Slack has unveiled a new feature that lets you build interactive reports, polls, dashboards, presentations, microsites, and other tools without ever leaving the warm, comforting embrace of your chat window. It's called Slackforce Surfaces, and it works by having you describe what you want to Slackbot, which then uses AI to scrape information from relevant conversations and connected apps like Google Drive or Salesforce. Because why open a separate tab when you can just ask a chatbot to do your job for you?

Once Slackbot conjures up a Surface, you can share it with colleagues and pin it to channels, where other people can view it, interact with it, and - most importantly - leave comments. In a demo shared by Slack, a user asks Slackbot to create an arcade-themed visualization of AI token usage. The AI then generates an interactive dashboard showing token usage across divisions like sales, design, and engineering. Because nothing says "productivity" like turning your company's AI spending into a retro video game.

"You're not exporting your data to some other tool to make sense of it, you're asking Slackbot to build the dashboard, the deck, the report right where the conversation already is, and your whole team can act on it together," Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, tells The Verge in an email. Translation: we've finally figured out how to keep you from ever leaving Slack, even to think.

This update arrives just months after Slack overhauled Slackbot to make it more like an AI assistant, capable of summarizing information across channels, sorting through messages, and finding time to schedule meetings. It also added collaborative vibe coding channels last month. Because apparently, the only thing missing from your workday was more ways to avoid actual work.

There are many other potential uses for Surfaces, too - like building a live dashboard for a customer support queue that other workers can monitor, or creating a weather-themed financial forecast that pulls in data from connected apps. Slack notes that the feature will only pull information that you've given its AI tools permission to access, which is reassuring if you trust your colleagues not to accidentally invite the AI to your private rants.

Slackforce Surfaces is available to all customers - including those on the free plan - as long as Slackbot is enabled in their workspace. You'll be able to use it with live data starting in October. So get ready to replace your entire software stack with a chatbot that may or may not understand what a "vibe" is.