Imagine if you had an invisible robot running around the internet doing all kinds of tasks for you.

That is still the promise of a Slack bot: simplify everyday tasks by cutting down on repetitive work, answering common questions, routing updates, reminding people about deadlines, and connecting Slack to the tools where work actually happens. Slackbot, Workflow Builder, and the Slack Marketplace now make that easier than the old world of one-off bots, but the goal is the same: fewer interruptions and less manual busywork.

Slack is simple, text-based, searchable, and customizable. That makes it the perfect environment for simple bots that replace time-consuming or interrupting tasks. You can still check emails, aggregate newsletters into a public channel, send notifications from Trello or Jira, update your calendar, save reminders and to-dos, store company knowledge, and automate a million more time-saving things.

Before we get into all of the cool stuff Slack bots can do, let’s get the basics down first and talk about the original: Slackbot.

Get to know the basics: Slackbot

Slackbot is a highly customizable tool when you start to get into the advanced features, but you should start by learning the absolute basics. I’m sure you’ve already had some interaction with Slackbot when you first signed up, but here’s a refresher.

Get support with Slackbot (automated or a real human!)

Slackbot is Slack’s built-in self service support system. You can ask Slackbot questions, and get explanations along with links to the relevant knowledge base articles.

Often, if it doesn’t quite understand your question or it’s too broad, you’ll get back a simple list of links:

More specific questions give better results, saving you a click:

If you can’t find exactly what you need by asking Slackbot or browsing Slack’s help center, you can also contact human support staff through Slackbot. Just type /feedback [your message]

Use Slackbot as an indexed scratchpad to store information

While Slack has since given you the power to message yourself, Slackbot is a great place to store information and links so that they’re indexed in Slack’s search. The search is private to you, so you can even come up with your own tagging system and be sure that no one else is cluttering it up.

For example, maybe you want to use Slack to store cool designs you find around the web, or important Google Docs. If you’ve tagged these resources (just by typing some kind of tag along with the message), you can use a search query like this to pull up all of the messages you’re looking for:

in:@slackbot cool design

You don’t really have to come up with tags, either. Slack’s search is excellent, and I’ve found that I’m able to easily find anything I need.

Use Slackbot to help you remember your deadlines

The /remind command is one of Slackbot’s most useful features. You can use it to remind yourself to do a task, to read an article or to build some kind of dark matter generator. Slackbot is also able to send someone else a reminder, and even set reminders to recur.

Here are all of the commands you can use:

Remind yourself

/remind me to mow the front lawn on saturday morning

Remind someone else

/remind @sally to confirm attendance to the webinar tomorrow at 3pm


Remind a channel

/remind #content-creation to go on Zoom for the weekly meeting every tuesday at 9am

Set a recurring reminder

/remind me to clear out temporary files every week starting next monday

/remind me to send my invoice on the 1st of every month

See a list of your reminders

/remind list

With the list, you can snooze reminders or mark them as complete with a single click.

You can use natural language to set reminders, so don’t be afraid to say things like ‘tomorrow’ or ‘next weekend’. Do, however, be careful about how complex you get. I asked Slackbot to remind me on the 1st and 15th of every month. The command confused it, and I ended up with a recurring reminder only for the 1st of every month.

To set reminders without using slash commands, just hover over a message you want to remind yourself about, and click the three dots.

It’s as simple as that. In three hours, I’ll be surprise-reminded about this useful lamb gif!

Schedule asynchronous standup meetings with Slackbot

This is a cool tip courtesy of Kurt Braget from Popstand, and it’s for anyone who wants to run asynchronous standup meetings on a schedule with Slack. While there are tools that help manage Slack meetings like geekbot.io, you might want to set up your own quick and dirty solution using just /remind:

/remind #standups to “do @drew's standup - 1 yesterday's accomplishments 2 today's goals 3 challenges?” at 10:30AM every weekday

To report for the meeting, Drew would just reply to the reminder and let everyone know the status.

With this method, you can’t really store data or track the meeting notes, but it is a super fast and free solution.

Turn Slackbot into a knowledge base, a link hunter or a prankster

Did you know you can program Slackbot to respond to new commands? We’re getting into the advanced stuff now! It takes some setting up, but it’s well worth it. Here’s the general idea:

You can also program Slackbot with answers to frequently asked questions, or to trigger gif mayhem when it detects a certain word.

