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Companies conduct stock splits to allow investors to purchase their shares at a more affordable price. Tech giant and Magnificent 7 leader Nvidia is no exception, having split its stock several times in the more than 25 years it’s been a publicly traded company.If demand for the AI processing leader’s shares continues to increase, pushing its stock price up further in the years to come, Nvidia may have to conduct more stock splits.  Here’s a history of Nvidia’s stock splits, and a look at how high its share price would be today had it not multiplied its shares.When did Nvidia conduct its first stock split?Nvidia conducted its first stock split on June 27, 2000, at which point each existing share split into two, and the company’s per-share price halved accordingly. Existing stockholders saw their shares double in number, but the value of their holdings did not change. That was more than a year after Nvidia conducted its IPO, on January 22, 1999, at $12 a share. Its stock was listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market shortly after. Related: How many employees does Nvidia have? From R&D to salesHow many times has Nvidia split its stock?After Nvidia conducted its first stock split in 2000, five other splits followed — in 2001, 2006, 2007, 2021, and 2024—for a total of six splits in its corporate history as of the end of March 2026.Post-split dateStock split actionJune 10, 202410-for-1July 20, 20214-for-1September 11, 20073-for-2April 7, 20062-for-1September 12, 20012-for-1June 27, 20002-for-1What happens when Nvidia conducts stock splits?In a stock split, the number of shares outstanding increases, and the per-share stock price decreases accordingly, such that the company’s market value remains unchanged. In a 4-1 split, for instance, each existing share becomes four shares, each worth a quarter of the previous share pric. After a split, existing shareholders own more shares, but the value of their stake remains unchanged, and their stake as a percentage of the company’s total equity remains as it was before the split. Similarly, the underlying company’s market capitalization remains the same. Boosting the number of shares makes more of Nvidia’s stock available for trading. Reducing the stock price as a result of the stock split enables individual investors to buy Nvidia stock at a price lower than if Nvidia had not conducted a stock split. For example, in its 2024 stock split, Nvidia was trading at around $1,200 a share. Following the 10-for-1 stock split, investors could own Nvidia at $120 a share. At the end of March 2026, Nvidia’s stock was trading at around $165.Investors can also benefit from the stock split. For example, when Nvidia conducted its 10-for-1 stock split in June 2024, it reduced the quarterly dividend per share to 1 cent from 4 cents. For shareholders who held the stock prior to the stock split, their dividends actually increased because they were receiving the equivalent of 10 cents per share on a pre-split basis. For investors who bought Nvidia’s stock after that stock split, they were entitled only to 1 cent per share on a post-split basis.NVIDIA also benefits from splitting its stock because it can use the higher share count to grant employees stock options and buy back stock at a lower price to boost earnings per share. More on Nvidia:Nvidia’s headquarters: An ode to space and 3D renderingHistory of Nvidia: Company timeline and factsJensen Huang’s net worth: The Nvidia CEO’s wealth & incomeWho approves Nvidia’s stock splits?Nvidia’s senior management can propose a stock split, but its board of directors must approve the split before it can move forward. Next, a majority of shareholders must approve of the action. Once approved to split its stock, Nvidia files an amendment to what’s known as the Restated Certificate of Incorporation, which results in a proportionate increase in the number of shares of its authorized common stock. Important dates for Nvidia’s stock splits There are a number of important dates to keep in mind during the implementation of a stock split. There is a specific date on which, at the close of market trading, Nvidia stockholders are considered shareholders of record for the upcoming stock split. After that, the newly split shares are allocated after the close of a particular trading day — this is known as the effective split date. On the following trading day, shares begin trading on a split-adjusted basis at the opening — this is known as the post-split date. All of these days typically take place within a week.What happens to fractional shares of Nvidia when it splits its stock?According to Nvidia, investors who hold fractional shares should consult their brokerage firms ahead of any proposed stock splits. The company won’t issue any new fractional shares as a result of a stock split.What would Nvidia’s stock price be in 2026 if it hadn’t conducted any stock splits?Nvidia’s stock price — had it not split its stock six times — can be calculated by multiplying the current stock price by the number of shares it split each share into on a reverse basis:Current Nvidia price x 10 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 2 x 2 = Nvidia stock price had the stock never been splitBased on the March 27, 2026, closing stock price of $167.52, Nvidia’s stock would be worth $160,819.20 had it never split its shares. At that price, the stock would be out of reach for most retail investors, unless they had access to fractional share trading. 

