7 Slack automation ideas

Slack is a great way to coordinate your team, cross-collaborate on projects, and find information about your business in real-time.  It is, essentially, where most of the work happens. 

That's not to say that Slack isn't distracting at times. Between daily requests from team members that can get lost in the noise to important company announcements that take time to carefully read, Slack can be a lot. But if you set up the right automated workflows—what we call Zaps—you can make Slack a more productive place. 

From automatically notifying your sales teams in Slack when new leads come through to using AI to set up Slack assistants that can respond to company-specific questions, here are the best ways to automate your Slack messages.

Table of contents

• Track leads and sales

• Create Slack reply bots and assistants with AI

• See incoming emails and coordinate as a team

• Streamline your internal communication

• Send saved items to your to-do list and vice versa

• Connect your calendar

• Push data to and from Slack with webhooks

Track leads and sales

If you're in sales, marketing, or growth, there's nothing better than seeing a new lead roll in or a fresh Stripe payment hit your dashboard—especially when it pops into Slack in real time. Automating lead and sale notifications helps keep your team in the loop without constantly checking forms, social media management tools, or payment dashboards.

You might set up a Zap that sends a message to your #new-leads channel every time someone fills out a form on your website or clicks on a Facebook ad. You can even include key details like their name, email, and what they're interested in, so your team can reach out right away without digging through tools to find the context.

You can also connect tools like Stripe to keep tabs on (and, of course, celebrate) new payments. Use these Zaps to keep your team aligned and motivated, or alert the right people of any failed payments.

Pro tip: If you're getting a lot of leads and making plenty of sales (congrats!), spamming your Slack channel with every new activity may not be the best idea. Use a filter step to limit notifications to high-value leads or purchases over a certain amount. Or, a digest step can bundle all leads or sales into a single daily summary, so your team can stay focused on doing their best work without constant interruptions.

Create Slack reply bots and assistants with AI

It's no secret that an inordinate amount of daily communication takes place in Slack. 

Pulling the power of AI into your Slack workspace can help streamline that communication. With these Zaps, you can create ChatGPT- or OpenAI-powered assistants that can answer questions across a range of topics—directly inside Slack. From accounting bots that answer company-specific topics to a simple explainer bot that can break down complex messages, these workflows will do wonders for your productivity. 

See incoming emails and coordinate as a team

Slack users don't need email for internal coordination, but the outside world still uses it to contact your team. Sharing an inbox can be confusing, however—who's supposed to respond to which emails? Slack is a great place to decide. Here are a couple of automations that can notify your team when a new email comes in.

Set these up and you can discuss who should respond to emails, meaning your customers will never get multiple responses—or be left in the dark—again.

Once you've set up notifications from email to Slack, you can refine your workflows by adding steps like:

• A filter step that only notifies Slack when emails meet specific criteria—like containing certain keywords, coming from VIP contacts, or having attachments. That way, your team only sees the messages that matter.

• Formatter steps to clean up email subjects, shorten message previews, or extract key info (like names or ticket numbers) before posting to Slack.

• An AI step can generate a quick summary of the email, flag action items, or even suggest which team member should respond based on the message content.

• Paths can route notifications based on sender or topic—for example, send product feedback to #product and billing inquiries to #finance.

These small upgrades keep your Slack notifications clear, focused, and actionable—so your team spends less time sorting through messages and more time replying to the right ones.

Streamline your internal communication

Need to log your messages somewhere more permanent than Slack itself? Slack's free version only lets you browse the 10,000 most recent messages, but there's a workaround.

You can create your own log of all messages in Google Sheets. That way, you can gather data quickly from a specific Slack channel or create an organized, easily shareable record. Just set up this simple automation, and every message will be saved, giving you a personal archive. Or if you want to manually choose which message gets saved across all your channels, use a New Reaction Added trigger and pick an emoji to use to start the Zap.

You can also use Zaps to automate workflows inside Slack. You might want to copy announcements from one channel to another to keep your team up to date about things like company news and HR updates. Or, maybe you'd like to set up an automation that notifies your team when new channels are created in Slack—or send automated welcome messages to new users as soon as they're added. These simple Zaps let you keep your team in the loop without any manual copying and pasting across channels.

Send saved items to your to-do list and vice versa

People ask you to do stuff on Slack. Then you forget about it. You can save messages that include a request, but there's a better way to turn your saved messages into to-do tasks. You can send Slack messages you save (or react to) over to your to-do list app. Here are a few Zaps for that:

These are just a few examples. You might also want to flip that workflow on its head and get notified when a new task or project has been added to your project management app. Perhaps you want to know when you're needed on a project or celebrate when your team completes their tasks. Here are a couple of Zaps for those scenarios: 

You could create a similar workflow using any of the thousands of apps supported by Zapier, including a bunch of task management apps.

Connect your calendar

Your Slack status lets co-workers know whether they can expect to reach you—if you remember to change it. If you never do, don't worry: We've got a few Zaps for the job.

If using your status is too subtle, you can also send a message to your team when an event starts. This is also a great way to make sure your entire team knows when a meeting is about to begin.

Do you ever set aside time in your schedule to tackle specific tasks? Instead of manually updating your Slack status, set up this Zap to do the heavy lifting for you. Or use a Zap to send yourself (or your team) a reminder message in Slack when it's time to focus.

Push data to and from Slack with webhooks

Are none of the above automations quite right for you and the apps you use? Then you might want to try using webhooks. When you want to send information to Slack from a tool you use that doesn't integrate with Zapier, you can use webhooks to push that data. That means you can still get notified in Slack for things happening in your favorite apps. 

Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

These examples just scratch the surface of what you can do with Slack and Zapier. Zapier supports thousands of apps, meaning you can build almost any automation you can imagine. Start building your Zap now and see what you can come up with.

This article was originally published in March 2020 and was most recently updated in May 2025 by Nicole Replogle.