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The hallmarks of my 25+ year career center on the meaningful market impacts I have…
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Thank you, Convoy team
Thank you, Convoy team
There will be a time to talk more about the Convoy story, but for now, it’s enough to say that if given the chance, I…
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Stop wasting your time putting volatile freight in RFPs
Stop wasting your time putting volatile freight in RFPs
This article originally appeared in the inaugural issue of Convoy's "The Future of Freight," featuring 40 thoughtfully…
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Ryan Gavin shared thisI love this on so many levels Wade Foster and Zapier team. If your company still operates primarily out of email, with basic chat layered on top (mostly DMs or group messages in Teams), the concept Wade describes will probably feel foreign, maybe even a little ridiculous. But I've lived the transition from a Microsoft-centric communication model to an open, channel-based operating model that orchestrates work. It changes how a company operates. It changes the culture. And now, with AI, it changes what's possible. Does it take some getting used to? Absolutely. My first few months using Slack at a startup were challenging. Then it clicked. Work wasn't just happening faster. It was happening in the open. People were building, learning, connecting ideas, and moving the business forward together. One conversation could become shared organizational knowledge instead of disappearing into someone's inbox or DMs. That openness matters even more in an AI-first world. Agents don't just need access to structured systems. They benefit from the conversational context of how work actually gets done across an organization. People who haven't experienced Slack often assume it's just another collaboration tool. I think that's missing what's actually happening. Look at many of the world's fastest-growing and most innovative companies. They've adopted a fundamentally different way of working, one that's increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in the age of AI. Thanks Wade Foster for sharing in the open.Ryan Gavin shared thisWe're killing the DM at Zapier. Starting with the executive team. We've long held Default to Transparency as a value. That value has largely encouraged communication in public channels. But as the company grew, DMs are a hard habit to resist and break. But every DM is a gap in our Shared Brain. It's context that is lost for humans and AIs. As a result the cost of DMs keeps going up. So earlier this year I posted about our exec transparency leaderboard. The leaderboard has become quite the competition internally… I'm 3rd today. My co-founder Bryan has held the top spot as long as I can remember… It sets a standard for the rest of the company. In fact, since last year we’ve seen the % of Slack messages in public channels go from 33% to 46%. What the leaderboard measures Transparency is a team sport, and a disinfectant. Every month we track what percentage of our execs' Slack messages happen in public channels versus private DMs. When your CEO debates strategy in a DM, that decision is invisible to every agent and every team that needs to know what was decided and why. The decision happens but the reasoning vanishes. When that conversation happens in a channel, it stays. New hires can search it, agents can read and verify it, etc. Your Shared Brain knows what's true now: ask it a question and the answer reflects the latest reality. Taking It to the Next Level Reducing DMs are one way to increase transparency and open up context for humans and AI, but there are other mechanisms that help too. Three things beyond the leaderboard: 1. Meetings get recorded, transcribed, and become queryable 2. We run a shared skills library. Anyone on the team can encode a workflow they've figured out into a skill and share with the team 3. And we keep score. It's a silly scoreboard, but it subtly drives positive behaviors Raising Your Ambition In order to get the most of AI in your company, the AIs need context. So making your context queryable is one of the most practical moves you can make to improve the effectiveness of your AI agents. P.S. I’m coming for #1, Bryan...
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Ryan Gavin reposted thisRyan Gavin reposted thisBring your ideas to life right in Slack! 🚀 With Miro’s new Slackbot MCP integration, you can spin up boards, stickies, and diagrams directly in your conversations to turn any discussion into a clear, actionable plan. 👉 Add Miro to Slack: https://sforce.co/4vBSrCm
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Ryan Gavin posted thisI just got back from Cannes. Dear lord, it was hot. While I was there, we and Anthropic announced Tag Claude in Slack. A customer asked me, "Isn't that competitive with Slackbot?" It reminded me how few people realize what Slack has become. Most people still think of Slack as a collaboration application. In reality, its most powerful capability is that it's an open platform. And right now, it's becoming the platform where humans and agents work together. The most valuable technology platforms in history didn't win because they did everything themselves. They won because they made it possible for everyone else to build. iOS became iOS because of the App Store. AWS became AWS because anyone could deploy on it. Salesforce became the enterprise standard because it opened its platform and let thousands of partners and integrations flourish. The pattern is consistent. The platform wins when the ecosystem wins. That's what's happening in Slack right now, and I think it's still widely underestimated. Six weeks ago we launched Slack MCP. We're already at 1.5M weekly active users, 50M total tool calls, and 300% weekly growth in custom AI agents. Companies like Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Linear, Atlassian, Box, viktor.com, and Perplexity aren't just integrating with Slack. They're choosing Slack as the place where their agents live and work. Vercel's CEO put it well: "Work starts in conversation. That's why we see Slack as the natural place to build our agents." Their v0 generative UI agent turns Slack channels into real-time multiplayer prototyping, with engineers, designers, and PMs building together without leaving the conversation. OpenAI's goal is to turn Codex into a teammate and they chose Slack to make that happen. With a seamless integration into Slack, builders @-mention Codex just like a teammate. Anthropic describes Slack as its "core operating system for how we run the company." Wayfair has saved more than 500,000 hours and $15 million annually by bringing CRM workflows into Slack. This is the compounding effect of an open platform. Shopify's CEO Tobias Lütke captured something important: "The risk is that AI does the work and we never learn from it. When people work together with their agents in public, the opposite happens. The best prompt patterns spread, knowledge spreads." Every new agent, every workflow, every integration makes the platform more valuable for everyone else. That's how ecosystems compound. Today, more than 2,600 ISV apps and agents connect into Slack — and more than 1 million customer-built apps and agents on top of that. Some overlap with capabilities Slack offers natively. That's not a bug. It's exactly how great platforms work. The best solution should win. And when the best solutions choose to build on your platform, everyone benefits. We're not trying to become every application. We're building the place where every application, every agent, and every team comes together. That's the platform bet.