Ukrainian officials are urging World Gymnastics and the IOC to revoke Sofia Ilteryakova’s neutral status, citing her failure to face the Ukrainian flag during a medal ceremony.

President Donald Trump has reportedly told aides that he’s willing to end the U.S. military campaign against Iran even if the strait remains largely closed.

President Donald Trump reportedly told aides he would end the war in Iran without reopening the trade route.

The asset manager says innovation can proceed under current SEC rules as the Clarity Act faces debate in Congress.

The furniture and home furnishings sector has faced a downturn over the last two years that has resulted in sales declining by 0.82% in 2025 compared to 2024 adjusted, according to the CNBC/National Retail Federation Retail Monitor.Furniture and home furnishings sales continued to decline by 0.31% in January 2026, month-over-month seasonally, the report said.An epidemic of furniture store closings has spread across the nation, but often, the reason retailers have given for shutting down their stores has not been financial distress.Many independent furniture chains and stores have aging ownership, and the time has come for many of these owners to close their businesses for the final time and retire.Several of the furniture businesses closing have been multi-generational owners that have operated for decades. That’s the case with Greenbaum Home Furnishings, which has been family-owned since 1959.

The iconic 67-year-old furniture store liquidates its merchandise and closes down.Shutterstock

Greenbaum Home Furnishings closesGreenbaum Home Furnishings, which at one time operated four stores and a warehouse in Washington, announced on its Facebook page that it will close its last remaining store in Bellevue, Wash., after conducting a final retirement sale.”Retirement sale – After 67 years, we’re ready to close the business and sell off our entire inventory!” the company wrote in a March 27 Facebook post. “Shop early for the best selection because when it’s gone, it’s GONE!”The 67-year-old furniture retailer once operated stores in Bellevue, Tukwila, Tacoma, and Lynnwood, Wash., and a warehouse/service center in Woodinville, Wash.Furniture chain shut 3 stores in 1995Greenbaum closed its stores in Tukwila, Tacoma, and Lynnville, and laid off about half of its 93 employees in November 1995, according to the Seattle Times. The company continued operating the Bellevue store and the warehouse/service center for the last 30 years.The furniture store, which opened for business in 1959 as Ken’s Suburban Furniture, announced its retirement sale on March 19 on its Facebook page.Greenbaum has not indicated when its last day of operation will be.Customers can browse Greenbaum’s website for living room, dining room, bedroom, home office, accessories, and outdoor furniture pieces, though a trip to the store would be better for determining which products are still available.Another iconic furniture store closesAnother 67-year-old furniture store, Kelsey Furniture Company, announced on its website and social media that it must close its iconic Tuscola, Ill., location, since its store building has been sold.The company, which opened for business in 1959, will liquidate all merchandise and assets in a going-out-of-business sale that began March 5.More closings:67-year-old furniture retailer liquidates, closes downKroger grocery chain rival closes locations in restructuring143-year-old grocery chain closes more locations, lays off dozensThe owners are leaving the furniture business after posting a goodbye message: “…goodbye. Thank you to all our loyal customers for the past 67 years. We will miss all of you!”Kasala furniture chain liquidatedAnother Washington-based furniture company also recently closed for reasons other than economic hardship, as furniture store chain Kasala Modern Home Furnishings said it would close down its three stores in the Pacific Northwest, as the owners plan to retire from the industry and focus on other business and personal interests, according to its website.The Seattle-based furniture chain rolled out “The Great $5 Million Store Closing Sale” with a private sale that began Feb. 4 and expanded to the general public on Feb. 6, seeking “to sell our entire and complete stock to the bare walls as quickly as possible,” according to a message on its website at the time.Kasala seems to have successfully liquidated all of its inventory and shut down all of its stores, as the company’s website has been disabled.Related: Major supermarket chain closes more stores, lays off dozens

