- If you could automate a workflow, your life would be simpler and
you would be more productive. A workflow is a multi step process. It's something repeatable,
arduous, and manual. An example might be
you're adding somebody new to your team. In Slack, you want them to
be in the right channels and you wanna introduce
them to the right people. You need the IT team to actually get them the right equipment. And you need the HR team to
make sure that they provide them with the benefits
documentation that they need to get started. You could build that today
using our platform APIs. You could find a developer
and build a custom app that builds that inside of Slack. But you need a developer. When I started at Slack,
the top request I got from some of our largest
customers was to make it easy for anyone to build
basic workflows in Slack. So today I am really excited to show you what we've been doing. Workflow Builder is a visual
tool that allows anyone to make it easier to share information and automate routine tasks. Anyone can use the Workflow Builder. People in HR, marketing, sales, anybody. The Workflow Builder
enables those who don't code to build simple but powerful
apps inside of Slack. To show you a bit of
what we've been up to, please join me in welcoming
Dió and Karishma to the stage to show you how easily you
could build a Workflow app. (upbeat music) - Thanks Brian. Hi everyone, pleasure to be here. My name is Karshima, and I head up Slack's New York based solutions engineering group. Today I'm so delighted to be
able to show you how you can easily create repeatable
workflows right in Slack and turn them into apps. Now, to best illustrate this point, what I'd actually like to do
is go back to that example Brain mentioned: onboarding employees. It's a journey I'm sure
many of you in the audience here have exposure to. And the funny thing about
onboarding is a task is simple as getting your new hire's
access to their benefits booklets can actually require
a ton of internal coordination and process. So let's go ahead and take a
look at how we might be able to automate that using
the Workflow Builder. So what I'm gonna go ahead
and start by doing is popping open the Workflow interface and here's where I can see a
view of all of the workflows I've already created, as well as this Get Help Benefits one. More on that later. But for now, let's go
ahead and create a new one. Now, in creating a new
workflow, the first thing I need to think about is: what do
I want to have as my trigger or action that sets up
the rest of my workflow? In this case, we actually have a welcome channel that we already bring new hires into, so I'm go ahead and have the
act of a new person joining that channel as my trigger. Now it's time to determine
what are the steps or what's the process
I'm trying to automate? I have a couple of options here, but in this example all I'm
trying to do is take that manual process of giving each new
hire their benefits booklet individually and turn that
into an automatic solution. So I'm gonna go ahead and
choose and craft my message. And what you see here is some text. All I'm doing is providing
them a link to the latest version of the benefits
as well as pointing them in the direction of a channel
they can go to if they wanna talk to our HR team for more help. Once this looks good, I
can go ahead and preview it down at the bottom here and click to save. Pretty simple. We just created our
first workflow together. Now once I'm happy with it, all that's left to do to
put this out in the wild is rename it. So I'm gonna call this the
Benefits Distribution workflow. Click to save. And the last step I need to
have is actually to publish to the New Hire Guide app. There we go. My workflow has been published. (clapping) Zero lines of code involved in doing that. And I think workflows can be
as simple as the one as you just saw here or more
complex with multiple steps and forms. I'm sure you must be wondering:
what does this actually look like for a new hire
who's joining the company and being brought into
that welcome channel? To best illustrate this, what I'm actually gonna do
is bring my colleague Dió into that channel and onstage to show you the end user experience. Dió? (clapping) - Thanks, Karishma. Hi, I'm Diógenes Brito, one of the two designers on
the Workflow Builder team, and I'm going to walk you
through the experience of a new hire using some of
these freshly created workflows. So as Karishma mentioned, I've been brought into
the welcome channel, and I can see that I have a message from an app called New Hire Guide. So let's check it out. Great. It looks like I have instant
access to the benefits booklet. And there's an instruction there to join the help benefits channel if I have any more questions. I think I might need some more assistance, so I'll join that channel. When I join the channel, it looks like I triggered a new workflow. A different one asking
me to fill out a form in order to get help here. So I'll click the button. As a new hire, I'm looking to set up
time with a consultant to walk me through my benefits. So I'll select the New
Hire Benefits Overview, the default urgency looks good, and click submit. Easy. It looks like a person
named Alexander French from the benefits team
is going to reach out in the next 72 hours. And there are some further
instructions there for how to continue along my new employee journey. Brian, that was super simple. - That was. So think about this: building the app that
Karishma built up front classically would have
taken getting a developer and carving out some of
their time to go through about a dozen steps or two. Maybe that happens in a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks. In less than two minutes, Karishma developed a custom app. Saves her the repetitive
stress of doing the same thing over and over again, and saves Dió hunting and
searching for information and makes him more productive, gets him up to speed more quickly. Do you have people wanting to get started? What should they do? - Well, they should come
to the apps and Slack breakout session immediately
following this keynote or they should visit the platform booth to meet members of the development team and see what else is possible. And we're taking names for
customers who want to join the Workflow Builder pilot program. So please visit
slack.com/workflowautomation or swing by the booth. - That's great. Thanks Dió, appreciate it. - Thanks. - Thank you. (clapping) To make getting started even easier, we're actually gonna be
launching a set of templates alongside the Workflow Builder. Simple examples of small
jobs that you might have inside your company that
you might wanna customize in order to get work done. This is the first step. We've built this based
on customer feedback. We'll continue to evolve it. One of the key things as
we do that is also gonna be opening up the Workflow Builder
to our developer community, allowing them to allow
customers to actually customize workflows coming from their apps. So if you think about Workato,
Zapier, WorkDay, ServiceNow, the ability to take those tools
and customize what happens inside of Slack is even more powerful.
