and share a channel with Slack. Audit slash Slack Corp. And what happens on an almost every-year basis is the new junior auditor gets added to the account, who isn't really up to speed. Historically, the way that you would deal with this is that you would actually forward them a set of email chains, some of which were readable, some of which were indented galore. You'd share a bunch of documents with them. But David, the new accountant, would still have a set of questions about how revenue recognition is actually done at Slack. The great thing about a Shared Channel is you're adding somebody into the archive of history. You're adding them to all the prior conversations, the past decisions, as well as the documents, making it really easy for him to come up to speed super quickly. Now, mind you, that same channel is actually shared in our Slack workspace, which means that our accounting team is plugged in as well. The benefit is they can actually watch David get up to speed, but they don't have to deal with the amount of questions and back and forth that they probably had to before, making both teams working together more powerful and more effective. This is only in beta. A product in beta that you have to opt in to use is now in use by over 13,000 paid customers at Slack, teams connecting with other teams, companies with other companies around the globe. Let me give you a customer example. Fastly is a Slack customer. They're an edge cloud platform that provides their customers with secure, high-bandwidth online experiences. Fastly prides itself on its customer support. In fact, they have over 95% customer satisfaction rating. Their team is always looking for innovative ways to improve their client experience. Shared channels is one of those improvements. Fastly's support team is global in nature, and they now use shared channels with some of their largest enterprise customers. In fact, shared channels are actually a premium feature in their premium product that they provide to some of those customers. Today, Fastly's enterprise customers depend on 100% uptime. A few examples. The news organization that's covering a major event, the retailer that's actually dealing with Cyber Monday, and the sports network that's dealing with the big game all need seconds of response time in order to stay up and to stay responsive to their customers. With shared channels, Fastly can provide real-time customer support. In a shared channel, the customer and Fastly can come together. If there's a breaking news event that actually is driving upload in Eastern Europe, Fastly can actually swarm the right engineers and operations people into the channel with the news organization to resolve the issue. Or something even more simple. The news organization has a question about their billing, and they can bring in a finance person in order to get the question resolved. Just like that, they've actually taken care of the problem, resolved the customer's issue. This boosts their customer satisfaction rating, and actually has driven up their net promoter score. When customers reach out to Fastly on Slack, they actually feel like they're reaching out to a member of their own team. With all that, you probably want to get started with shared channels. It's available today in our standard and plus teams, and great news, as Tamara said, it's coming to our enterprise grid customers this summer. To learn more, please join the Work Beyond Your Organization's Walls with Slack session right here in this room tomorrow. So channels are where work gets done, but channels go beyond communication. Slack also connects your information and the tools that you use. If you could automate a workflow, your life would be simpler, and you would be more productive. A workflow is a multi-step process. It's something repeatable, arduous, and manual. An example might be you're adding somebody new to your team. In Slack, you want them to be in the right channels, and you want to introduce them to the right people. You need the IT team to actually get them the right equipment. And you need the HR team to make sure that they provide them with the benefits documentation that they need to get started. You could build that today using our platform APIs. You could find a developer and build a custom app that builds that inside of Slack. But you need a developer. When I started at Slack, the top request I got from some of our largest customers was to make it easy for anyone to build basic workflows in Slack. So today, I am really excited to show you what we've been doing. Workflow Builder is a visual tool that allows anyone to make it easier to share information and automate routine tasks. Anyone can use the Workflow Builder. People in HR, marketing, sales, anybody. The Workflow Builder enables those who don't code to build simple but powerful apps inside of Slack. To show you a bit of what we've been up to, please join me in welcoming Dio and Karishma to the stage to show you how easily you could build a workflow app. Thanks.