Meta Platforms recently disclosed a new stock option plan for its top executives that won’t pay out unless the company’s market cap skyrockets from roughly $1.36 trillion to $9 trillion by 2031. That would make Meta worth more than twice Nvidia’s value, currently the world’s most valuable company at around $4.1 trillion.For dividend stock investors watching Meta, the new plan provides a signal about where the company is betting its future and how confident it is getting there.Meta’s executive compensation plan: the $9 trillion betThe new compensation plan covers six of Meta’s top executives, including Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan, and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, each executive could unlock options worth up to $625.6 million if Meta hits the $9 trillion target, with the total potentially rising to $921 million per executive when accounting for restricted stock units, per a report from Fortune. The program is a “big bet” that will only reward executives if the company achieves “massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders,” a Meta spokesperson said in a CNBC interview. The plan also comes with urgency baked in. For just the first tranche of options to pay out, Meta’s stock would need to reach $1,116.08, an 100+% increase from current levels. And the clock is ticking.Meta’s dividend stock caseMeta initiated its first-ever dividend in early 2024, marking a turning point for the stock. It has since become one of the more interesting income plays among mega-cap technology companies.Key dividend metrics for META stock: Dividend per share (2025 actual): $2.10Dividend per share (2026 estimate): $2.24 (+6.9% year over year)Dividend expense (2026 estimate): $5.66 billionDividend per share (2030 estimate): $3.81Dividend CAGR (2025–2030): 12.6%Free cash flow per (2026 estimate): $10.85 billion Dividend payout ratio (2026 estimate): About 50%The free cash flow trajectory is what stands out most. Analysts expect it to drop sharply in 2026, down 75.1% year over year, as Meta pours capital into data centers, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and custom chips. But the same forecasts show free cash flow bouncing back sharply, more than doubling by 2028 and pushing toward$119 billion by 2030.That recovery story is the foundation of the dividend stock case.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is excluded from the executive compensation plan.Williams/Getty Images

AI is driving the core businessSpeaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in early March, Meta CFO Susan Li laid out a detailed picture of how AI is already moving the needle.She pointed to a Facebook ranking improvement that produced a 7% lift in organic content views, calling it the highest-revenue-impact product launch in two years. She also described Meta’s internal investment process as highly disciplined, with teams running experiments half-by-half and measuring returns over both one-year and four-year horizons.More on dividend stocks:Energy Transfer stands out as high-yield dividend stockIs Realty Income the best monthly dividend stock to buy nowVerizon remains a top dividend stock for passive income”The work that we have done has turned out to be more additive than we expected. You make the ads perform better. That drives costs down for advertisers. That drives their budgets on us up,” Li said.She also acknowledged that Meta has been playing catch-up on data-center capacity, noting that much of what the company is building now won’t come online until 2027 or later.Still, she framed the spending as investing from a position of strength and not desperation.Meta spent much of 2025 overhauling its artificial intelligence division after its Llama 4 family of models failed to generate the developer excitement the company had hoped for. As part of that revamp, Meta invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its new Meta Superintelligence Labs unit, CNBC reported. What’s next for META stockMeta’s stock is down roughly 32% from all-time highs, trailing most of its megacap peers. But the forward estimates tell a different story.Revenue is projected to climb from $200.97 billion in 2025 to $448.05 billion by 2030. EBITDA margins are expected to expand from 56.5% in 2026 to 67.2% by 2030. EPS on a GAAP basis is forecast to rise from $29.60 in 2026 to $57.61 by 2030.Out of the 45 analysts covering META stock, 40 recommend “buy,” and five recommend “hold.” The average META stock price target is $864, 61% above the current price targets. For dividend stock investors, the combination of a rising payout, improving margins, and a management team with real skin in the game makes Meta worth a close look, even if the $9 trillion target feels like science fiction right now.Related: This megacap AI stock pays over $12 billion in annual dividends

Here’s an inside look at Holly Smith’s first 90 days at P.F. Chang’s and how it can help your marketing team.

