What is Slack?

Slack is a business communication and collaboration platform that combines team chat, channels, searchable message history, audio and video huddles, file sharing, app integrations, canvases, lists, and automation in one workspace. It sits in the business-instant-messaging and unified-workspaces categories, but it is also used as a collaboration hub for project teams, operations, support, engineering, and sales. The core problem it collapses is fragmentation - instead of hopping between email threads, ticketing tools, docs, and meeting links, teams can coordinate in a single place. Slack is widely used by organizations of all sizes, and its public materials highlight customers such as Airbnb, Canva, and Lyft.

Slack began as a workplace messaging product and grew into a broader operating layer for work. Over time, it added threaded collaboration, richer admin and security controls, third-party app integrations, automation, and more recently AI-assisted features and Salesforce-connected workflows. The product now positions itself less as a simple chat app and more as a work OS where conversations, context, tasks, and external tools can live together.