[00:20:23] Speaker 4: Thanks, Brian. Hi, everyone. Pleasure to be here. My name is Karishma, and I head up Slack's New York-based solutions engineering group. Today, I'm so delighted to be able to show you how you can easily create repeatable workflows right in Slack and turn them into apps. Now, to best illustrate this point, what I'd actually like to do is go back to that example Brian mentioned, onboarding employees. It's a journey I'm sure many of you in the audience here have exposure to. And the funny thing about onboarding is a task as simple as getting your new hires access to their benefits booklets can actually require a ton of internal coordination and process. So let's go ahead and take a look at how we might be able to automate that using the workflow builder. So what I'm going to go ahead and start by doing is popping open the workflow interface. And here's where I can see a view of all of the workflows I've already created, as well as this get help benefits one. More on that later. But for now, let's go ahead and just create a new one. Now, in creating a new workflow, the first thing I need to think about is what do I want to have as my trigger or action that sets up the rest of my workflow? In this case, we actually have a welcome channel that we already bring new hires into. So I'm going to go ahead and have the active a new person joining that channel as my trigger. Now it's time to determine what are the steps or what's the process that I'm trying to automate? I have a couple of options here. But in this example, all I'm trying to do is take that manual process of giving each new hire their benefits booklet individually and turn that into an automatic solution. So I'm going to go ahead and choose and craft my message. And what you see here is some text. All I'm doing is providing them a link to the latest version of the benefits, as well as pointing them in the direction of a channel they can go to if they want to talk to our HR team for more help. Once this looks good, I can go ahead and preview it down at the bottom here and click to save. Pretty simple. We just created our first workflow together. Now once I'm happy with it, all that's left to do to put this out in the wild is rename it. So I'm going to call this the benefits distribution workflow. Click to save. And the last step I need to have is actually to publish this to the new hire guide app. There we go. My workflow has been published. Zero lines of code involved in doing that. And I think, you know, workflows can be as simple as the one as you just saw here or more complex with multiple steps and forms. I'm sure you must be wondering, what does this actually look like for a new hire who's joining the company and being brought into that welcome channel? To best illustrate this, what I'm actually going to do is bring my colleague, Dio, into that channel and on stage to show you the end user experience. Dio?

[00:23:37] Speaker 5: Thanks, Karishma. Hi. I'm Diogenes Brito, one of the two designers on the Workflow Builder team. And I'm going to walk you through the experience of a new hire using some of these freshly created workflows. So as Karishma mentioned, I've been brought into the welcome channel. And I can see that I have a message from an app called new hire guide. So let's check it out. Great. It looks like I have instant access to the benefits booklet. And there's an instruction there to join the help benefits channel if I have any more questions. I think I might need some more assistance. So I'll join that channel. When I join the channel, it looks like I triggered a new workflow, a different one asking me to fill out a form in order to get help here. So I'll click the button. As a new hire, I'm looking to set up time with a consultant to walk me through my benefits. So I'll select the new hire benefits overview. The default urgency looks good. And click submit. Easy. It looks like a person named Alexandra French from the benefits team is going to reach out in the next 72 hours. And there are some further instructions there for how to continue along my new employee journey. Brian, that was super simple.

[00:24:59] Speaker 3: That was. So think about this. Building the app that Karishma built up front classically would have taken getting a developer and carving out some of their time. They go through about a dozen steps or two. Maybe that happens in a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks. In less than two minutes, Karishma built a custom app. Saves her the repetitive stress of doing the same thing over and over again. And saves Dio hunting and searching for information and makes him more productive and gets him up to speed more quickly. Dio, if people wanted to get started, what should they do?

[00:25:27] Speaker 5: Well, they should come to the apps and Slack breakout session immediately following this keynote or they should visit the platform booth to meet members of the development team and see what else is possible. And we're taking names for customers who want to join the Workflow Builder pilot program. So please visit slack.com slash workflow automation or swing by the booth.