“Your AI? It’s my AI now.” The line came from Etay Maor, VP of Threat Intelligence at Cato Networks, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat at RSAC 2026 — and it describes exactly what happened to a U.K. CEO whose OpenClaw instance ended up for sale on BreachForums. Maor’s argument is that the industry handed AI agents the kind of autonomy it would never extend to a human employee, discarding zero trust, least privilege, and assume-breach in the process.The proof arrived on BreachForums three weeks before Maor’s interview. On February 22, a threat actor using the handle “fluffyduck” posted a listing advertising root shell access to the CEO’s computer for $25,000 in Monero or Litecoin. The shell was not the selling point. The CEO’s OpenClaw AI personal assistant was. The buyer would get every conversation the CEO had with the AI, the company’s full production database, Telegram bot tokens, Trading 212 API keys, and personal details the CEO disclosed to the assistant about family and finances. The threat actor noted the CEO was actively interacting with OpenClaw in real time, making the listing a live intelligence feed rather than a static data dump.Cato CTRL senior security researcher Vitaly Simonovich documented the listing on February 25. The CEO’s OpenClaw instance stored everything in plain-text Markdown files under ~/.openclaw/workspace/ with no encryption at rest. The threat actor didn’t need to exfiltrate anything; the CEO had already assembled it. When the security team discovered the breach, there was no native enterprise kill switch, no management console, and no way to inventory how many other instances were running across the organization.OpenClaw runs locally with direct access to the host machine’s file system, network connections, browser sessions, and installed applications. The coverage to date has tracked its velocity, but what it hasn’t mapped is the threat surface. The four vendors who used RSAC 2026 to ship responses still haven’t produced the one control enterprises need most: a native kill switch.The threat surface by the numbersMetricNumbersSourceInternet-facing instances~500,000 (March 24 live check)Etay Maor, Cato Networks (exclusive RSAC 2026 interview)Exposed instances with security risks30,000+ observed during scan windowBitsightExploitable via known RCE15,200 instancesSecurityScorecardHigh-severity CVEs3 (highest CVSS: 8.8)NVD (24763, 25157, 25253)Malicious skills on ClawHub341 in Koi audit (335 from ClawHavoc); 824 by mid-FebKoiClawHub skills with critical flaws13.4% of 3,984 analyzedSnykAPI tokens exposed (Moltbook)1.5 millionWizMaor ran a live Censys check during an exclusive VentureBeat interview at RSAC 2026. “The first week it came out, there were about 6,300 instances. Last week, I checked: 230,000 instances. Let’s check now… almost half a million. Almost doubled in one week,” Maor said. Three high-severity CVEs define the attack surface: CVE-2026-24763 (CVSS 8.8, command injection via Docker PATH handling), CVE-2026-25157 (CVSS 7.7, OS command injection), and CVE-2026-25253 (CVSS 8.8, token exfiltration to full gateway compromise). All three CVEs have been patched, but OpenClaw has no enterprise management plane, no centralized patching mechanism, and no fleet-wide kill switch. Individual administrators must update each instance manually, and most have not.The defender-side telemetry is just as alarming. CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensors already detect more than 1,800 distinct AI applications across its customer fleet — from ChatGPT to Copilot to OpenClaw — generating around 160 million unique instances on enterprise endpoints. ClawHavoc, a malicious skill distributed through the ClawHub marketplace, became the primary case study in the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz flagged it in his RSAC 2026 keynote as the first major supply chain attack on an AI agent ecosystem.AI agents got root access. Security got nothing.Maor framed the visibility failure through the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) during the RSAC 2026 interview. Most organizations are failing at the first step: security teams can’t see which AI tools are running on their networks, which means the productivity tools employees bring in quietly become shadow AI that attackers exploit. The BreachForums listing proved the end state. The CEO’s OpenClaw instance became a centralized intelligence hub with SSO sessions, credential stores, and communication history aggregated into one location. “The CEO’s assistant can be your assistant if you buy access to this