We taught the Adapt agent to decide when to respond on Slack

When a message drops in a busy Slack channel, it's easy to miss. Someone reports a bug, asks a critical question, or flags an issue, and unless the right person is watching, it sits there. The longer it goes unanswered, the slower your team moves.

That's why we launched the Adapt agent in Slack earlier this year. Users could tag Adapt in a thread to triage a bug, answer a product question, or pull context from other apps, and it showed up and did the work intelligently, like an agent should. This helped teams move faster, but it was a fundamentally reactive model. Messages would go unanswered, and we kept watching teams (and ourselves) forget to tag Adapt at the moment it would have been most useful. That didn't feel like the truly intelligent agent we want to build.

Today we're announcing the launch of the Proactive agent mode for Slack. Adapt now intelligently decides for itself when to chime in on a Slack conversation, just like a teammate would. Tell Adapt "Automatically respond to bug reports here", and Adapt will jump in on bug reports without an @-mention. We believe this is a real step toward agents that feel less like tools and more like teammates.

How the proactive response system works

The challenge of building a great proactive system is balancing response sensitivity. At low sensitivity, Adapt's trigger is no better than @-mentions. At high sensitivity, we risk spamming your Slack channel.

We want Adapt users to have full control over when Adapt should and shouldn't respond. The proactive response system has three policies, configurable per Slack channel or per Slack thread:

1. @-mention only. The default. Adapt only responds when explicitly tagged.
2. Smart mode. You set conditions in plain English for when the Adapt agent should respond.
3. Always respond. Adapt responds to every message coming into a channel.

Structure of the system

1. The Adapt agent listens to messages that come in from a Slack channel or thread.
2. The proactive response system fetches the saved policy for that channel or thread.
3. If it's a smart policy, the system takes the policy plus relevant surrounding context into account to make an intelligent decision: respond or don't respond.

Response decisions are made in milliseconds, so when Adapt does jump in, it feels instant.

Why it's great for knowledge work

Humans continuously choose whether or not to respond to a message based on context. Adapt's proactive response system is also contextual, pulling surrounding chat conversations, business context, and the active response policy to make an effective decision. Interacting with the system should feel like interacting with a human teammate.

We also provide the ability to opt in or out of proactive responses at any scope, giving you ultimate control over how Adapt interacts with your team.

Try it out today

Proactive Adapt agents are live today. You can ask the Adapt agent in any Slack channel to help you set up a proactive policy. Proactive mode becomes even more valuable when paired with workflows. It's the difference between ad-hoc responses and a repeatable process your team can actually rely on.

A few example workflows you can build with proactive responses:

Autonomous bug triage

Adapt can monitor a Slack channel like #bugs and autonomously triage every report. It can reproduce the issue, file the Linear ticket, and open a PR with a candidate fix.

How to set it up:

@Adapt automatically respond to only bug reports that come into this channel. Use the bug-triage skill to evaluate each bug report.

Tailored outreach

Whenever a new user signs up and a message is dropped in a channel, Adapt can research the user and draft a tailored outreach email with example use cases.

How to set it up:

@Adapt monitor the #new-user-signups channel for all new messages and research every new user. Draft an email for outreach in the thread.

Customer support

Adapt can connect to popular CS tools like Zendesk, Intercom, and Pylon, proactively monitor every new customer message, and draft a reply based on your company's context, saving a rep several hours per day.

How to set it up:

@Adapt for all new messages that land in the #support channel, use the customer-support skill to draft a reply.

See proactive Slack agents in action

Proactive responses are available now for every Adapt customer with the Slack integration enabled. Open Slack, tag @Adapt in the channel you want to make proactive, and tell it the policy in plain English. If you're curious to see how it works, get a demo.