[00:25:48] Speaker 3: That's great. Thanks, Dio. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you. To make getting started even easier, we're actually going to be launching a set of templates alongside the Workflow Builder. Simple examples of small jobs that you might have inside your company that you might want to customize in order to get work done. This is a first step. We built this based on customer feedback. We'll continue to evolve it. One of the key things as we do that is also going to be opening up the Workflow Builder to our developer community, allowing them to allow customers to actually customize workflows coming from their apps. So if you think about a Workado, a Zapier, a Workday, a ServiceNow, the ability to take those tools and customize what happens inside of Slack is even more powerful. Now, speaking of apps and integrations, let's talk about how we actually integrate the apps that actually people use day in and day out. Slack has over 1,500 apps in our directory, from industry giants like Atlassian, Google, SAP, and Workday, to smaller tools from starting companies like Donut, Guru, Poly, and Troops. But all of these tools often sit in different siloed repositories. Your customer service team might be sitting inside of Zendesk, your sales team in Salesforce, and your engineering team inside of Jira. The power of Slack is that we bring all of those together, making it easier for people to share information across those siloed apps and take action on notifications. That's why 94% of paid Slack customers use apps and integrations every week. Today I'm going to share some of the dramatic improvements that we've been making in one particular class of apps, productivity tools. Productivity tools are the essential tools that your team uses every day. Email, calendar, calls, and files. Most companies use a set of tools from a variety of different vendors. You might be a Google Suite shop, but also using Dropbox and Zoom. Or maybe you're a Microsoft Outlook shop, but you also use Box and WebEx. The benefit of Slack is that we bring all of them together. We've had apps for many of these for a while, but we're super proud of the fact that just two weeks ago we launched an entire suite of apps for the Office 365 suite. So now I'm proud to say that whatever tool suite you're using, it will integrate with Slack. Each of these tools independently house important context and information, but hunting and picking across web browsers to find that email from a customer, or that file in Dropbox, or the calendar event, or the call-in ID is challenging. It's time-consuming and it's frustrating. Slack takes all this important information and brings it together in Slack channels, making it much easier to find, share, and discuss the information you need access to. But it's not just about bringing information into Slack. It's about the fact that the information flows both ways. Into Slack and back into the tools you use every day. No more cutting and pasting information across web browser tabs. We make it simple for you to receive the information that you need, share it with your team, and act on it no matter where you are. We've made a lot of great strides this year in the roadmap. We want to show you what we've been doing and give you a sneak peek at what's coming next. Let's start with email. We want Slack and email to work hand-in-hand. We always encourage companies to deploy Slack wall-to-wall across their organizations because that's when you get the transformative power of Slack. But we know this doesn't happen overnight. It can be really painful when part of your company is on Slack and part isn't, figuring out how to message somebody and where they are. That's why we're developing a bridge, a bridge that brings email and Slack together. We want to make it easier for you to bring emails into Slack that you need, a proposal from a vendor, a customer complaint, but we also want to reduce the stress of messaging people at your company who aren't in Slack yet by sharing messages from them right in their email inbox and a little bit more. Let's show you what we've been building. Please join me in welcoming Lydia Han, the product manager on the team, out to the stage to do a little demo.

[00:30:07] Speaker 6: Thanks, Brian. Hi, everyone. I'm Lydia Han, and I'm a product manager at Slack working on our platform team. Today, I'll be demoing some of our recent announcements as well as share some exciting new launches on how we can integrate email better with Slack. To do this, I'll be playing the role of a sales manager at a company called Acme Corp. So first, let's talk about our recently launched Gmail and Outlook add-ons. These email add-ons will allow you to bring important information from email into Slack. So let's switch over to my desktop and show you what that looks like. I have my Office 365 Outlook mail client open, and here I have a new email from Mark, a customer I've been chatting with. So Mark and I have been going back and forth a couple of times, and it's about time that I loop in my entire sales team to take this relationship to the next level. To do this, though, I would either have to forward this email along, start an unwieldy number of email threads, or I would have to take a screenshot and then share it into Slack, where my sales leads teams are sitting. We recognize this happens to our customers a lot. They have an external partner that they're having a conversation with in email, but their entire team is sitting in Slack. So let me show you how to bring this email into Slack in a simple way. Here in Outlook, I have the Slack for Outlook add-in already installed. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that Slack icon. All I have to do is select the channel that I want to send this information to, in this case the sales lead channel, add a note, who can pick this up, and yeah, I'm going to include all the attachments over. So just like that, I'm able to send this email directly into Slack. All right, so let's go ahead now and switch over to Slack, open up our sales lead channel, and see what this looks like. Here I'm in my sales leads channel, and look at that. The email has come through. What's so great, yeah, woo. What's so great about these email add-ons is that it preserves the entire context of the conversation. That means any one of my teammates can go ahead and click in here and see the back and forth conversation to read up on it. They can also open up any attachments that was attached to that email. And look at that. Already, my teammates are already responding, and David is going to be our hero today and take on the customer. All right, so that is all live today, and this is what's powerful about bringing information and working into Slack versus a siloed email inbox. The moment I sent this information into Slack, it became visible to my entire team, and so that everyone can have all the context that they need to be helpful or just follow along and see who took on the customer. This is all really great if your entire team is in Slack, but what if you're working with a colleague who's not in Slack yet? We recognize that for our customers, not everyone is set up with Slack and using it on day one. So Brian, let's pretend you're the director of finance at the company Acme Corp., and you haven't signed on to Slack yet.

[00:33:30] Speaker 3: Sounds good. For the sake of the demo, I'll do just about anything. I'm Brian, director of finance at Acme Corp., and I'm used to my email inbox. I've been there since 1999. It seems to work for me. I skipped the Slack training, and I skipped the second Slack training, but I know I've got an invite, and eventually, I'll probably get around to it.

