Slack turns conversations into interactive reports and dashboards

Slack has added Surfaces, a Slackbot capability for building interactive reports and dashboards directly in conversations. Teams can turn a chat request into a structured, shareable work product without moving to a separate reporting app. The feature builds on Slack’s push to keep collaborative work on its platform, following the introduction of code channels where teams and AI coding agents build together.

According to Salesforce, Slackbot can answer a request for a report or dashboard with charts, KPI cards and tables in the conversation. Slack’s current help documentation says users describe what they want and specify the relevant data sources. Slackbot can draw on information they are allowed to access in Slack, along with connected MCP servers or enterprise search sources.

Users can share Surfaces in channels or direct messages, add them as a conversation tab and comment on them if they have viewing access. Slack also gives a sales example: a Surface can visualize pipeline by deal stage and provide a sortable list of opportunities.

In its July 29 product announcement, Slack said Surfaces had shipped with reports, dashboards, polls and calculators, as well as commenting, sorting and drill-down interactions. The post described Surfaces as live objects whose data could be updated by pairing them with a skill.

Slack’s current help page gives a narrower account of refresh behavior. It describes Surfaces as static files that do not pull in new data or reflect changes, and says users must create a new Surface with the same prompt to retrieve current data. Slack says the files are governed by workspace or Enterprise file-retention settings. Surfaces are available on all plans to members with Slackbot access, although access and usage limits vary by plan.