What the Bot: Salesforce has decided to increase prices for certain paid Slack plans. The company is attempting to justify the change by stating that all customers will now have access to more AI features. And if you don’t want or need AI, well, you’ll likely end up paying more anyway.

According to a recent announcement from Salesforce, Slack customers will now have to pay more but will receive new AI-based features in return. Paid plans for the service will cost a few dollars more per user, meaning larger organizations could face significantly higher costs if they want to continue using the cloud-based collaboration platform for the foreseeable future.

The Slack Business+ plan will increase from $12.50 to $15 per user per month for companies paying annually. Meanwhile, monthly billing will rise from $15 to $18 per user. A few plans (Foundations, Starter, and Pro) should not see any price increases. Salesforce also introduced a new Enterprise+ plan offering enhanced search, admin, and control capabilities.

At the core of these Slack price increases is the platform’s integration of AI features. Customers on the Pro plan will gain access to conversation summaries and huddle notes, while Business+ and Enterprise+ plans will unlock more advanced AI capabilities such as AI search, recaps, translations, file summaries, and more.

Salesforce is also betting big on agentic AI with its Agentforce service. Agentforce customers can develop their own AI agents, which, according to the cloud giant, should enhance employees’ and users’ experiences through the new “digital labor” paradigm. Agentforce now includes “add-ons” and the Agentforce 1 Editions, starting at $125 and $550 per user per month, respectively.

Providing every employee in an organization with rich AI features is now a strategic imperative, Salesforce stated in its announcement. While workers are increasingly interested in using AI services, many corporations are still struggling to translate the technology into meaningful business value. Some organizations are even beginning to backtrack from fully adopting AI.

Salesforce is just one of many tech companies desperately trying to turn AI into a money-printing venture rather than an aggravating cost and security nightmare for the entire IT world. In 2024, the corporation was caught abusing user data to train new AI models without asking for permission first.