[00:33:50] Speaker 6: All right, so my sales team has been working diligently to plan out our Q2 budget, and we're preparing for a big budget review meeting that's happening later today. We want to make one small change. It's so tiny, but as a sales manager, it's my job to make sure that I get Brian's eyes on it, since he is the director of finance. So because I can't find him in Slack, since he hasn't joined yet, I have to now open up my email, send him an email, or it's such a quick ask, maybe I should just find his phone number at my desk and just give him a quick call. Well, that's no longer going to be the case anymore. I'm really excited to share that we're starting to roll out a new capability that will create a bridge between email and Slack. What this means is the moment that an admin invites Brian to join Slack, I can now find him in Slack. I can message him, and I can mention him in conversations. So I want to show you what this looks like. Going back into our Slack here, I'm going to go and find Brian. Look at that. He's right here in Slack. That means that an Acme core admin has invited Brian, and now I can start having conversations with him. Here, you can see that he's an invited member, and he might be slow to respond because he hasn't signed up for Slack yet, and he's going to be receiving my messages via email. But that's okay. I'm going to ask him, hey, Brian, we're going to need an extra 20K for our budget. Can you let me know if this is okay? So Slack also reminds me here that it might take more time because he hasn't finished registering yet. All right. Let's switch on over to Brian's email and see what this looks like.

[00:35:40] Speaker 3: So look at that. There's a direct message that came in from Lydia. Hi, Brian. We're going to need an extra 20K for our budget. Can you let me know if this increase is okay? With a view in Slack button that I could see it right there. But what if I'm not really still ready to view it in Slack, Lydia? What else could we do with this? I'm really not there yet.

[00:35:59] Speaker 6: Well, Brian, we're working on the capability that will allow you to respond to these Slack messages from directly from your email inbox. This feature is going to roll out in the next coming months, but we're so excited that we want to show y'all a quick preview today. So Brian, why don't you go ahead and respond to that email?

[00:36:21] Speaker 3: Okay. I'll give it a shot. Sounded like a live demo. Approved. I almost typoed it.

[00:36:31] Speaker 6: Great. So Brian has just responded to that Slack message from his email. And look at that. In the direct message, Brian has had a conversation with me. Yeah. Awesome. Brian just approved my request. And now I can move on with my day in a matter of seconds. So let's go ahead and get started. All right.

[00:37:32] Speaker 3: Let's go ahead and get started. All right. Email is one of the core work tools. But the other ones that teams use everyday are calendars, calls, and files. If you think about files, almost every company that I actually talk with uses more than one somewhere in their organization. Your designers might be using Dropbox paper, while most of your organization is in Google Drive. Or you might be a Microsoft OneDrive shop that also has Box attached. Finding files across multiple repositories is really hard, and sharing them can also be a challenge. Slack makes it easy. We make it easy to share and discover files on Slack. It doesn't matter if you have one file provider or many. Slack flexes to meet your needs of how your company works, not the other way around. We're gonna take the same approach from a calendar and calls perspective. People use a variety of different options, and if you think about setting up a meeting, you might need to integrate a calendar reminder, the files that you need to use, and a separate video conferencing solution. Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco, BlueJeans, you name it, you get the idea. So, Lydia, why don't you show us what we can do with all of that today?