computer,” Maor told VentureBeat. “It’s an assistant for the attacker.”Ghost agents amplify the exposure. Organizations adopt AI tools, run a pilot, lose interest, and move on — leaving agents running with credentials intact. “We need an HR view of agents. Onboarding, monitoring, offboarding. If there’s no business justification? Removal,” Maor told VentureBeat. “We’re not left with any ghost agents on our network, because that’s already happening.”Cisco moved toward an OpenClaw kill switchCisco President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel framed the stakes during an exclusive VentureBeat interview at RSAC 2026. “I think of them more like teenagers. They’re supremely intelligent, but they have no fear of consequence,” Patel said of AI agents. “The difference between delegating and trusted delegating of tasks to an agent … one of them leads to bankruptcy. The other one leads to market dominance.” Cisco launched three free, open-source security tools for OpenClaw at RSAC 2026. DefenseClaw packages Skills Scanner, MCP Scanner, AI BoM, and CodeGuard into a single open-source framework running inside NVIDIA’s OpenShell runtime, which NVIDIA launched at GTC the week before RSAC. “Every single time you actually activate an agent in an Open Shell container, you can now automatically instantiate all the security services that we have built through Defense Claw,” Patel told VentureBeat. AI Defense Explorer Edition is a free, self-serve version of Cisco’s algorithmic red-teaming engine, testing any AI model or agent for prompt injection and jailbreaks across more than 200 risk subcategories. The LLM Security Leaderboard ranks foundation models by adversarial resilience rather than performance benchmarks. Cisco also shipped Duo Agentic Identity to register agents as identity objects with time-bound permissions, Identity Intelligence to discover shadow agents through network monitoring, and the Agent Runtime SDK to embed policy enforcement at build time.Palo Alto made agentic endpoints a security category of their ownPalo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora characterized OpenClaw-class tools as creating a new supply chain running through unregulated, unsecured marketplaces during an exclusive March 18 pre-RSA briefing with VentureBeat. Koi found 341 malicious skills on ClawHub in its initial audit, with the total growing to 824 as the registry expanded. Snyk found 13.4% of analyzed skills contained critical security flaws. Palo Alto Networks built Prisma AIRS 3.0 around a new agentic registry that requires every agent to be logged before operating, with credential validation, MCP gateway traffic control, agent red-teaming, and runtime monitoring for memory poisoning. The pending Koi acquisition adds supply chain visibility specifically for agentic endpoints.Cato CTRL delivered the adversarial proofCato Networks’ threat intelligence arm Cato CTRL presented two sessions at RSAC 2026. The 2026 Cato CTRL Threat Report, published separately, includes a proof-of-concept “Living Off AI” attack targeting Atlassian’s MCP and Jira Service Management. Maor’s research provides the independent adversarial validation that vendor product announcements cannot deliver on their own. The platform vendors are building governance for sanctioned agents. Cato CTRL documented what happens when the unsanctioned agent on the CEO’s laptop gets sold on the dark web.Monday morning action listRegardless of vendor stack, four controls apply immediately: bind OpenClaw to localhost only and block external port exposure, enforce application allowlisting through MDM to prevent unauthorized installations, rotate every credential on machines where OpenClaw has been running, and apply least-privilege access to any account an AI agent has touched.Discover the install base. CrowdStrike’s Falcon sensor, Cato’s SASE platform, and Cisco Identity Intelligence all detect shadow AI. For teams without premium tooling, query endpoints for the ~/.openclaw/ directory using native EDR or MDM file-search policies. If the enterprise has no endpoint visibility at all, run Shodan and Censys queries against corporate IP ranges.Patch or isolate. Check every discovered instance against CVE-2026-24763, CVE-2026-25157, and CVE-2026-25253. Instances that cannot be patched should be network-isolated. There is no fleet-wide patching mechanism.Audit skill installations. Review installed skills against Cisco’s Skills Scanner or the Snyk and Koi research. Any skill from an unverified source should be removed immediately.Enforce DLP and ZTNA controls. Cato’s ZTNA controls restrict