Slack getting smarter could mean the end of email

Ever since Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021, the platform has grown exponentially, with new features and AI integration, making it a big player at every Dreamforce event since then. We’re currently at Dreamforce 2026, and Slack is again the talk of the town, so much so that it has us asking a big question: Do we even need email anymore?

We posed our question to a group of experts at a special panel at Dreamforce. Entitled “How Slack Is Making AI A Team Sport”, the panel focused on the fact that AI use isn’t something that many people are doing on their own, but instead using an AI agent and collaboration to get work done.

Our expects were Sajjaad Khader (creator and executive, Slack, as well as panel host), Ryan Gavin (EVP and CMO, Slack), Amy Bauer (senior director, Slack Product) and Lindsy Simon (VP of engineering, Vercel).

Simon and Gavin were the two panellists who gave us their answers. Simon told us that this change has already happened and, at Vercel, email is almost never used. Gavin, however, still thinks email will have a place, albeit an indefinite one.

“The transition is real. You can look at the leading AI companies for for patterns and practices of how they work and the rest of enterprise will follow. Email is going to have its own place and its own identity and I don’t think it’s going away per se. But, I do so a lot of companies that simply don’t operate out of their email inbox like in the past. We certainly don’t. While I do have my email and its inbox, that’s for external customers who still like to do business that way, but again I’m not in there, Slackbot is. Slackbot goes through my inbox, reads it, triages it for me, writes responses for me, and it all happens inside of Slack,” Gavin said.

“On the other side of the fence you still have many companies and traditional industries living inside their email inbox, but I always tell them that it’s time to start moving away from that and doing things better and removing the limiters from your company.”

When Slack was originally gaining popularity, and before being acquired by Salesforce, it was already touted as a replacement for email, albeit for internal use inside of companies. The rise of AI may see that come to fruition, even for external use, but for now don’t delete your email account just yet.

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