[00:39:59] Speaker 6: Sure, so in the previous demo, I told you that we were preparing for a big budget review meeting that was coming up later. Well, that meeting now is just a matter of minutes away. So let's hop on over back to the Q2 budget channel here in Slack. All right, so in Slack, it seems like Karen has already done her due diligence and updated the PowerPoint presentation. What I wanna do now is actually preview this document really quickly and make sure everything is good. See, in the past, I would've had to download this file locally on my desktop and then open it up just to look at it. Well, thanks to a few recent launches, now I can preview Microsoft Office files directly in Slack. This will work for Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel files. So let's take a look at what that looks like. Here, I'm gonna just simply click the file and look at that. All of a sudden, I'm able to see every single slide of this presentation, confirm that everything looks good, and give Karen a check mark. This looks great. Awesome. So, I just showed you how you can preview files to prepare for a meeting. Let's now talk about calls in Calendar. If you didn't notice yet, there's a little red light here on the sidebar. This is from our Outlook Calendar app that we launched recently. This is a new app for Slack, and it's been helping me get to my meetings on time. It was really easy to set up. All I had to do was connect my Outlook Calendar to Slack by going through a simple authentication flow. And all of a sudden, I was getting the most important event updates and reminders right in Slack. So, let's go ahead and click on it. Ah, it looks like that budget review meeting is happening in one minute, so I should probably get going soon. And where's the room? Ah, right here, Conference Room A. But what happens if I'm not in the office today? As a sales manager, I'm often traveling and meeting with customers, so today I'm offsite. Well, that's no problem. I can join remotely by clicking on the Join Zoom Meeting button right here. This little button is small but mighty. Think about all the times you were going through a calendar invitation and scrolling through that wall of text just to find that one URL or that one meeting ID to memorize and then punch in. Well, now you just need to click the button, and the great part is this works on both desktop and on mobile. So, as you're walking from meeting to meeting or as you're commuting into work, you can receive these event reminders directly on your phone, click on the button, and land straight into the calling provider of your choice, whether that be Zoom, Webex, Skype, and a growing list of others. And if that wasn't enough for you, now my Slack status will update to in a meeting so that my colleagues know I'm in a meeting and that I'll be slow to respond. This is all live today in the Outlook Calendar app and coming soon for the Google Calendar app. No more updating your status in multiple places. So, I... Whoo. I hear whoops, and I'm just gonna keep it going. All right, so I just showed you how we can bring together files, calls, and calendar to help you be prepared for your meetings. And that way, you and your teammates can always have the most important and up-to-date information right at your fingertips. Well, that's all for me today. I gotta head off to a meeting, so back to you, Brian.

[00:43:46] Speaker 3: Thanks, Lydia. That was really wonderful. Thank you.

[00:43:48] Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you.

[00:43:51] Speaker 3: You know, it's really a lot of those small touches. It's the calendar syncing. It's the fact that on mobile, you can preview a file. It's the fact that we give you a link to cut into your video conferencing app that makes your life simpler. If you wanna get started with all that today, you can. Slack.com slash apps. Our app directory actually has the email add-ins. It actually has the calendar, calls, and files apps as well that you can install directly. But that's not all, because that's never all. We continue to invest. We continue to actually push more new releases, more improvements to the functionality. Here's a first look at one thing. Sometimes, all you need to do is find time to chat. What if you could do that right from Slack? In the future, you'll be able to do just that with smart event creation. Here, we're in a direct message between Mara and Jessica. They're on the go, talking back and forth, and realize they need to meet later today to discuss things face-to-face. Using natural language processing, Slack actually figures this out. Let's see what happens when we push today. It actually looks at both of their calendars, Outlook or Google, and to see when they might both be available. Checks on that, picks a time, and makes a suggestion. Once you actually accept that suggestion and create it, it actually pushes that information back into the direct message they're in as well. So not only have you actually taken 15 steps out of that process, you made them both aware of the fact that it's there, and it's set up, and they're done, and can get back to more productive work. Beyond smart event creation, we're gonna continue to make it easier for you to find all the information you need. Sticking with the theme of meetings, think about the fact that you need the start time, and the location, the agenda, the presentation you're supposed to review, and the dial-in information, typically strung out in a bunch of different places, or maybe from a couple of different apps. We wanna make this all come together seamlessly in Slack to make it much richer and more available to you. A lot more to come. So at Slack, we're focused on enabling your teams to do their best work. Shared channels allow multiple companies to work together in Slack. The Workflow Builder will enable anyone to build custom apps in Slack, to enable sharing information, and automating routine tasks, and we continue to invest in the productivity tools you use every day, including an email bridge between Slack and email. This is literally the tip of the iceberg. This is what we're showing you today. Most of this is live or coming soon, but it's not nearly all the features that we're developing. Our team is super proud about the pace of innovation that we're bringing to you to help all of you be more productive and do your best work. Please join the team tomorrow morning in the product roadmap session to see even more of the features that are coming up across the range of services Slack provides. Now, to hear more about how our customers are using this range of features, please join me in welcoming Senior Vice President of Sales and Customer Success, Bob Frotty, to the stage.

