What's New in Slack: December 2025 Update

December 2025 brings some of Slack's most significant updates yet. Whether you're managing customer relationships, overseeing enterprise migrations, or ensuring regulatory compliance, this month's releases transform how teams collaborate and manage customer data.

The Headline Feature: Native Customer Contact Management

Slack is no longer just a messaging platform—it's now a full-fledged CRM hub. Available now for Business+ and Enterprise plans, the new Customer Contact Management feature integrates directly with Salesforce Free Edition, letting you build comprehensive customer records without leaving Slack.

Here's what you can do:

• Build detailed customer profiles within your Slack workspace
• Log customer calls, emails, and meetings in one centralized location
• Collaborate with your team on accounts without context switching
• Automatically create a Salesforce Free Edition org when you set up contacts

Getting started is straightforward: Workspace Owners enable the feature, create a contact list, and share it with team members. Anyone with access can update information, log interactions, and share contacts across the organization.

This represents a fundamental shift in how sales teams can work. Instead of jumping between Slack conversations and CRM systems, everything happens in one place. Your deal discussions, customer data, and team collaboration finally live together.

AI Gets More Shareable

If you've been using Slack's AI search, you'll love this: you can now share AI-generated answers directly in channels and DMs.

When you ask a question in natural language, Slack's AI searches through your messages, files, and connected services to generate an answer. Now, instead of copying and pasting that insight, you can share it with one click.

What AI search includes:

• Messages from public channels and DMs
• PDFs and Word documents
• Slack canvases, lists, and snippets
• Files from Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Box

What it excludes:

• Images and GIFs
• CSV files and spreadsheets
• Audio and video transcripts

Admins maintain full control over who can share AI answers, and all searches respect existing permissions—users only see information they already have access to.

Going Global: New Data Residency Options

Compliance teams, take note: Slack now offers data residency in Brazil (São Paulo), Switzerland (Zurich), and UAE (Dubai). This brings the total number of available regions to 12, helping global organizations meet local data sovereignty requirements.

Your messages, files, and search indexes stay in your selected region, while Slack maintains functionality across all features (with minor exceptions for UAE and Switzerland, where AI transcription features aren't available).

Enterprise Migrations Get Easier

For organizations moving workspaces to Enterprise Grid, there's a powerful new tool: pre-migration bulk email match resolution.

Before the migration starts, admins can now identify and merge duplicate user accounts with matching email addresses. This prevents the data fragmentation and confusion that used to plague enterprise migrations, ensuring clean, consolidated user data from day one.

Small Changes, Big Impact

Several smaller updates improve daily workflows:

Redesigned Admin Dashboard – The admin interface gets a visual overhaul with better navigation and a unified design language that matches the Enterprise dashboard.

Sidebar Admin Access – Admin Tools moved from the workspace menu to a more intuitive location in the sidebar, reducing clicks and improving efficiency.

Copy Channel Emails – Need to forward emails to a channel? You can now copy channel email addresses directly from the channel menu, making integrations and email workflows much simpler.

Coming Soon: Features to Watch

Several exciting features are on the horizon:

Admin Advisor for smaller plans will bring enterprise-grade security recommendations to Pro and Business+ customers, democratizing best practices that were previously only available to larger organizations.

Huddle reminders will sync with Google Calendar and Outlook, sending just-in-time notifications so you never miss a scheduled conversation.

Message triggers in private channels will extend Workflow Builder automation to confidential spaces, unlocking new possibilities for sensitive workflows.

AI-suggested channel sections will automatically organize your sidebar by analyzing channel content and suggesting the best placement for new channels.

Critical: Audit Log Retention Changes

Mark your calendars: April 30, 2026 is when Slack implements a two-year retention policy for audit logs. After this date, logs older than two years will be automatically deleted.

If your organization requires longer retention for compliance purposes, you need to act now. Export your existing audit logs using either the UI or the Audit Logs API, and establish a regular archival process before the policy takes effect.

This doesn't affect message or file retention—only audit logs tracking administrative actions and security events.

What This Means for Your Team

These updates position Slack as more than a communication tool. With native CRM integration, enhanced AI capabilities, and global compliance options, it's becoming the central operating system for modern work.

Sales teams can finally stop juggling multiple tools and manage customer relationships where conversations already happen. Enterprise admins get cleaner migrations and more intuitive controls. Global organizations gain the compliance flexibility they need. And everyone benefits from smarter automation and AI assistance.

The December 2025 updates show Slack's vision clearly: a unified platform where customer data, AI agents, and team collaboration converge seamlessly.