Here’s how to set it up:

Click the arrow next to your organization name, and you’ll get a drop-down menu with Customize Slack as an option.

Click Customize Slack. You’ll be taken to your browser, and see an option for Slackbot.

Add your trigger words into the ‘When someone says’ box, and put the response in ‘Slackbot responds’.

You can add multiple input phrases by separating them with commas, like affiliate links sheet, affiliate link sheet, affiliate links spreadsheet. Add multiple responses by putting each alternate response on a new line , Slackbot will say one at random!

Activate Slack’s superpowers by adding your own bots

On its own, Slackbot is a great tool for reminders, Slack support and custom responses. But with integrations, Slack is so powerful I couldn’t believe it when I first saw.

For example, you could make a quick bot (code-free) with Zapier that updates a channel every time your favorite news sites publish a story, or plug in an app from the Slack Marketplace to quickly add a new slash command that lets you manage your to-do list!

Use /todo to turn Slack into a proper to-do list

Reminders are fine, but they lack the power of a real to-do list like Wunderlist or Todoist. With Workast, you can use /todo to add assignments, due dates, and a task dashboard to Slack.

You can assign tasks to any Slack user in your team, and see the task reports (completed, open, assigned) in the /todo dashboard.

It’s a lot like the native /remind feature, but it’s got a few extra advanced features that turns it into a very powerful tool. And, it’s free.

Upgrade your Slack knowledge base

It’s possible to turn Slackbot into a fully-fledged knowledge base with custom responses, but it’s not the absolute best way. You can enhance the capabilities with an add-on like Tettra.

Slackbot can now help with more of this search-and-answer work when your workspace has clean channels, canvases, and connected apps. For governed team knowledge, use a dedicated knowledge base and keep Slackbot responses pointed at the source of truth.

With Tettra, you can store your internal policies and procedures in Slack and then the Tettra bot will automatically search and show you the links inline:

If it looks like Tettra’s pulled up the right resource, you can click to share it with the channel, keeping everyone on the same page.

Add Trello to get real-time notifications of activity

You can get Slack notifications in the form of an email digest, or in app, but with Trello for Slack you can also push them to Slack so you don’t have to manually check up on your team’s activity. With the Trello app for Slack, I can get notified on blog post activity and add new post ideas to the Trello board just by typing a command.

To make a new card for a post idea, I can just type:

/trello add "slack bot guide"

And the bot will create a card for me in the first list of our blog articles board.

Connect Slack to your Google Calendar and get handy event notifications

Here’s another reason to never venture outside the realms of Slack: you can use it for calendar notifications. Connecting your calendar is easy with Google Calendar for Slack.

Select which calendar sends notifications to which channel, and you’re away. Check out Slack’s help doc on the topic for more information.

Skip your inbox , check emails with Slack

There are a couple of methods you can use to integrate Slack with email, but by far the simplest is Slack’s own email app.

When you add it to Slack, you get a secret email address. Use that email address to sign up for newsletters, cc it in important support conversations, or forward emails there.

This a great way to quickly share information that might otherwise get swept away in Gmail‘s relentless stream, and works best when you want to share emails with a group of people (like the #support channel for urgent customer issues or the #marketing channel for excellent email copy!).

Add Donut to Slack to help your team get to know each other

As a remote team, we have used Donut at Process Street to bring everyone closer together. Donut works by randomly matching 2 or more team members together each week, and letting them set up a quick 10-minute call together where they can talk about their hobbies, personal life, or anything they choose. It is a lightweight way to create conversations that would not otherwise happen at work.

At just the cost of 10 minutes of everyone’s time each week, you can improve the strength of your team and your company culture.

Make sure your team sees important announcements and articles with @must-read

Tag @must-read in any Slack message to add the message to the reading lists of whoever is mentioned

Ask @must-read ‘status’ to see who has and hasn’t read the message

A major criticism of Slack since the very beginning is that it’s easy to lose important material in a rapid-fire chat interface, even with a powerful search.

You can do a lot to get around this, such as by pinning or starring messages, but this can quickly turn into just another thing to manage. What if there were a way to have a company-wide list of resources that made everyone accountable to read it? @must-read is exactly that! It’s simple, but it could be exactly what your team needs.

