CRMs are fantastic for managing sales data, but navigating them can be challenging—especially when you're on the go and juggling multiple client meetings. What if you could chat with your CRM data directly in Slack without the hassle of switching between apps?

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to make that happen.

Using Lindy, we’ll create an AI-powered Slack bot that connects to Salesforce, enabling you to query contacts, accounts, opportunities, and more. By the end, you’ll have instant access to data-driven insights—all without needing any coding or technical skills.

This tutorial shows you how to:

• Setup a Slack message trigger
• Link your CRM data
• Add Slack response skill
• Put your workflow to the test

Tools you’ll need for this tutorial:

• Lindy
• Salesforce account

Let’s get to it!

Step 1 - Setup a Slack message trigger

Log in to Lindy.ai and click the ‘New Lindy’ button in the sidebar to the left of your dashboard. 

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Click ‘Start from scratch’ in the popup window. 

This opens a blank canvas in the Lindy Flow Editor. Click the “Select Trigger” button to set up a workflow trigger.

Since we're setting up a Slack AI chatbot, search for "Slack" in the pop-up window and select the "Message Received" action.

In the action editor, connect your Slack instance to Lindy and choose the Slack channel where you’d like to chat with Lindy. We’ll be using “android-web-development.”

We’re not quite finished with this step yet. We need to filter out the messages the Lindy Slack bot sent so that only messages from humans in the channel will trigger the workflow, not the bot's responses.

To do this, go to Slack and add Lindy as an app to your workspace. Click the “Add apps” button in Slack to get started.

Quick tip: The Lindy Slack app will automatically be added to your account when you run a Slack-connected Lindy workflow. However, we need some data from the app before running the workflow, so we’re adding it manually at this stage.

Once the Lindy Slack app is added, right-click on its name in the left sidebar of your Slack workspace. Hover over the “Copy” option and select "Copy Link." This will copy the link to the Lindy Slack app.

Return to Lindy and enable the “Filter events on this trigger” option. Then, update the condition to Sender Id > Does not equal > [paste the ID from the copied URL]. The ID will be the alphanumeric string after the last forward slash in the URL. This ensures that messages from the Lindy Slack bot won’t trigger this workflow.

Step 2 - Link your CRM data

With the Slack trigger set up, the next step is to connect Salesforce CRM to Lindy. Simply click the “Perform an action” option in the “Select next step” dialog box.

Search for ‘Salesforce’ in the search box and select any actions you choose in the results. 

Quick Note: The action(s) selection does not matter in this step. We’re only adding it to connect Salesforce to Lindy. We’ll select our Salesforce actions in a future step.

In the action editor, authorize your Salesforce account to connect with Lindy.

Next, we’ll add an AI Agent step to handle all the CRM queries for us. To do this, simply click the “+” button after the Salesforce step in the workflow.

Choose the ‘Enter AI agent’ option. 

In the action editor, add a prompt to specify what you want the AI agent to do. In this case, we’ll instruct it to answer our questions in Slack using data from Salesforce.

Prompt:

Answer the user's question in Slack based on the data in Salesforce. If you can't find the answer to the user’s question, respond that you can't to the user in Slack.

We need to assign skills to our AI agent—these are actions it can perform on our behalf across different apps. To do this, click the “+” button at the bottom of the action editor under the ‘Skills’ category.

Search for and select the Salesforce app, then select all the Salesforce actions you want your AI agent to perform. We’ll include the search options and the "Get Account" action for this setup.

This next step might seem counterintuitive, but we need to delete the previous Salesforce step we added. To do this, click the three-dot icon and select the “Delete” option from the dropdown menu.

Important note: As mentioned earlier, we added this step just to sync our Salesforce account with the Lindy app since you can’t do this by simply adding an AI Agent “Skill.”

Step 3 - Add Slack response skill

In addition to the Salesforce actions, we must enable our AI agent to respond in Slack once the data has been retrieved. To do this, click the “+” button under Skills again.

Select the “Slack Thread” option under the Recommended actions in the pop-up window this time.

Now choose the ‘Send message’ option.

That’s it. Our workflow is completed. Click the ‘Save’ button at the top right corner of the screen. Now is the time to test our workflow. 

Step 4 - Put your workflow to the test

To test your Lindy Slack bot, go to the Slack channel you connected to Lindy and ask a question about your CRM data. Lindy will reply with the answer directly from your CRM!

You can also see the full audit trail of Lindy's steps in the “Task” view of the Lindy app.

And that’s it! You can now chat with your CRM data directly from Slack—no more switching between apps, messaging colleagues, or digging through old conversations for CRM answers.