Slackbot, Say “Hello” to Watson

IBM’s marketing, design and engineering teams are using Slack to collaborate and create new cognitive solutions, benefiting all users of the platform, as learnings will be passed on to developers.

This is just one part of IBM’s partnership with Slack, announced at October’s World of Watson in Las Vegas.

.@stewart of @SlackHQ in photos at #ibmwow: In 5 years, message bots will "make sense of chaos" at work ► https://t.co/rI1C8m4QR4 pic.twitter.com/LG0ADfoKZR

— Tech Ed Canada (@TechEdCA) November 1, 2016

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Why IBM and Slack Teamed Up

In 2016, chatbots were one of the most talked-about ideas in workplace software. Slack was a fast-growing workplace messaging app, and its open platform let outside developers plug bots and apps straight into the channels where people already worked. IBM, meanwhile, was betting heavily on Watson, the question-answering system that had won Jeopardy! in 2011, and was turning it into a set of cloud services developers could build on.

Putting the two together made sense on paper. Slack had the users and the conversations. IBM had the natural language tools that were supposed to make bots understand what those users actually meant.

“Slack and IBM share the same vision for how AI can transform workplace efficiency,” said David Kenny, IBM Watson’s general manager in a press release. “The degree of leverage we can gain from enhanced cognitive capabilities becomes massive.”

According to Kenny, combining Slack and Watson will make it easier for developers to build cognitive-enabled bots for Slack, propelling productivity.

This guy has a point. https://t.co/sZ2dR4Wiv2

— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) October 26, 2016

#AI isn't in #Slack to eliminate human interaction—it's to "get rid of the stupid questions" we always have to answer – @stewart #ibmwow pic.twitter.com/tLLmUUgfjF

— TechPORTFOLIO (@TechPORTFOLIO) October 26, 2016

In the same press release, Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack, said: “This partnership with IBM and the work we are doing with Watson will accelerate our customers’ organizational intelligence and propel workplace productivity in dramatic new ways.”

Butterfield added that he wanted Slack to become better and smarter the more it was used, and “supercharge” people’s ability to find answers.

In pursuit of this goal, Slack will adopt Watson Conversation to improve the accuracy and efficiency of Slackbot, the customer service bot. Watson machine learning will also enable Slackbot to continuously improve its accuracy.

What the Partnership Included

Upgrading Slackbot was only one piece of the deal. Watson Conversation itself was brand new: it launched at the World of Watson event the day before the partnership was announced, as a service for building bots that respond in natural language.

According to SiliconANGLE’s report, the companies listed three main goals. The first was bringing Watson Conversation into Slackbot, the assistant built into every Slack workspace, which explains Slack’s features and can be set up to answer common questions. The second was a help desk bot that would let employees report IT problems in a dedicated Slack channel instead of going through a separate ticketing system. The third was a middleware plug-in that would let outside developers build their own Watson-powered agents for Slack, backed by a starter kit with template code and tutorials.

Fortune also reported that developers building on Slack would be able to tap other Watson tools, including sentiment analysis, which tries to read the emotion in text, and speech plug-ins that turn text into spoken words.

A Crowded Field for Bot Builders

IBM wasn’t the only big company chasing Slack’s developers. SiliconANGLE pointed out that Google had acquired Api.ai, a startup with a cloud toolkit for building virtual agents, the month before, and that Microsoft had introduced its own bot development framework that May.

That competition is worth remembering when reading the 2016 announcement. Each of the big tech companies wanted to be the brain behind workplace bots, and partnerships like this one were as much about winning developers’ attention as about any single feature. For developers, it meant plenty of free tools and starter kits to experiment with, and the freedom to pick whichever AI service worked best for them.

What Happened Next

Both companies look very different today. Salesforce completed its acquisition of Slack Technologies in July 2021, with Slack continuing to operate under its own brand.

IBM, for its part, moved on from the Watson brand of 2016. In May 2023 it announced watsonx, a platform built around foundation models and generative AI, at its annual Think conference.

Slackbot also got the overhaul Butterfield was hinting at, just not in the form anyone expected in 2016. In October 2025, Engadget reported that Slack was testing a redesigned, AI-powered Slackbot that people can talk to in everyday language to draft project plans, flag daily priorities and find information, with a beta open to 70,000 users at the time. The goal of a Slackbot that gets “better and smarter the more you use it” finally arrived, driven by the generative AI wave rather than the Watson services of 2016.

What It Means for Developers

The lesson from this partnership is that the platform you build on can change hands, and the AI services behind your bot can be renamed, replaced or retired. Developers who built tightly around one vendor’s tools in 2016 had to adapt more than once since.

It’s worth keeping your bot’s core logic separate from whichever language service you’re using today. That way, when a better model or a new platform owner comes along, you can switch the engine without rebuilding the whole product.