Slack and Teams bots for business: what they’re good for and what they cost

A Slack bot or Teams bot lets staff report, request, approve or look things up without leaving the chat they already have open. Done well, requests stop getting lost in direct messages. Approvals stop waiting for someone to log in to a portal, and you get a record of who did what.

Most businesses can get the simple version from tools they already pay for. Slack’s Workflow Builder comes with every paid plan, and Teams has a built-in Approvals app. A custom bot earns its cost when it has to reach your own systems, serve Slack and Teams at once, or handle something sensitive. This guide covers what each route costs, how the platforms work and what to ask a supplier.

What are Slack and Teams bots actually good for?

A bot is a small app that lives inside Slack or Teams. Staff message it, click its buttons or fill in its forms, and it does something in another system. Five jobs suit it well:

• Requests. Holiday, kit, system access, a new supplier. A form in chat beats an email that nobody owns.
• Approvals. The approver gets a message with Approve and Reject buttons, and the decision is logged.
• Reporting. Incidents, near misses, IT faults, or concerns about conduct at work.
• Look-ups. “What’s our mileage rate?” or “Where’s order 4471?”, answered from your policies or systems.
• Notifications. A new lead, a failed payment or a contract about to expire, sent to the right channel.

What they share: the job is short, it starts with a person, and the result belongs in a record somewhere else.

Where a bot is the wrong answer

• Long or complex forms. Twenty fields with attachments and conditional sections belong on a web page. A bot can link to it.
• People who aren’t in Slack or Teams. Customers, contractors and frontline staff without an account can’t use it.
• Work that needs a screen. Reviewing a contract or reconciling accounts needs more space than a chat window.
• A process nobody can describe. If no one can say how a request should flow today, a bot will only automate the confusion.

How does a Slack bot work?

A Slack app is software you install into your workspace and allow to act there. The bot is the part that sends and receives messages. Staff can reach it by direct message, by buttons in a message, or by a slash command such as /report, which can open a form.

Permissions and scopes

Every Slack app asks for scopes, the specific permissions that define what it can see and do. Posting messages is one scope. Reading public channels is another. The person installing the app sees the list and approves it. Slack’s own guidance tells developers to request the minimum their app needs.

Ask for the scope list before you install anything. A reporting bot needs to send and receive its own messages. It doesn’t need to read every channel in your workspace.

Admin approval

By default, members can install apps without asking anyone. Workspace owners can switch on app approval, so new apps need sign-off first. When an owner approves an app, they’re approving the scopes it will use. If you handle anything sensitive in Slack, turn this on before you add bots.

Slack’s own AI, and what it costs

Slack now builds in AI of its own. Its UK pricing page lists these prices per user a month:

The AI split comes from Slack’s guide to its AI features, which calls Slackbot “your personal AI agent”. Slack says customer data is never used to train large language models.

For a 20-person team, Business+ paid yearly is £240 a month. That buys capable general AI inside Slack. It doesn’t buy a bot that files a report into your case system or checks stock in your warehouse software.

How does a Teams bot work?

In Teams, a bot is part of a Teams app. The app package tells Teams what the bot is called, where it can appear and what it may do. A bot can be installed for one person, in a group chat or in a team’s channels. By default, a bot in a channel only receives messages that @mention it. Reading everything needs extra permission.

Three ways to build one

• The Teams SDK. Microsoft’s toolkit for building Teams bots and agents in code, in TypeScript, C# or Python. This is the custom route.
• Azure Bot Service. Microsoft’s service for registering a bot and connecting it to channels. Teams and Slack are both standard channels, with unlimited messages even on the free tier. You still pay for the servers your bot runs on.
• Copilot Studio. Microsoft’s low-code tool, where someone who isn’t a developer builds an agent from topics, documents and connectors.

Copilot Studio pricing in the UK

Microsoft’s UK Copilot Studio page sets out two routes:

• With Microsoft 365 Copilot. This costs £23.10 per user a month, paid yearly and excluding VAT. Licensed staff can build and use internal agents at no extra cost. Microsoft’s licensing notes add that, for licensed staff, most answers from agents in Teams don’t use Copilot Studio credits.
• Standalone. £153.80 a month buys a pack of 25,000 Copilot Credits, or you can pay as you go. You need this for staff without Copilot licences, or to publish outside Microsoft 365. An Azure subscription is required.

Credits are hard to forecast, because the number used depends on how complex each response is. Unused credits don’t carry over to the next month. Our guide to what an AI agent costs to build and run works through the Copilot sums in more detail.

