Salesforce to acquire Doti to boost AI-based enterprise search via Slack

Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Israeli startup, Doti, aiming to enhance AI-based enterprise search capabilities offered via Slack.

The demand for efficient data retrieval and interpretation has been growing within enterprises, driven by the need to streamline workflows and increase productivity, thereby accelerating decision-making.

The global enterprise search market is projected to reach $12.2 billion by 2032 from just $5 billion in 2022, growing at a CAGR of 9.6%, a report from Allied Market Research showed.

Slack itself has been offering an enterprise AI search capability since March to help enterprises discover information from applications and services, building on its previously released ability to search information within its platform.

Given the market opportunity, the acquisition is a no-brainer as Salesforce would want to advance its capabilities in the space, analysts pointed out, referring to Doti’s current product offering, which is a AI-based enterprise search bot that can be interfaced with on Slack to surface insights from across applications and services, such as Datadog, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, , Notion, Slack, Salesforce, Monday, and Zendesk, among others.

“Doti supports both humans and AI agents in real-time by not only retrieving but also interpreting information. That should be the real reason why Salesforce wants it. The company has been pushing towards a model where Slack becomes the primary workspace and Agentforce powers automated workflows inside it,” said Ashwin Venkatesan, executive research leader at HFS Research.

“In that vision, Doti provides Salesforce with the missing intelligence layer, transforming conversations into accurate answers and actions. In simple terms, it strengthens the bridge between chat, context, and execution, which is central to Salesforce’s agent-driven roadmap,” Venkatesan added.

Explaining further Salesforce’s rationale to acquire Doti, Venkatesan pointed out that Doti has already achieved a few complex parts needed to execute Salesforce’s vision of combining Slack and Agentforce, including building a knowledge-graph backbone, an auto-answering layer that behaves more like an assistant than a search bar, flexible deployment options, and deep, native integration with Slack.

“…getting to Doti’s level of maturity would have taken years, and proper execution would have been a key challenge. That’s why an in-house build wasn’t the practical method,” Venkatesan said.  

However, analysts pointed out that Slack, with or without Doti’s expertise, faces pressure from other vendors, including Microsoft, Google, and AWS, in the AI-based enterprise search space.

The current competitive landscape comprises three broad groups: large platform providers such as Microsoft, Google, and AWS; specialist search engines such as Coveo, Sinequa, Lucidworks, and Elastic; and assistant-layer players like Glean, which sit directly in the workflow, Venkatesan said.

Doti’s team will join Salesforce’s AI R&D hub in Israel post the acquisition, which is expected to close by January.

This article “Salesforce to acquire Doti to boost AI-based enterprise search via Slack” originally ran on Computerworld.