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Warning

On May 29, 2025, Slack implemented significant API changes that affect third-party applications, including Dust's Slack integration. These changes require commercial applications to be listed on the Slack Marketplace to maintain full functionality. Applications not on the Marketplace face severe rate limiting that makes data synchronization impractical.

Impact:

• Customers who installed or reconnected our Slack app after May 29th are experiencing degraded performance
• Existing installations remain functional until September 2025
• ⚠️ Customers with existing Dust Slack App installations from before May 29, 2025 must avoid re-authenticating or reinstalling Dust app as this would subject them to the lower rate limits
• Integration with Slack is temporarily suspended for new customers
• Our response includes splitting our application into separate Slack Bot and Connection components to meet Slack's new requirements
• We are actively working with Slack to list a dedicated application on their marketplace to restore full functionality of interactions with @dust

Please see our Status Report Document for all updates.

Overview

Dust's integration with Slack allows you to synchronize data from selected Slack channels (public or private). Dust agents can retrieve and utilize conversations and information shared within these channels to provide more relevant and contextual responses.

Setting up the Connection

Managing Permissions

• Adopt a shared-by-default approach—share everything except for the data you want to exclude from Dust.
• Admins can update permissions directly from the Slack connection in Dust by clicking on Manage Permissions

Updating the connection

• Admins can synchronize or unselect any Slack public channel by clicking on  Add / Remove data from the Dust Slack connection panel.

Link an agent to a specific channel.

To ensure your agent answers by default whenever a user summons @dust, set up your agent as Shared or Company, then toggle right the Slack integration setting and select the channel you want to link to your agent.

Summon any agent from synchronized channels.

If you don’t want to link one specific agent to one channel, you can use the ~ or the + sign to talk to any shared or company agent directly from Slack.

@dust ~agentname
or
@dust +agentname

Refresh Rate

A few seconds: Changes to channel selections in the Add / Remove data modal are reflected within a few seconds or minutes, depending on the size of the data. The actual sync of new messages from Slack channels is almost instantaneous, meaning Dust will have access to new messages as soon as they are posted.

Slack Connection Specificities

Data Synchronization

• Dust synchronizes text messages and information from selected public channels.
• Direct messages, and external files are not accessible by Dust.
• Messages from other bots (eg: Slack workflows) are not synchronized with Dust.
• When messages are not threaded, Dust points to the window of the channel message that represents the chunk whose URL is the first message. To optimize Dust synchronization and retrieval of Slack messages, we recommend formatting Slack threads as is: first message with the title and then create a thread.

Labels

Dust syncs the name and id of the channel from Slack messages and include them in the document above the content itself. They are accessible as channelId:xxxxxx and channelName:myChannel.

Labels will allow for additional filtering on data sources selected on the semantic search tool.