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Ryan Gavin reposted thisRyan Gavin reposted thisOne of my favorite moments from Cannes was sitting down with Ryan Gavin and Jessica Jensen for Business Insider Daily Take, our regular segment at The The Female Quotient Quotient Beach. When asked for their biggest takeaways from the week, they shared advice that feels especially relevant right now. Jessica reminded us: "Drive your own bus and be optimistic. There's a lot of doom and gloom out there. You are the agent of your own reinvention." Ryan offered an equally powerful perspective: "This is a moment where it's okay to say, 'I don't know,' and 'I'm nervous.' You can be okay with that. Go back to first principles—the things that endure: human ingenuity, curiosity, empathy, and the ability to connect with others. Work hard, have a good attitude, show up every day, and kick some ass." Two different perspectives, but one common theme: uncertainty isn't something to fear—it's something to navigate with optimism, curiosity, empathy, and resilience. As AI transforms how we work and live, it's easy to get caught up in what's changing. But it's the enduring qualities that make us human—and our willingness to reinvent ourselves—that will matter most. A fitting way to wrap up an inspiring week at Cannes.
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Ryan Gavin reposted thisRyan Gavin reposted thisContent and communication belong together. 🤝 By adding the Box MCP server to Slackbot, you can now securely query, create, and act on your Box content directly within your Slack workflows—no context-switching required. 👉 Add Box to Slack: https://sforce.co/4uOW32G
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Ryan Gavin reposted thisRyan Gavin reposted thisNew and improved: The Jira Agent in Slack 🚀 A lot of work happens in Slack. Teammates chat back and forth, decisions get made, edge cases get surfaced, trade-offs get debated. Then someone context-switches to a project management tool and manually reconstructs that conversation as a ticket. Context gets lost. Atlassian’s new launch changes this. The Jira Cloud for Slack app now lets you mention Jira in any channel and create a work item directly from the conversation. Jira reads the thread and structures it into an execution-ready spec. What makes this different from “create ticket from Slack” features you’ve seen before: it’s powered by the Teamwork Graph. Jira doesn’t just parse your message. It understands the context behind it. You can assign tasks to teammates or agents right from Slack. This is a great example of removing friction in teamwork with AI.
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Ryan Gavin reposted thisRyan Gavin reposted thisYesterday, Anthropic pulled Claude into Slack, turning it from a work destination into a work participant. Claude now sits where multiplayer work happens, can be tagged like a colleague, retains channel context, connects to approved tools, and can plan work for later completion. Software is becoming labor. Some thoughts: ▪️ Where matters more than what. Slack contains the messy, high-value substrate of work: decisions, exceptions, handoffs, and the implicit knowledge that doesn't make it into a system of record. Tag makes that usable as persistent working context. The model’s intelligence matters, but more consequential is its position inside the flow of coordination. A channel-native agent can become a living index of institutional memory over time. That is much harder to rip out. ▪️ Familiar, but different. Agents in Slack are not new. Plenty of startups let teams trigger agentic workflows from a channel. OpenAI has Slack integrations for Q&A, drafting, summaries, and retrieval. Some adventurous companies have even dropped OpenClaw-style agents into Slack. The distinction comes down to depth of integration and span of control. Retrieval bots answer questions. Workflow bots trigger predefined automations. A channel-native agent can accept input from multiple people, iterate in public, work on its own timeline, use approved tools, and report back. Closer to teammate than bot. ▪️ The unit of AI adoption shifts from user to channel. Most copilots are private productivity tools. Useful, but trapped at the level of individual efficiency. A channel-native agent can improve the shared process: summarize a debate, retrieve prior decisions, turn a request into a task plan, chase an owner, or surface a blocker. That is a more credible path to measurable enterprise ROI. ▪️ This points toward an AI employee budget. The last two years were sold as “every knowledge worker gets a copilot.” Claude Tag asks a different question: which recurring workflows can this agent own, and what systems is it allowed to touch? That moves pricing away from flat per-seat chatbot licenses and toward outcomes, throughput, or agent capacity. The buyer is funding a new kind of labor layer. That is powerful. It is also a cost-control nightmare. ▪️ Early productization of ambient agency. The “@Claude” invocation makes delegation visible, preserves a shared audit trail, and gives colleagues a chance to correct the agent in public. It keeps the human in the loop while the machine learns where it is useful. The likely trajectory: explicit invocation → proactive monitoring → scoped autonomy. ▪️ New Failure Modes. A persistent agent in Slack can misread a thread, expose context to the wrong audience, or turn informal conversation into operational action. Control will be key. The market will converge on this shape quickly. The competition will be over who owns the work graph: the collaboration suite, the system-of-record, the enterprise search layer, or the model labs.