unapproved AI applications. Cisco Secure Access SSE enforces policy on MCP tool calls. Palo Alto’s Prisma Access Browser controls data flow at the browser layer.Kill ghost agents. Build a registry of every AI agent running. Document business justification, human owner, credentials held, and systems accessed. Revoke credentials for agents with no justification. Repeat weekly.Deploy DefenseClaw for sanctioned use. Run OpenClaw inside NVIDIA’s OpenShell runtime with Cisco’s DefenseClaw to scan skills, verify MCP servers, and instrument runtime behavior automatically.Red-team before deploying. Use Cisco AI Defense Explorer Edition (free) or Palo Alto Networks’ agent red-teaming in Prisma AIRS 3.0. Test the workflow, not just the model.The OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10, published using ClawHavoc as its primary case study, provides a standards-grade framework for evaluating these risks. Four vendors shipped responses at RSAC 2026. None of them is a native enterprise kill switch for unsanctioned OpenClaw deployments. Until one exists, the Monday morning action list above is the closest thing to one.

Slack today announced more than 30 new capabilities for Slackbot, its AI-powered personal agent, in what amounts to the most sweeping overhaul of the workplace messaging platform since Salesforce acquired it for $27.7 billion in 2021. The update transforms Slackbot from a simple conversational assistant into a full-spectrum enterprise agent that can take meeting notes across any video provider, operate outside the Slack application on users’ desktops, execute tasks through third-party tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and even serve as a lightweight CRM for small businesses — all without requiring users to install anything new.The announcement, timed to a keynote event that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is headlining Tuesday morning, arrives less than three months after Slackbot first became generally available on January 13 to Business+ and Enterprise+ subscribers. In that short window, Slack says the feature is on track to become the fastest-adopted product in Salesforce’s 27-year history, with some employees at customer organizations reporting they save up to 90 minutes per day. Inside Salesforce itself, teams claim savings of up to 20 hours per week, translating to more than $6.4 million in estimated productivity value.”Slackbot is smart. It’s pleasant, and I think it’s endlessly useful,” Rob Seaman, Slack’s interim CEO and former chief product officer, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview ahead of the announcement. “The upper bound of use cases is effectively limitless for it.”The release signals Slack’s clearest bid yet to become what Seaman and the company’s leadership describe as an “agentic operating system” — a single surface through which workers interact with AI agents, enterprise applications, and one another. It also marks a direct challenge to Microsoft, which has spent the past two years embedding its Copilot assistant across the entirety of its productivity stack.From simple chatbot to autonomous coworker: six new capabilities that redefine what Slackbot can doThe features announced Tuesday organize around several major capability areas, each designed to push Slackbot well beyond the role of a chatbot and into something closer to an autonomous digital coworker.The most foundational may be what Slack is calling AI-Skills — reusable instruction sets that define the inputs, the steps, and the exact output format for a given task. Any team can build a skill once and deploy it on demand. Slackbot ships with a built-in library for common workflows, but users can also create their own. Critically, Slackbot can recognize when a user’s prompt matches an existing skill and apply it automatically, without being explicitly told to do so. “Think of these as topics or instructions — basically instructions for Slackbot to perform a repeat task that the user might want to do, that they can share with others, or a company might be able to set up for their whole company,” Seaman explained.Deep research mode gives Slackbot the ability to conduct extended, multi-step investigations that take approximately four minutes to complete — a significant departure from the instant-response paradigm of most enterprise chatbots. Slack chose not to demonstrate this feature on stage at the keynote, Seaman said, precisely because its value lies in depth, not speed. MCP client integration, meanwhile, allows Slackbot to make tool calls into external systems through the Model