Salesforce has blocked third-party apps from indexing or storing Slack messages long term, even if their customers permit them to do so, according to a public disclosure from the company. Salesforce acquired Slack in July 2021 for $27.7B.
The move is a hindrance to AI startups that have used access to this data to power their services. Glean, for example, which describes itself as “Work AI,” helps organizations unify, search, analyze, and automate operations using their internal data from 100+ systems. The platform indexes your internal content, builds a knowledge graph of employees, documents, and workflows, and then offers personalized search and content generation.
Slack data, as any company that uses the service can testify, is a very crucial part of that knowledge graph, and up until recently, Glean was able to use it. However now, since the changes, Glean and other apps can no longer index, copy, or store the data they access via the Slack API on a long-term basis, according to the disclosure. Salesforce will continue allowing firms to temporarily use and store their customers’ Slack data, but is now requiring that they subsequently delete it after a certain period of time.
Salesforce says the change improves data security, but it's obvious that the move is designed to silo off Slack data for Salesforce's own AI ambitions and put competitors at a disadvantage.
Glean wrote an e-mail to customers informing them that the changes will prevent them from adding Slack data to their Glean search index, thereby “hampering your ability to use your data with your chosen enterprise AI platform.”
Class Big Tech Move: Build your market share with the support of partners through open protocols, and then later abuse your dominant position by shutting off or charging for access.
It raises the question for Slack users: Is that your data (Salesforce) or my data? And if it's mine, how is it that you can restrict access to it for the tools that I choose to employ?