Salesforce has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Doti, a young company specializing in agentic enterprise search. With this move, the CRM giant aims to accelerate the development of a unified layer for search and knowledge discovery across its platform, with Slack serving as the central conversational interface.
The transaction, expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal Q4 2026, is contingent on usual closing conditions. While the company has not disclosed the exact amount, Israeli media estimate the deal at around $100 million, reflecting the increasing value of startups focused on AI applied to corporate data.
What does Doti do, and why does “agentic search” matter?
Doti is an enterprise search company built around generative AI and AI agents. Unlike traditional corporate search engines that simply retrieve relevant documents or messages, agentic search aims for more: understanding context, reasoning over information, and activating automated actions.
Practically, this means an employee can ask not only “What’s the status of this client?” but also request things like “Prepare a summary of the account, detect risks in the contract, and draft a response for the legal team.” This type of experience is precisely what Salesforce intends to embed natively into its ecosystem with Doti’s arrival.
Since the acquisition was announced, Salesforce has emphasized two key ideas:
- Unifying search across all data already within Salesforce (Sales, Service, Marketing, Tableau, Data Cloud…) and connected tools.
- Combining search with AI agents, so that finding information and executing actions become part of the same workflow.
Doti’s team will join Salesforce’s AI R&D hub in Israel, one of the most active centers worldwide for cybersecurity, data, and applied enterprise AI.
Slack as an “agentic operating system” for work
The move cannot be understood without Slack. Salesforce has been positioning its messaging platform as the centerpiece of its agentic AI strategy: an “agentic OS” where people and AI agents coexist as team members.
The idea is that the new search layer powered by Doti will primarily be consumed through Slack:
- Slack becomes the conversational interface for asking questions, exploring, and cross-referencing data across the organization.
- AI agents can appear in channels to suggest responses, open incidents, draw conclusions, or trigger workflows in Salesforce without leaving the chat.
- The search experience will shift from a static box at the top of the screen to a continuous dialogue, fueled by conversation context, files, and CRM records.
At the same time, Salesforce has taken steps to protect the strategic value of data flowing through Slack: it has tightened API usage terms to prevent external platforms from indefinitely indexing and storing messages. This move, which impacted third-party enterprise search tools, aligns with the goal of building its own search and AI layer over Slack and other Salesforce products.
With Doti integrated internally, this strategy gains strength: instead of relying on external tools, Salesforce controls the entire stack—from data to user interface.
Beyond search: towards a unified layer of knowledge and action
The company presents the Doti acquisition not just as a boost to search capabilities but as a step toward building a unified knowledge layer for the agentic enterprise:
- One entry point to find dispersed information across CRM, documents, wikis, tickets, repositories, or shared files.
- Semantic understanding and context: not just keyword matching, but grasping entities (clients, products, projects), relationships, and states.
- Automatable actions: enabling AI agents to create tasks, update records, generate reports, or initiate complex workflows based on results.
In this scenario, acquiring Doti complements other existing Salesforce initiatives like Einstein Copilot as a conversational assistant, Data Cloud as a corporate data lake, and Agentforce as a platform to create and orchestrate AI agents connected to business processes.
Doti offers specific expertise in modern enterprise search: indexing heterogeneous sources, maintaining updates, managing fine-grained permissions, and presenting actionable results for both humans and agents.
Fierce competition in the AI-powered enterprise search race
The move is part of an increasingly intense race to control the “knowledge access layer” within organizations. Microsoft pushes ahead with Copilot and Microsoft Search integration throughout its 365 ecosystem; Google advances with its combination of Workspace, Vertex AI, and enterprise search tools; numerous startups aim to position themselves as universal enterprise search engines.
Salesforce takes a different approach:
- Full control over CRM data, which is central to many businesses.
- Slack as a daily interface, where a large portion of corporate collaboration already occurs.
- An explicitly agentic vision, where people converse with agents that not only respond but also act on their behalf within company systems.
With Doti, this vision gains a critical component: a search foundation designed to support a volume of agents, users, and sources without crashing, while respecting permission models and compliance requirements.
Challenges: result quality, data governance, and trust
The technical aspect is only half the story. Integrating Doti into the Salesforce ecosystem brings several challenges that the company must address to ensure this investment has real organizational impact:
- Result quality and relevance: in complex environments, filtering noise and prioritizing important information will be as critical as deploying large AI models.
- Data governance and sovereignty: many European and other sensitive markets scrutinize where data is stored and indexed, who can train models with it, and the traceability of agent responses.
- Identity and permission management: in a setting where humans and agents access shared resources, identity control is key to resilience against attacks and misuse.
Salesforce has already signaled its focus here by restricting third-party access to Slack data and emphasizing “trustworthy AI.” If Doti’s integration results in powerful yet compliant search solutions, it could reinforce this messaging and help differentiate its offering in a risk-sensitive market.
What Salesforce customers can expect
In the near term, no immediate interface changes are expected, as the acquisition still needs to complete and the tech integration takes time. However, the strategic message to customers is clear:
- Search will stop being an “add-on” and become a core feature of the Salesforce+Slack experience.
- Generative AI projects and in-platform agents will benefit from a richer, more coherent, and actionable knowledge base.
- Organizations already standardized on Slack might see much of their routine workflows shift over the coming years to conversations with agents that understand both natural language and business context.
In a world where companies generate more data than ever and employees no longer want to “hunt across ten sites,” Salesforce’s investment in integrated agentic search makes strategic sense. Doti’s acquisition is probably just the beginning of broader consolidation regarding who controls the primary enterprise search experience.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Doti, and what does it mean to be an “agentic enterprise search” company?
Doti is a startup specializing in AI-based enterprise search that not only locates information but is designed to work alongside AI agents capable of interpreting context and triggering actions. Instead of merely returning links or records, its technology aims to turn each search into a starting point for automated workflows within the company’s systems.
How will the Doti acquisition affect Slack and Salesforce users?
The integration aims for users to search and act on organizational information directly from Slack and Salesforce apps. This should translate into smarter searches, better contextual responses, and the ability for AI agents to create tasks, update records, or produce documents without leaving their usual workspace.
How does Salesforce’s search strategy differ from other AI-enabled enterprise search solutions?
While others focus on being “neutral” search engines across multiple tools, Salesforce incorporates agentic search within its own CRM, analytics, and collaboration ecosystem. By controlling data sources (Salesforce, Slack, Tableau, Data Cloud), conversational interfaces, and AI agents, Salesforce aims to offer a more integrated and process-oriented experience.
What are the privacy and data governance implications of this acquisition?
Salesforce has recently restricted third-party access to Slack data to maintain strict control over information flow. With Doti integrated, data indexing, searching, and AI usage are expected to adhere to the same security, compliance, and sovereignty policies, which is especially crucial for regulated sectors.
Sources:
Salesforce – official announcement of Doti acquisition
Globes – financial coverage of the deal
Coverage of Salesforce’s agentic strategy and Slack’s role