Context Protocol, meaning it can now create Google Slides, draft Google Docs, and interact with the more than 2,600 apps in the Slack Marketplace and the 6,000-plus apps built over two decades for the Salesforce AppExchange. “We’re going all in on MCP for Slackbot,” Seaman said. “MCP clients and MCP servers are becoming very mature.”Meeting intelligence allows Slackbot to listen to any meeting — not just Slack huddles, but calls on Zoom, Google Meet, or any other provider — by tapping into the user’s local audio through the desktop application. It captures discussions, summarizes decisions, surfaces action items, and because Slackbot is natively connected to Salesforce, it can log actions and update opportunities directly in the CRM. Slackbot on Desktop extends the agent outside the Slack container entirely, while voice mode adds text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities, with full speech-to-speech functionality under active development.How Anthropic’s Claude powers Slackbot — and why keeping it affordable is the hardest partSlackbot is built on Anthropic’s Claude model, a detail Seaman confirmed ahead of the keynote, where Anthropic’s leadership will appear alongside Slack executives on stage. The partnership underscores the deepening relationship between the two companies: Anthropic’s technology powers the reasoning layer, while Slack’s “context engineering” — the process of determining exactly which information from a user’s channels, files, and messages should be fed into the model’s context window — determines the quality and relevance of every response.Managing the cost of that reasoning at enterprise scale is one of the most significant technical and financial challenges the team faces. Slackbot is included in Business+ and Enterprise+ plans at no additional consumption charge — a deliberate strategic choice that places the burden of cost optimization squarely on Slack’s engineering team rather than on customers.”A lot of what we’ve done is in the context engineering phase, working really closely with Anthropic to make sure that we’re optimizing the RAG phase, optimizing our system prompts and everything, to make sure we’re getting the right amount of context into the context window and not obviously making fiscally irresponsible decisions for ourselves,” Seaman said. Starting in April, Slackbot will also become available in a limited sampling capacity to users on Slack’s free and Pro plans — a move designed to drive conversion up the pricing tiers.Desktop AI and meeting transcription are powerful, but they raise hard questions about workplace surveillanceThe extension of Slackbot beyond the Slack application window — particularly its ability to listen to meetings and view screen content — raises immediate questions about employee surveillance, especially in large enterprise environments where tens of thousands of workers may be subject to company-wide IT policies.Seaman was emphatic that every capability is user-initiated and opt-in. Slackbot cannot listen to audio unless the user explicitly tells it to take meeting notes. It cannot view the desktop autonomously; in its current form, users must manually capture and share screenshots. And it inherits every permission the organization has already established in Slack.”Everything is user opt-in. That’s a key tenet of Slack,” Seaman said. “It’s not rogue looking at your desktop or autonomously looking at your desktop. It’s very important to us, and very important to our enterprise customers.” On Slackbot’s memory feature — which allows it to learn user preferences and habits over time — Seaman said the company has no plans to make that data available to administrators. Users can flush their stored preferences at any time simply by telling Slackbot to do so.Slack’s native CRM is a Trojan horse designed to capture startups before they outgrow itAmong the most important features in Tuesday’s release is a native CRM built directly into Slack, targeting small businesses that haven’t yet adopted a dedicated customer relationship management system.The logic is straightforward: small companies typically adopt Slack early in their lifecycle, often on the free tier, and their customer conversations already happen in channels and direct messages. Slack’s native CRM reads those channels, understands the conversations, and automatically keeps deals, contacts, and call notes up to date. When companies are ready to scale, every record is already connected to Salesforce — no migrations, no starting over.”The hypothesis is that along the way, companies are effectively going to have moments where a CRM might matter,” Seaman said. “Our goal is to make it available to them as a default, so as they are starting their company and their company is growing, it’s just right there for them. They don’t have to think about going off and procuring another tool.”The feature also represents a response to a growing competitive threat. