san francisco stewart butterfield ceo of slack the instant messaging platform launched in 2013 believes the pandemic was time for a great workforce reset to create a future of work rooted in flexibility and better engagement slack has over the past few years morphed into the digital headquarters for employee conversations with returntooffice rates still hovering at low levels and businesses increasingly born and thriving in the cloudits very compelling to say that in our universe we didnt get to use the office but we got to use software and they all worked he said realisation is slowly spreading he said about the importance of flexibility but there is a big disconnect in the tech spending around transformation i think we still underinvest across the board in technologies and in the kinds of transformations that are possible across all different functional areas he said on the sidelines of salesforces flagship event dreamforce 2022 held in san francisco in septembersalesforce acquired slack for 277 billion last year and its expected to contribute 15 billion to its revenue in the 2023 financial year for a fifth consecutive quarter the number of customers spending over 100000 with slack grew by more than 40 yearoveryear recently the us national weather service roped in slack as its platform to connect over 4300 employees with emergency managers public safety decisionmakers and local media partners nationwide slack has introduced huddles that allows teams to chat over audio providing an option for video and screen sharing with the tap of a button some 12 slack product integrations with salesforces crm platform customer 360 went live at dreamforce slack has over 200000 paid customers and 77 of the fortune 100 use the product in india slack has over 120 employees most of who came through its acquisition of punebased technology company astroasked about competitors like microsoft giving teams for free in most office 365 and microsoft 365 plans with aggressive marketing spends butterfield said there is no real competition to slack and noted that most of his customers were also microsoft customers 100 of our enterprise customers are microsoft customers of those the overwhelming majority are office 365 customers he said butterfield acknowledged its a challenge with some new customers because microsoft is offering free plans and companies dont want to spend money on buying licences but once people have some education and some experience in the area its very easy for us to go in and win and coexist happily he said slack has a free plan with limitations of 90 days of message history 10 integrations with other apps like google drive and office 365 and offers oneonone audio and video conversations with screen sharingslack organises conversations into dedicated spaces called channels channels bring clarity to work one can create them for any project topic or teamasked how employees can have a richer communication experience without having to react to every channel message butterfield said slack provides the ability to send messages to its users later the