They’re not looking to partner and innovate with us. They’re innovating on their terms and forcing us to either go along or jump ship.
A quiet change to Slack’s terms—blocking third-party access to message data unless it goes through Salesforce—isn't just an update. It's a calculated first move, signaling a shift as vendors trade openness and integration for control.
Tim Glomb is the VP of Digital, Content, and AI at martech firm Wunderkind and Co-Founder of RavenEQ, building AI agents for outdoor brands. Glomb warns that Salesforce’s recent move to restrict API access to Slack data is a deliberate strategy to lock customers in and a chilling test of what enterprise clients are willing to tolerate.
Slack attack: "They’re not looking to partner and innovate with us," Glomb says. "They’re innovating on their terms and forcing us to either go along or jump ship." That approach has real consequences: Wunderkind relies on the enterprise search tool Glean to unify knowledge across platforms like Google Drive and Jira, with key Slack channels feeding into the system. "That channel and all of its content feeds into Glean as an actual approved, confident knowledge base," he says. "Now we lose that, and we have to pivot and change that source of knowledge to a new medium."
Wheel talk: Glomb’s frustration boils down to a simple principle: the data belongs to his company, not Salesforce. He insists that Slack is merely a communication tool his team uses to create their own content and knowledge base. For Salesforce to gatekeep that information, he says, is absurd. "It'd be like selling me a bike but keeping the tires," he explains. "I can't do anything with a bike without the tires. Why are you keeping them? They're mine, I bought them."
CEOs have to decide, are we building a closed camp of control, or do you want to do business with somebody who says, 'How can I make your business move easier?' If the only way you can keep me as a client is to hold my data hostage, that's a horrible business play.
Agent provocateur: This forced pivot isn’t an unintended consequence, it's the entire point. Glomb believes this is just Salesforce "testing the waters" with a less business-critical application before potentially applying similar restrictions to its core CRM product. He suspects the motive is to make it difficult for customers to use competing AI tools, funneling them toward Salesforce’s own offerings. "It's funny, isn't it? Our Slack data will be available to their new tool, Salesforce Agentforce," says Glomb. "Why is my data available to the tool they want me to use, but not the one I've already chosen and paid for?"
Abandon ship: The control-oriented strategy is already having consequences, driving Glomb’s company to actively seek out alternatives. "We've already started building a life raft. If we have to get in it and get off of Salesforce, so be it," he says. "We are spinning up a new CRM on HubSpot for some marketing practices. We easily could have gone to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but decided not to because we're just not sure we can trust them."
Salesfarce: Glomb sees this as a defining moment that splits the software industry into two opposing camps: those who believe in control and those who champion open innovation. It forces executives across the industry to make a choice. "CEOs have to decide, are we building a closed camp of control, or do you want to do business with somebody who says, 'How can I make your business move easier?'" he asks. "If the only way you can keep me as a client is to hold my data hostage, that's a horrible business play."