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, a wave of startups and individual developers have begun “vibe coding” their own lightweight CRMs, emboldened by the capabilities of large language models. By embedding CRM directly into Slack — the tool many of those same startups already depend on — Salesforce aims to make the procurement of a separate system unnecessary.Slack says it has a context advantage over Microsoft and Google — but can it last?The announcements arrive at a moment of intense competitive pressure. Microsoft has integrated Copilot across its entire productivity suite, giving it a distribution advantage that reaches into virtually every Fortune 500 company. Google has been similarly aggressive with Gemini across Workspace. And standalone AI tools from OpenAI to Anthropic threaten to fragment the enterprise AI experience.Seaman took a measured approach when asked directly about competitive positioning, invoking a mantra he said Slack uses internally: “We are competitor aware, but customer obsessed.””I think there are two things that really stand out. One, we have a context advantage — if you look at the way people use Slack, they love it. They use it so much, constantly communicating with their colleagues, openly thinking, working in public project channels. Two is the user experience. We focus so much on how our product feels in people’s hands.”That context advantage is real but not guaranteed. Slack’s strength lies in the richness and volume of conversational data flowing through its channels — data that, when fed into an AI model, can produce responses with a degree of organizational awareness that competitors struggle to match. But Microsoft’s Teams captures similar conversational data, and its deep integration with Windows, Office, and Azure gives it a systems-level advantage that Slack, operating as a single application, cannot easily replicate.Starting this summer, every new Salesforce customer will receive Slack automatically provisioned and AI-powered from day one — a bundling play that ensures the messaging platform reaches the broadest possible enterprise audience. Salesforce reported $41.5 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2026, up 10% year-over-year, with Agentforce ARR reaching $800 million. But Wall Street has remained skeptical about whether AI will ultimately erode demand for traditional enterprise software, and Salesforce’s stock has underperformed the broader Nasdaq over the past year. More Slack users in more organizations gives AI-driven features more surface area to prove their value.Slack’s biggest bet is that it can do everything without losing the simplicity that made it belovedTuesday’s launch is the first major product release under Seaman’s leadership. He assumed the interim CEO role after former Slack CEO Denise Dresser departed in December 2025 to become OpenAI’s first chief revenue officer — a move that signaled even Salesforce’s own executives felt the gravitational pull of frontier AI companies. The overarching thesis embedded in the announcement — that Slack is evolving from a messaging platform into an operating system for AI agents — is as risky as it is ambitious.”One of the fundamental tenets of an operating system is that it obscures the complexity of the hardware from the end user,” Seaman said. “There are thousands of apps and agents out there, and that can be overwhelming. I think that’s our job — to be the OS that obscures that complexity, so you just use it like it’s a communication tool.”When asked whether Slack risks losing its simplicity by trying to do everything, Seaman didn’t flinch. “There’s absolutely a risk,” he said. “That’s what keeps us up at night.”It’s a remarkably candid admission from the leader of a platform that just launched 30 new features in a single day. The company that won the hearts of millions of workers with playful emoji reactions and frictionless messaging is now betting its future on meeting transcription, CRM pipelines, desktop agents, and enterprise orchestration. Whether Slack can absorb all of that ambition without losing the thing that made people love it in the first place isn’t just a product question — it’s the $27.7 billion question that Salesforce is still trying to answer.