Tenali in Slack
Message Tenali directly, tag it in a channel, send it files, and approve CRM updates — without leaving Slack.
Once Slack is connected, Tenali is a colleague you can message. Ask it something in a DM and you get the same answers you'd get in the web app. Tag it in a channel and it answers the whole team in the thread. Send it a document and it learns from it.
The two surfaces behave differently on purpose, and the difference is about privacy — a DM is yours, a channel is everyone's. That distinction is worth understanding before you roll it out to a team.
Ask Tenali in a DM
Open the Tenali app in your Slack sidebar and just type. A DM is scoped to you, so Tenali can draw on everything your account can already reach:
- Your meetings, summaries, and transcripts
- Your documents and connected sources
- Your action items
- Your CRM, if you've connected one
Things worth asking:
- "What did we discuss with Acme last week?"
- "What are my action items?"
- "What deals do we have open?"
- "Summarize my most recent meeting."
- "What did the customer say about pricing on the Contoso call?"
Tenali replies in the same DM. Long answers are trimmed to keep the message readable, with a link through to Tenali for the full picture.
Tag Tenali in a channel
Invite the Tenali app to a channel — type /invite @Tenali in the channel, or mention it and click Invite when Slack offers. Then mention it — @Tenali what's our current stance on SOC 2? — and it replies in that thread. Everyone in the channel sees the answer, which makes it useful for the questions that get asked over and over in #sales-help or #ask-product.
Tenali adds an 👀 reaction while it's working, then posts the answer and removes the reaction.
If you tag Tenali inside an existing thread, it reads that thread first — including its own earlier replies — so follow-ups like "@Tenali and what about SSO?" work without you repeating yourself. It reads a bounded slice of the thread, not the wider channel and not other threads, so on a long back-and-forth keep the key detail in your mention.
If nothing in the shared knowledge base covers the question, Tenali says so plainly — "I don't have anything on that in the shared knowledge base — someone from the team can follow up" — rather than guessing or falling back to private material.
To make something answerable in channels, an admin publishes it as an organization source. See Organization Sources & Question Analytics.
What Tenali can see, by surface
| Direct message | Channel mention | |
|---|---|---|
| Your meetings, summaries, transcripts | Yes | No — but see auto-captured answers above |
| Your documents and private sources | Yes | No |
| Your action items | Yes | No |
| Your CRM records | Yes | No |
| Sources published to the whole organization | Yes | Yes |
| Remembers the conversation | Yes — across the whole DM | Within the tagged thread only |
Send Tenali a file
Drop a document into the Tenali DM and it becomes one of your sources. Tenali confirms it's training, then messages you again when the document is ready:
✅ Q3-pricing.pdf is ready — ask me about it anytime.
A few limits apply:
- Up to 3 files per message. Send more and Tenali tells you to split them across messages.
- 25 MB per file.
- Standard document formats — the same ones the Sources page accepts.
Files sent in channels aren't ingested — only files in the DM with Tenali.
Update your CRM from Slack
Rolling outCRM write-back is off by default and switched on per workspace — there's no admin toggle and no plan tier, so contact support to have it enabled. You'll also need exactly one CRM connected to your own account.
Once it's on, you can ask Tenali in a DM to update your CRM from what was said on a call — "log yesterday's Contoso meeting on their deal", "set the next step on Acme to send the MSA".
Tenali doesn't write anything straight away. It posts a Proposed CRM changes card in the DM showing each change it wants to make: the action, the record, the field-by-field before and after, why it matched that record, the quote from the meeting it came from, and a match-confidence percentage.
Two buttons:
- Approve all — asks you to confirm ("Apply these changes? This will update your connected CRM."), then writes the batch.
- Discard — throws the whole batch away.
Once applied, Tenali replaces the card with the outcome and links to the records it touched. Large batches show the first 18 changes on the card with a note of how many more are in the batch — approving still covers all of them.
For what Tenali can and can't change, how records get matched, and how to undo, see Update Your CRM from Chat.
Limits worth knowing
- 20 messages a minute, per person. Past that Tenali asks you to slow down. It's generous for normal use and exists to stop a runaway loop.
- Answers are capped in length. Very long answers are trimmed with a link through to Tenali.
- Channel replies carry no links or mentions. Tenali strips URLs,
@here/@channel, and user mentions out of channel answers so it can't ping a room or leak an internal link. - In a channel, Tenali's memory is the thread and only the thread. It reads the thread it was tagged in, not the rest of the channel and not other threads. A mention that starts a brand-new thread has nothing earlier to go on.
- Huddles are captured by the desktop app, not by this app. Tenali does record Slack huddles — it treats Slack as a fully supported platform, with audio and screen capture and no time limit — but that runs through the desktop app rather than this integration. See Recording Modes.
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