Lidiane Jones has vacated the Slack CEO seat after 11 months in the role.
A new CEO will step in on Monday, as Jones seems set to take the helm at Bumble – the online dating app – in January.
Announcing her departure on the Slack platform, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, wrote: "Lidiane, this is a hugely deserved achievement for one of our most incredible executives.
While we will all, of course, miss her greatly (especially me), we recognize what an amazing opportunity this is for you in becoming a public company CEO.
Indeed, this may be a significant loss for Salesforce, as Jones impressed after stepping into the role during a difficult spell for its Slack business.
At the time, Slack co-Founder Stewart Butterfield had just left and activist investors swirled – with some reportedly calling for Salesforce to deprioritize the platform.
After all, the pandemic-induced surge in UCaaS had just – to put it mildly – tempered.
Moreover, a tricky macro-environment and slower revenue growth strengthened their calls to cut costs and push profit margins further.
Meanwhile, in February, Dave Michels, Principal Analyst at Talking Pointz, described Slack as "an albatross hanging around Salesforce’s neck" in conversation with CX Today.
Yet, Jones kept calm and carried on, introducing industry-first GenAI innovations – with the advent of Slack GPT – and achieving new milestones for the business.
Marc Benioff shared one such milestone in Salesforce’s latest earnings call. He stated:
We've seen excellent usage growth in our automation products, including Slack, which has now launched nearly 8 million workflows weekly, a 71 percent increase year-over-year.
However, this doesn't mean that Slack is out of the woods. Its competitor, Microsoft Teams, still dominates the space, and some remain doubtful of its place in the Salesforce stack.
That said, the recent launch of Salesforce’s new Einstein 1 Platform has helped to allay some of those concerns and offer the new Slack CEO a revitalized go-to-market.
The New Einstein 1 Platform and Slack’s Position Within It
During September’s Dreamforce event, Salesforce launched its Einstein 1 platform – which houses each of the vendor’s CRM apps.
As evident in the screenshot below, the Einstein 1 ecosystem enables a cross-function data fabric, leverages their combined intelligence, and makes data sharing across CX functions much simpler.