[00:46:59] Speaker 7: Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Brian, and hello, everyone. I'm super excited to be with you here today in sunny springtime San Francisco, and thank you all so much for joining us. So, in our session today, we're gonna focus on two themes. First, some important trends that we're seeing in the market, and second, how our customers are utilizing Slack to navigate these trends. So, we're seeing a dramatic shift happen in the marketplace. The pace of change is faster than it ever has been before. Our customer expectations are very high, and decisions are more complex, involving more and more communication and collaboration across geographically distributed and cross-functional teams. We're also seeing significant new trends in technology. When you communicate with the, the very nature of communication is changing, and when you communicate with the younger generation, you're probably not sending them an email. I can only reach my daughter through Snapchat. So, and the research is backing this up. Individuals under 24 almost exclusively communicate through messaging, and this is the future. This is the workforce of tomorrow. We're also seeing a proliferation of business applications. You probably recognize a number of the logos here on the right. You probably use many of those applications each and every day. Independent research from Netscope highlights that most enterprises have over 1,000 different business applications in their companies. In this increasingly complex world, where what's important tomorrow is often very different from what's important today, we want to help you do your best work. The fast-paced global adoption of Slack is a strong proof point that that is happening. In a very short period of time, we've grown to over 10 million, 10 million daily active users on Slack in over 150 countries around the world. This includes over 600,000 different organizations and 65 of the Fortune 100. And within the last year, these Fortune 100 companies have added hundreds of thousands of new users. But it's not just about the numbers. What most people don't often realize is the breadth of our customers. We're seeing adoption across all industries, across all regions of the world, and across companies of all sizes. From TD Ameritrade and E-Trade and financial services, to major universities like MIT and Arizona State. And in government, the UK Ministry of Finance and NASA. As well as some of the largest and most strategic technology providers in the world, like IBM, Oracle, and SAP. Organizations around the world are adopting Slack. So one company that's definitely operating in a fast-paced environment is Electronic Arts. Are there any gamers here in the audience? Cal, put your hand up. Anyone that admits that they're a gamer? So even if you don't play video games, this is Commodore, if you skateboard the streets of New York City, you've probably heard of EA. Their industry has come an awful long way since the days of asteroids, Donkey Kong, and Pong. So let's take a quick look.

[00:50:36] Speaker 8: an You gotta face up, you gotta get yours, you never know the top till you get too low. Oh Son of a, Slim Smarter, Oh Son of a, I'm so sorry.

[00:51:29] Speaker 7: All right. That's definitely fast paced. So EA was founded in 1982, and they now have over 300 million registered players. They have over 10,000 employees and generate over five billion in annual revenue. With operations in 27 countries and locations ranging from Sydney to Shanghai and Seattle to Seoul, you can see how communication, collaboration, and alignment are critical. Let's take a quick look at Slack at EA. There are a number of things that really stand out. First is high adoption. They have over 10,000 employees and 13,000 daily active users. So all of their employees are on Slack, and they've extended their network to include important partners and contractors. And they're highly engaged. They're sharing almost 400,000 messages and over 9,000 files every day. Beyond that, the user sentiment is really positive. Check out this feedback. Slack is awesome. It enables company-wide communication and the ability to spin up open channels around focused topics. Far better than email. Or some more direct feedback. You're amazing dudes. Thank you, EA. All right. We're also seeing the platform use at Electronic Arts. They're using EA across the business, and we spoke earlier about the proliferation of business applications. You can see this here. EA has integrated over 550 different apps into their platform or into their workflow, and they're able to bring together all of their functions to seamlessly work together. The power of the platform enables EA to bring together all of their people, all of their information, and all of their apps to get work done. So the launch of FIFA 19 is a really powerful example of Slack in action at EA. So FIFA, if you're not familiar with it, is the soccer or football game, if you're here from the U.K., and it's the very definition of a blockbuster video game. They've sold over 260 million copies in franchise history, and that makes it the best-selling sports video game of all time. And it takes a village to bring this game to market. And Slack, as EA's collaboration hub, is that virtual village. Here's a visualization of how this looks in practice. So the graph here represents communication in Slack. Each dot represents a person, and the lines connecting them represent communication. The location of the dots show how closely groups of people work together. The yellow dots represent the FIFA studio team. They design the game. And the graph shows the actual communication required to get FIFA to launch. The FIFA studio team doesn't work alone. They work closely with 162 people in their game engine team, and these are the engineers that build the core game engine. As the game gets close to launching, the teams that help bring the game to market get looped in, like publishing, analytics, and player development. And after launch, the studio works with the tech ops team to bring the game forward, to scale it to millions of users, and to support their online services. Once the players are online, the player experience team provides 24-7 global support. This, in total, is the virtual village. And by the end, it includes over 600 people across 78 teams and 32 offices, sharing over 116,000 messages, and this is just in a 28-day period. So you can see, with everyone working together and moving in the same direction to build, ship, and support a blockbuster game. So to hear more about this amazing story, I'm delighted to welcome Gopi Parampalli, who is the VP of IT at Electronic Arts. Hey, Gopi. Good to see you again. All right. Thank you for being with us here today.

