Shift AI Podcast · 2026-05-19 · 51 min
In this episode of the Shift AI Podcast, Kurtis Kemple, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Slack (Salesforce), joins host Boaz Ashkenazy for a wide-ranging conversation on how Slackbot is evolving into a full agentic platform for human-AI collaboration in the flow of work. Kurtis shares his extraordinary personal journey, from growing up in poverty in Northern New Jersey, dropping out of school, struggling with addiction, and spending over six years incarcerated, to teaching himself to code in prison with nothing but a textbook and a computer with no internet. From there, he built a career in tech that has taken him to one of the most prominent roles in developer relations at Salesforce. The conversation dives deep into how Slackbot is becoming far more than a simple assistant. Kurtis demonstrates how skills, canvases, and MCP connectors transform Slackbot into a powerful orchestration layer where multiple agents and humans collaborate in threads, channels, and workflows. He explains how Slack is positioning itself as the interface for agentic AI, whether that means connecting to Agentforce, GitHub, PagerDuty, or custom-built tools.
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