What Your Slack Agent Should Be Doing (But Isn't)
Most Slack bots answer questions when you ping them. That's it. They're glorified FAQ widgets living in a corner of your workspace.
Your Chat Thing agent doesn't have to be one of them.
With the Slack power-ups, your agent can post into channels, read conversation history, and actively participate in the work your team is already doing. It stops being a bot. It starts being a Slack teammate.
ā Available on the Standard plan and above. Slack power-ups are part of our Standard tier, so if you're on Free or Starter, you'll need to upgrade to unlock them.
Two Power-ups, One Big Upgrade
1. Send Message
Your agent can post messages to any Slack channel where it's been added. Use it for:
- Automated updates: "Post the daily standup summary to #team"
- Cross-channel alerts: "Let #support know about this issue"
- Research sharing: Search for something, then post findings to a channel
2. Get History
Your agent can read the conversation history of any channel it belongs to. Ask questions like:
- "What happened in #general last week?"
- "Summarise the conversation in #product yesterday"
- "Did anyone mention the API outage in #engineering?"
Who This Is For
Slack power-ups pay back fastest for teams that live in Slack all day. A few scenarios we see working well:
- Support teams: an agent monitors #support, answers common questions itself, and escalates the rest by posting to #support-escalation with full context.
- Ops and people teams: the agent posts a daily standup summary to #team at 9am, pulled from overnight conversations or your Notion standups.
- Marketing teams: when a new blog goes live, the agent posts a summary and a shareable link to #content.
- Engineering teams: ask the agent to summarise the last 24 hours of #incidents so your morning standup doesn't start with a scroll.
If your team already uses Slack as its nerve centre, these power-ups move your agent from "useful when pinged" to "part of the workflow."
Setup in 4 Steps
- Enable the Slack channel for your agent from the Channels tab.
- From the Power-ups tab, add Send Message, Get History, or both.
- (Optional) Lock each power-up to a specific channel, or leave it open so your agent can use any channel it's been added to.
- Add your agent to each channel you want it to access. Just @mention it in the channel to invite it in.
That's it. Your agent is now a channel-aware Slack teammate.
Example Workflow
In #general, a teammate asks: "@agent search for the latest AI news and post a summary to #research"
Under the hood, your agent:
- Uses the Google Search power-up to find relevant news
- Summarises the results
- Uses Send Message to post into #research
Three power-ups working together from one natural request. That's the shape of what Slack power-ups unlock when you chain them with the rest of your agent's toolkit.
FAQ
Does my agent need to be in a channel to post there? Yes. Slack requires bots to be members of a channel before they can read from or post to it. Just @mention your agent in any channel to invite it in.
Can I restrict which channels the agent can post to? Yes. Each power-up can be locked to a specific channel from its settings, so you can give your agent workspace-wide access or scope it to exactly one channel.
Does Get History include DMs? Get History works on channels where your agent has been added. Direct messages and private channels follow Slack's usual permission rules.
How is this different from just adding Chat Thing to Slack? Adding Chat Thing to Slack gives you a bot you can talk to. The power-ups give that bot the ability to act: post on its own, pull context from history, and chain tools together. It's the difference between a chatbot and a teammate.
Ready to upgrade your Slack agent?
Slack power-ups are available on Standard plans and above. If you're already on Standard, Pro, or Enterprise, they're waiting for you in the Power-ups tab.
