Salesforce Q1 2027 Earnings: Slack Adoption and Usage Growth Insights

What management said about Slack Adoption Rate and Usage Growth

1) Adoption and “usage” signs: expanding app ecosystem on Slack

Management highlighted very rapid growth in Slack’s custom-app ecosystem—framed as “built” usage by customers/partners on Slack:

• Slack customers reportedly built 3 million custom apps on Slack in Q1, described as “8x quarter on quarter”. ¹
• Within those, management pointed to 250 thousand AI agents built as part of that ecosystem, saying they grew more than double quarter on quarter and “grew eightfold year-on-year.” ¹

Interpretation (from management’s framing): the adoption rate appears to be measured less by simple user seat counts and more by active developer/build activity (custom app creation and AI agent creation) occurring inside Slack at accelerating rates. ¹

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2) “Usage growth” measured via Slack AWUs and tool calls

Management also gave specific growth metrics tied to usage:

• Slack AWUs (agent work units) were said to have grown 350% quarter over quarter. ²
• Management further stated Slackbot is a daily driver and emphasized that Slack-related usage is tied to agents working alongside humans inside channels (e.g., agents answering questions and performing developer PR requests/status updates in Slack). ³
• Management reported “We have seen 1 million users of Slack MCP in the first 6 weeks,” and stated Slack AWUs grew nearly 350% quarter over quarter. ⁴
• On usage of headless tool calling, management said “Slack has done 30.1 thousand tool calls” in the context of “headless MCP server for Slack.” ⁵

Interpretation (from management’s framing): usage growth is presented through multiple complementary metrics—AWUs growth, MCP user adoption, and tool-call activity—supporting the view that Slack is becoming an increasingly active runtime for agents and workflows. ²⁴⁵

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3) Management’s qualitative explanation: Slack as the “operating system of work” for agents

Management attributed usage growth to product experience and agent integration inside Slack:

• They described Slack as a “multiplayer collaborative platform” and an “operating system” that integrates applications and enables agents/Slackbot to access systems and approvals, with productivity impact mentioned as around 3% more or less. ⁶
• They emphasized that Slack is where agents and humans “work together,” describing real channel behavior such as agents listening/responding when requests appear and developers interacting with agents for tasks (e.g., PR requests). ³
• In discussing the “advanced use cases,” management pointed to developer community embedding and how it helps drive broader knowledge-worker adoption over time. ³
• Management said they expect this dynamic to expand such that “in 2 years, there will be more agents using Slack than people.” ²

Interpretation (from management’s framing): adoption/usage growth is not just “more users,” but deeper workflow adoption where agents can operate directly inside Slack contexts, pulling in enterprise data and performing actions without switching tools. ³²

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4) How management connected Slack usage/adoption to business impact (revenue linkage framing)

While the question focuses on adoption and usage growth, management also linked it to commercial momentum:

• Management said Slack bookings and related commercial metrics were “booming,” and described the broader business impact while discussing strong Slack-related growth characteristics. ⁶
• They stated “Slack was nearly half of our million-plus wins this quarter” and characterized it as a “rocket ship.” ⁷
• They also said the usage/innovation signals were happening “with the AI companies” and that “All of the AI companies run on Slack.” ⁴

Interpretation (from management’s framing): Slack adoption/usage growth is portrayed as translating into higher enterprise value (e.g., via more wins and increased adoption of AI-enabled workflows), though the excerpts don’t provide a precise numeric conversion rate from AWUs/tool calls to revenue. ⁶⁷⁴

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Bottom line

From management’s comments, Slack adoption rate and usage growth are evidenced by:

• Explosive builder activity: 3M custom apps in Q1 (8x QoQ) and 250k AI agents ( >2x QoQ; 8x YoY). ¹
• Rapid agent-related usage growth: Slack AWUs +350% QoQ, plus ~1M users of Slack MCP in the first 6 weeks. ²⁴
• In-product agent workflow penetration: management described agents working alongside humans directly in Slack channels (and characterized Slack as the “operating system of work”). ³⁶
• Tool-call activity: examples include 30.1k Slack tool calls for headless MCP server usage. ⁵

All of the above were presented by management as signs that Slack is accelerating adoption as an agentic platform where enterprises both build and execute workflows. ¹²³⁵