Slack's New 'Surfaces' Feature Builds Dashboards and Reports Inside Your Chat

Key points

• Slack is launching a feature called Slackforce Surfaces that lets users build interactive dashboards, polls, and reports inside Slack using an AI chatbot.
• Users describe what they want in plain language, and Slackbot pulls data from connected apps like Google Drive and Salesforce to build it.
• Slackforce Surfaces is available to all customers with Slackbot enabled, including free-tier users, with live data support arriving in October 2025.
• Slack says the tool only accesses data users have already given its AI permission to use.

Slack is adding a feature that turns its built-in chatbot into a one-stop tool for building live, interactive reports, without ever opening a separate app.

The feature is called Slackforce Surfaces. The idea is simple: you type a request to Slackbot, the chat assistant built into Slack, and it pulls together information from your conversations and from connected apps like Google Drive or Salesforce, a popular business software platform, to build whatever you asked for. That could be a poll, a dashboard showing sales figures, a presentation, or a customer support queue tracker.

What does this look like in practice?

Slack describes one example where a user asks Slackbot to create an arcade-themed dashboard showing how much AI processing capacity different company teams are using. The bot generates an interactive, colourful display breaking down usage across sales, design, and engineering teams. No spreadsheet, no export, no separate tool required.

Once the Surface is built, you can pin it to a Slack channel so colleagues can view it, interact with it, and leave comments directly inside the chat.

"You're not exporting your data to some other tool to make sense of it, you're asking Slackbot to build the dashboard, the deck, the report right where the conversation already is, and your whole team can act on it together," Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, told The Verge AI in a written statement.

Other practical uses Slack has described include a live feed of incoming customer support requests that a whole team can monitor, and a financial forecast that automatically refreshes when new data comes in from connected services.

Should users worry about their data?

Slack says no data is fair game by default. The feature only pulls from sources you have already granted Slack's AI tools permission to access. If a file or conversation is outside those permissions, Slackbot cannot touch it.

This matters because Slack sits at the centre of a lot of sensitive workplace information, from project plans to financial figures. The permission boundary is the main safety rail here, and it is worth confirming your workspace settings reflect what you are comfortable sharing before you start building dashboards.

This launch follows a broader push by Slack's parent company Salesforce to make Slackbot behave more like a capable AI assistant. In recent months Slackbot gained the ability to summarise conversations across channels, find meeting times, and sort through message history. Slack also added collaborative coding channels last month.

Slackforce Surfaces is available now to all Slack users, including those on the free plan, as long as Slackbot is enabled in their workspace. Live data connections, meaning dashboards that update automatically as new information comes in, arrive in October 2025.

What to watch for: Before your team starts building shared dashboards, check which apps are connected to your Slack workspace and what data permissions each one carries. A dashboard is only as private as the data feeding it.