Salesforce’s low-code workflow tool aims to unify CRM giant’s largest acquisitions

Salesforce is a big, complex set of services, which has been augmented via acquisition with several other big complex services, including MuleSoft, Tableau and Slack, three companies the CRM giant acquired in recent years.

The company has been looking for ways to make all of these tools (including Salesforce itself) work better together, and it thinks the answer is using its low-code workflow tool, Salesforce Flow. Today, it announced an update that is designed to build integrated workflows between whichever tools in the Salesforce family you happen to be using.

It’s a bold attempt to pull together all of the pieces in the Salesforce arsenal in a more coherent fashion, using a popular tool that has been around since 2019 to do the job.

Salesforce co-founder and CTO Parker Harris says that when the company launched 23 years ago, it was all about humans entering data and interacting with machines, but over time, the machine has been able to take over some of the tasks, and that’s where Flow comes in.

“It was humans going into screens and entering information and reading it, and while that’s still very important, I think the world has shifted a lot where it’s now more about automation. It’s more the computer driving business, rather than humans trying to do it all on their own,” Harris explained.

While that ability to automate tasks has been around in various forms inside Salesforce for some time, the company is trying to pull it together in one centralized place by updating Flow with four new components. For starters, there is Flow in Slack, which as the name implies embeds Flow capabilities into Slack.