Poll your team with Polly

Should we build that new feature? Did anybody watch the new Game of Thrones? Anyone want me to go get a coffee? Poll your team in Slack with Polly. This poll bot includes anonymous or public voting, recurring polls, surveys, team happiness tracking and an analytics dashboard.

Polls can be a fun way to get your team interacting, but also can be used for a variety of practical reasons. You could schedule a recurring poll to track meeting attendance, or agile teams could use polls to anonymously assign story points .

Use HubSpot or Salesforce context to get quick sales and marketing data

The old HubSpot idea is still useful: a team should be able to ask for company, contact, and deal context without opening a separate CRM tab. Today, use a current CRM integration like the HubSpot Slack app, HubSpot Breeze in Slack, or Salesforce-connected Slack workflows to create records, add notes, route alerts, and pull account context into the channel where the conversation is happening.

This is not a power tool for big data exports or full reporting. It is a fast way to answer small questions, capture small updates, and keep sales or marketing work moving without breaking the thread.

Conclude helps you focus to make decisions on proposals

Conclude uses the current /c command pattern to help teams focus a proposal, discussion, decision, and record inside Slack.

The command flow is where you enter proposal details, then create a focused space for discussion on the proposition.

When the team has reached a decision, use the same decision workflow to close the loop. It’s a simple tool, but one that helps decision-makers stay focused on resolving issues as quickly as efficiently as possible.

Control your CRM through Slack using sudo

If you want to add leads to your CRM, add meeting notes, get notified about upcoming sales calls, and more, use a current CRM integration like the HubSpot Slack app. I feel like the best way to sum up the use most people would get out of that kind of integration is that it saves you switching into your CRM for little annoying tasks.

While you’re likely to spend a lot of time in Slack, it’s not always practical to use your CRM’s more powerful interface for tiny things like updating leads and adding notes. Use Slack for the lightweight update, and keep the CRM as the source of truth.

Use chatbot intake for one-off expert requests

Complaining about tax returns is a staple of ’90s comedy for a reason: everyone hates it. The same chatbot pattern works when a team needs structured intake before handing work to an expert.

A good intake bot asks for the right context, routes the request, and gives the requester a clear next step inside Slack.

Use Workflow Builder for routine requests

Workflow Builder is the modern center of Slack automation. Use it to collect requests, send approvals, route messages, create tasks, open support tickets, gather onboarding information, or schedule recurring prompts. It is the best first stop when a team says it needs a Slack bot but the job is really a structured workflow.

Trigger repeatable Process Street workflows from Slack

Some Slack tasks need more control than a message, reminder, or CRM update. If the work has owners, approvals, due dates, evidence, or compliance risk, run it through Process Street instead of leaving it in chat.

Process Street is a Compliance Operations Platform that brings together Docs for governed SOPs, Ops for auditable workflow execution, and Cora, an AI compliance agent that monitors work and flags risk. Slack can trigger or notify, while Process Street enforces the steps, stores the evidence, and proves the process was followed. For a broader view of where this fits, see Process Street’s guide to choosing an operations management platform.

Build your first Slack bot

Anyone with a little bit of time and the right guide can knock together a Slack bot, so if you can’t find one that does exactly what you want to do, then you can either make it from scratch or integrate Slack with another app or trigger by using Zapier.

Here’s how you can make an RSS feed bot in just a few minutes:

Make an RSS reader Slack bot

With this tech news bot, I can get the headlines and summaries of all the major tech stories

Did you know Slack can also be an RSS reader? You can create your own Slack bot with Zapier for free, and set it up to post in a specific channel (like #tech-news) every time a new item enters the RSS feed.

First create a new Slack channel for the RSS feeds. Next, make a new zap in Zapier, and choose RSS by Zapier as your trigger step:

Tip: Use this guide from Zapier to find any RSS feed

Next, connect Slack as the action step and format your Slack message template:

That’s it! Now you’ve got your very own Slack feed of news articles, customizable in any way you like. Why not add the Process Street RSS feed, too, while you’re at it?

Or, if you’d prefer to get started making your own, use Slack Bolt and Slack’s current developer docs. See also these tutorials collected for absolute beginners by BotWiki

I hope this post has taught you about how you can power up Slack and get more done! If you’ve got a Slack bot you think should be on this list, let me know in the comments!

The post 21 Ways to Use Slack Bots to Simplify Everyday Tasks first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.