[00:55:44] Speaker 9: Thank you for having me here.

[00:55:46] Speaker 7: So, exciting video. We've spoken a lot here at Frontiers about kind of the pace of change and enabling everyone to do the best work. I know that you've gone through a lot of change recently. Talk to us a little bit about some of the change and how EA is navigating that change.

[00:56:01] Speaker 9: So there is a lot changing in terms of technology, games, the devices, and the players. But for today's discussion, I want to focus and anchor on talent. So if you take a step back and walk into any of our studios, what you will see is a craftsmanship from different kinds of, I call them electronic artists. There could be artists, engineers, people who support operations, publishing, digital platform, all of these guys. So what they're passionate about is just creating those expansive worlds and creating those immersive experiences. Now, the mix of that talent is changing. As you pointed out earlier, there are a lot more 24-year-olds now in the workforce than before. Their expectation is not just around messaging, but just in general, everything around technology has to offer has to be simple, easy to use. So that's one thing that's a big change that we're seeing. The second thing that we're seeing is collaboration is not one of those, hey, it's nice to have anymore, right? So if you take a step back and look at 27 countries and 55 sites where we operate and how it takes all these people to come together just for one game. I mean, repeat this game after game, title after title. So you are talking about really distributed operating model. So for that to happen, you got to have easy to use tools and you got to make sure that you can attract talent. It's basically employee experience for us and collaboration for us is a brand defining asset for us. So that's a big change that I see in the talent space.

[00:57:42] Speaker 7: So maybe let's go a little bit further on that one because EA has been around since 1982, I imagine, and there's messaging services in a lot of the games you build and a lot of different tools you've probably used across the course of time. How did you land on why collaboration tool, which I think you answered, but why Slack?

[00:58:00] Speaker 9: Yeah, so a couple of things that have changed. So if you go back a couple of years back, just go in time traveling machine and just go back a few years, most of this development was happening in a simple location, single location. So it was not as distributed as it is today. That's number one. What distribution allows us to do is, for example, create the hubs of excellence in different locations. For example, for artwork, we have created some hubs of excellence. For localization, we have created other hubs of excellence. For engineering work, we have created other hubs of excellence. So you can't do that. Basically, if you are trying to hire everybody in a single location, that's the reason why we had to move to this. And that's also easy to scale. But the scale and distribution also brings you a bunch of challenges. So that's one part of this, why it's important for us. The other part of this is how Slack came into the picture and how that became our collaboration hub. It's a very interesting story. If you go back to 2014 and before that, we used to have one of those big platform vendors packaged up everything, including messaging, as part of the platform play. And then what ended up happening was it was not being used because not all the teams basically found it fit for their purpose. So we started looking at, okay, if our users are not adopting it, then what could be the reason and what are the other alternatives? But by 2014, what we started finding out is a lot of teams have already started using Slack. And we didn't have to do a sales job to kind of go and say, okay, let's basically bring Slack in.

[00:59:38] Speaker 7: So adoption matters.

[00:59:39] Speaker 9: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, adoption is the only thing that matters because whether for a product company to make products, it's an RIT or a technology team, so a lot of technology, it really no longer matters whether you delivered it on time, on budget. What matters is adoption more than it is.

[00:59:57] Speaker 7: Great points. So as you've gone through your journey and you've been using Slack for a little bit of time now, what were some of the bigger surprises that you encountered along the path?

[01:00:06] Speaker 9: So we were talking about this this morning. So the first one is how easy it is to use. Just in general, if you really look at the revolution that started a couple of years ago with bring your own devices and bring your own technology and bring your own apps, if you were to go back to that, which started in more of a consumer space, right? Then over a period of time, the company started bringing this into enterprise. And the best elements of the consumer world, the ease of use specifically, and bringing it to the enterprise with all the things that an enterprise needs around security and administration and all of those things. I think I was super surprised to find that in Slack because initially I walked into this thinking, hey, it's a great persistent chat solution. Let's basically use it. But that's number one. The number two is more of a platform aspects of this because as you called out, as you see in the deck, there are a whole bunch of apps that we use, that we integrate to. If you take a step back and look at Slack as where work happens, you need to be able to integrate into these apps much more easily. And I think that's basically what I was super surprised in the beginning. But now we fully leverage it actually.