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Ryan Gavin reposted thisRyan Gavin reposted thisThe pressure on enterprise marketers has never been greater: move faster, prove growth, modernize the stack, and keep the brand coherent while doing it. The most forward-thinking organizations are finding a new rhythm, blending the scale they have built with the agility they need. Tune in to the FQ Lounge @ #CannesLions2026 as we bring together leaders to explore how smart investment in AI and innovation is changing not just product and capability, but how marketing teams operate, prioritize, and compete in real time. • Anthony DeMaio, Global Head of Sales, Business Insider • Ryan Gavin, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, Slack, Salesforce • Jessica Jensen, Chief Marketing Officer, LinkedIn
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Ryan Gavin reposted thisRyan Gavin reposted thisAudiences don’t experience brands in silos. They move fluidly across platforms, moments, and touchpoints. Tune in to the FQ Lounge @ #CannesLions2026 as we explore how marketers are designing seamless, human experiences that connect across channels without losing clarity or coherence. • Talia Bender Small, President, The Female Quotient • Ryan Gavin, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer, Slack, Salesforce • Leslie Lee, Head of Marketing, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions • Anna Spanfeller, Vice President, Head of Sales, Cognitiv
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2w
huge congrats - they are lucky to have you
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Ryan Gavin reacted on thisRyan Gavin reacted on thisCome with me to Abridge’s Keynote at the Times Center in New York City. If you know me, you know I’m endlessly curious about how AI is transforming industries outside of tech. So it was especially exciting to learn more about Abridge and its mission. Abridge uses AI to support everything from clinical notes to decision support, coding, orders, and other healthcare workflows — all starting with the patient-doctor conversation. And now, they’re collaborating with NVIDIA to strengthen AI built specifically for healthcare conversations. After navigating the healthcare system with my own family recently, this one really hit home. How incredible would it be if AI could make a meaningful impact in healthcare — giving doctors more time to focus on patients instead of paperwork, and helping patients get better care. I’m excited to learn more about Abridge. And left the event inspired. Thanks for having me Shiv (Shivdev) Rao, Abridge! #AI #HealthcareAI #AbridgePartner
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Ryan Gavin liked thisRyan Gavin liked this🔷 Complexity is easier to navigate with a picture. With Lucid Software's Slack MCP integration, you can create diagrams, locate and edit documents, and share visual context through natural language in Slackbot, turning abstract ideas into clear visuals without breaking out of the conversation. 👉Check out Lucidchart in Slack: https://sforce.co/4aSLKTY
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Ryan Gavin liked thisGrateful for the opportunity to join Talia Bender Small The Female Quotient panel at Cannes this week alongside an impressive group of marketers. Thank you Ryan Gavin Anna Spanfeller for the conversation!Ryan Gavin liked thisOne of the best parts about my work is that I talk to the most inspiring leaders every day. It's something I am very grateful for at The Female Quotient and something I'll never take for granted. To do it on our stage at FQ Beach @ Cannes Lions was next level. To the brilliant leaders who joined the conversations I moderated Alysa Taylor Mimi Swain Fabiola Torres Ryan Gavin Abigail Roulston Anna Spanfeller - thank you for lending your voice and sharing so many important insights and ideas. Can't wait for the next one!
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Ryan Gavin liked thisRyan Gavin liked thisOne of the best parts about my work is that I talk to the most inspiring leaders every day. It's something I am very grateful for at The Female Quotient and something I'll never take for granted. To do it on our stage at FQ Beach @ Cannes Lions was next level. To the brilliant leaders who joined the conversations I moderated Alysa Taylor Mimi Swain Fabiola Torres Ryan Gavin Abigail Roulston Anna Spanfeller - thank you for lending your voice and sharing so many important insights and ideas. Can't wait for the next one!
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Ryan Gavin liked thisLast week, I had the privilege of spending five extraordinary days in Healdsburg, California with Salesforce's Chairman's Club — our highest level of recognition for top global performers. These are the people who define what elite performance looks like. What makes Chairman's Club special isn't the setting (though wine country in June is hard to beat). It's the conversations. The caliber of the qualifiers, their insight, resilience, and customer obsession in that room is unlike anything else. I was equally impressed by the powerful +1s who joined them. Spouses, parents, siblings, daughters, friends, they all were critical to their success!!! To every Chairman's Club attendee: you earned this. Not just because of your numbers — but because of how you show up for your customers, your teams, and each other every single day. The bar is high. You cleared it. Congratulations, and thank you. See you at the top again next year. #Salesforce #ChairmansClub #SalesExcellence #TopPerformers
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