▲ Community Session: Build a Slack Agent

Hi, welcome everyone to another Verscell community session. My name is Jacob Paris and I'll be your host today. Uh we do these sessions to highlight cool

projects and interesting ideas from people in the community, from customers, and sometimes like today from people on the Versell team. Uh we're streaming this live out to X, but if you want to participate in the chat, come into community.vercell.com. Uh click going on the event and that will unlock the chat. And at the end of the session, we're going to have some time for Q&A. So follow our code of conduct and drop any questions you have along the way. I'd like to introduce our guest. We've got Matt Lewis here to show us how to build an AI Slack agent. Hey Matt.

Oh, uh you are muted. I'll unmute you. Yeah. >> Hey everybody. I'm uh Matt Lewis from the partnerships team here at Verscell. Excited to talk all things Slack agents. How are you today, Jacob? >> Yeah, I'm doing really great. Yeah, I'm calling in from Toronto. It's getting colder and colder every day. Uh which which sets my panic in motion, but excited to be here here talking to you. >> Awesome. Well, I'm I'm joining today from from Tennessee, so

>> that sounds warm. >> But yeah, >> today I want to talk about building a Slack agent. Um, but before we jump into how to build it, I want to step back and kind of talk about why to build it and why right now is such a great time to build one of these things. Um, if you came to ship 25 a couple months ago or a month ago, I gave a talk about this and

today I want to kind of condense it into this community session about why right now is such a great time to build Slack agents. Um, so yeah, so to get started, I really want to just talk about the software we built yesterday. So, if you've been building for the web for just a little or just a long time, you're probably used to this idea of building, you know, inputs, forms, you

know, creating tickets, creating dashboards, and trying to create a screen for all the different information that you want to accept or compute with. Um, so you definitely found yourself, you know, building a form to collect this information. Um, to try to automate some sort of system where someone fills in a form, you create a ticket, someone picks up the ticket, gets the work done. Um,

but to build something like this, you probably got into this trap as well. uh there's a lot of logic that you have to write or glue to make systems like this work. So for every new type of input or any new type of information that you wanted to work with, you had to write another, you know, if this then that

statement or, you know, this other thing that could happen or this weird edge case that we ran into one time. And I'm sure all of you have like gotten to a point where you're like, this this is just growing out of control. Like I can't I can't make this thing any better. it's really just becoming such a a process just to handle all the different types of information we want to work with. Um, but as we all know