[01:01:28] Speaker 7: That's great. So now as you start to look forward, you've done a lot of amazing things. And as you start to kind of think about how this evolves and grows over time, what are some of the things that are on the horizon for both EA's evolution but also how you're driving employee experience in Slack at EA?

[01:01:44] Speaker 9: So at EA, I think let me reflect on just where we've been and where we started for a second, and then I'll answer that question. So when we started the whole employee experience and specifically the Slack adoption part of it, we started off with bringing everybody into a single place because as an organization, if you're not in a single place, you create a lot of silos. People won't be able to talk to each other. And then once that happens, the bigger things, the cultural elements like getting aligned and understanding the big picture in the same way that everybody else does, all the way to a very tactical thing of, hey, I want to solve this problem, but I can't talk to the other person because they're not in the same place. So that whole range, I think we were able to solve it pretty fast, and when I talked to my peers in the industry, not everybody's in the same place. So once we got there, then the next step is about, okay, how do you make sure that this becomes the hub where the work happens? Then we started exploring this idea of, let's take a step back and look at what are some of the quick wins that are out there. Like, for example, if I want to log IT, if I need to ask for IT help, then why do I need to basically go out into a separate app and then basically be able to do it? Why can't I do that in Slack itself? Or moving on to a bunch of other use cases like, okay, can you not create the notifications on all the outages and the service incidents, things like that in the Slack? Or even moving on to if a player wants some support and some consultation from the player experience team, then why can't you do that using Slack basically to give you that platform? So we started looking at this low-hanging fruit. We are in the middle of kind of developing out those integrations. Now the next step for us is take a step back and look at the day in the life of a programmer, day in the life of a developer, day in the life of a player experience advisor, day in the life of artists. So basically that's where we want to go because to us, employee experience is all about creating the friction-free experience and offer a signature experience for people to work together and do best work of their lives.

[01:04:03] Speaker 7: Great, super aligned with the keynote this morning. So I know there's a lot of folks here that are different parts of their journey with Slack. You mentioned that you were able to drive it out and get adoption on a common platform pretty quickly. What words of wisdom might you have for the audience as they kind of embark on their journey with Slack?

[01:04:19] Speaker 9: Words of wisdom is probably too strong. I'll tell you what my pains were and how with the help of Slack and other peers, we were able to overcome them. So if you don't have people on a single platform, I would say start your journey there. Identify some of the use cases and basically start there. And don't think of this as if you're a technologist, my advice is don't think of this as a technology. Think of this as a capability that's going to be very powerful in the hands of your end users and your workforce and your partners. And then think of this as a marketing campaign. Think of this as an adoption drive. So don't look at this as a technology play. So that's where I would start. And then follow your customers, follow your employees, follow your partners, follow your users in their daily life. Understand what are some of the pain points that they have. What are some of the frictions that they have in getting their work done. And then it becomes very evident how to basically solve those problems.

[01:05:23] Speaker 7: Good words of advice. Now I could ask you, we could go on for a really long time, but I want to maybe wrap it there unless there's any other closing comments you'd like to share.

[01:05:33] Speaker 9: No, I think, you know, look, this has been an incredible journey for us, partnership with Slack. My execs and I and my team members, there are quite a number of them from Electronic Arts who are very excited to be part of this event and this continued partnership. We love our partnership with Slack and the kind of ease of use that this puts into our workers.

[01:05:56] Speaker 7: Well, that's fantastic. Well, Gopi, on behalf of the extended team, we're super grateful for the partnership as well. I want to congratulate you on all your success and thanks so much for being a part of Frontiers. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Yeah, thanks. All right, that's just about a wrap on our afternoon keynote. I'll do a brief summary and then I'll give you a little look at what's ahead. We heard from Tamar, Brian, and team on some incredible product innovation, enterprise shared channels, our workflow builder, and powerful interoperability capabilities. We got a glimpse into some important trends in the market and were able to take a closer look at how some of our customers are utilizing Slack to navigate those trends. So up next, you have the opportunity to take a deeper dive and learn more about these products. So the product announcements and customer stories will all be on display throughout the conference. Our afternoon keynote's at 4.20 followed by a sponsor happy hour at 5.20 and then our Frontiers celebration, appropriately located in new Frontiers of the Exploratorium, at 6.30. So I hope to see you all there. Thank you all so much for your participation, have a fantastic day. Thank you.