Admin consent

Teams admins decide which apps staff can use. In the Teams admin center, they allow or block apps for everyone or for named people. A bot built for your organisation is a custom app. An admin uploads it, or approves one a member submits, and it appears under “Built for your org”.

Data access has its own layer. With resource-specific consent, a team owner can let a bot read one team’s messages without opening up the whole organisation. Ask which permissions a bot requests, and why it needs each one.

Can one bot serve both Slack and Teams?

Yes. If part of your business works in Slack and part in Teams, it should.

The pattern is one back end, which holds the logic, the data and the connections to your systems. On top sit two thin front ends, one per platform, which handle messages, buttons and forms. Azure Bot Service can connect a single bot to both Teams and Slack, translating between their formats.

The two platforms don’t look the same, though. Slack forms and Teams cards behave differently, so each front end needs its own design and testing. Budget for two front ends, not one with a checkbox. The prize is that a report, request or approval is the same record, whichever app it came from.

How do you keep a bot safe under UK GDPR?

A bot that takes requests or reports is processing personal data, often about other people. Four questions matter.

Where does the data live?

There are two places: inside Slack or Teams, and in your bot’s own back end.

• Slack. Data residency in London is available on Business+ and Enterprise. It covers messages, files and bot-generated messages. Member profiles and channel membership aren’t covered, and may be stored elsewhere.
• Teams. For a tenant set up in the UK, Microsoft’s Product Terms commit to storing Teams chat messages at rest in the UK.
• Your back end. That’s your choice, and your supplier’s. Host it in a UK region and put that in the contract.

What can the bot read?

Only what its scopes or permissions allow. The ICO’s data minimisation principle says personal data should be “adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary”. A request bot that can read every channel fails that test. Our AI and GDPR governance guide covers the wider checks.

Is there an audit trail?

Approvals are only useful if you can prove them later. Teams Approvals logs each request and decision in Microsoft Purview. In Slack, audit logs are listed on Enterprise+ only. A custom bot should keep its own log of who asked, who decided and when, whatever plan you’re on.

Can people report anonymously?

This is the hard one. Slack and Teams always tell the bot who sent each message. Anonymity therefore has to be built into the back end: what it stores, what it passes on and who can see it. The conversation may also sit in the reporter’s own chat history, under your workspace’s retention and export rules. Ask a supplier to show you exactly where the reporter’s identity goes.

A worked example: reporting misconduct from Slack and Teams

Vault, now part of Diligent, is a speak-up platform for reporting misconduct at work. We became its engineering team. Nobody should have to find a portal to speak up. So we built reporting into the Vault apps on iOS and Android, the web, Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Every channel offers the same three choices:

• With a name. A normal report, straight to the right team.
• Anonymously. Nobody knows who sent it, but the investigator can still ask follow-up questions.
• GoTogether. The report is held until someone else reports the same person. Then both reach the employer together, and neither knows who the other is.

In Slack and Teams, staff start a report with a command or by messaging the Vault app directly, and it takes them through each step. Anonymous reports work differently. Workspace admins can often read chat messages in Slack and Teams, so an anonymous report moves out of the chat and into Vault’s web app. Reporters carry on the conversation wherever suits them: the mobile apps, the web, Slack, Teams or WhatsApp.

AI translation covers every report, conversation and follow-up. The person speaking up writes in their own language, and the investigator reads and replies in theirs. Every report becomes a case someone owns, whichever channel it came from. One back end serves every channel.

When Diligent acquired Vault in May 2025, it kept us on. It’s the kind of HR technology where trust is the whole product.

What does a Slack or Teams bot cost?

There are three routes, and most businesses should try them in order.

Configure costs

For 20 staff, Slack Business+ paid yearly is £240 a month. Microsoft 365 Copilot for the same team is £462 a month before VAT. A Copilot Studio credit pack is £153.80 a month, shared across your agents. Our guide to buying, configuring or building AI helps you tell which you need.

Build costs

A custom bot is a small software project. Four things drive the price:

1. How many systems it connects to. HR, finance, ticketing and CRM each add work.
2. One platform or two. A second front end adds design and testing.
3. Whether it uses AI. Understanding plain language or translating adds model fees and testing.
4. How sensitive the data is. Anonymity, retention and audit trails need careful design.

For a bot built around AI, in our experience a simple agent can cost as little as £500 to set up. Realistically, £5,000 is the lower bound for a well-managed, organised project. Where yours lands depends mostly on the state of your data and what the bot has to do.

Running costs are hosting, any AI model fees and someone to keep it working when Slack or Microsoft change their platforms. Azure Bot Service charges nothing for messages on standard channels such as Teams and Slack. The servers behind the bot are billed separately.

What should you ask a supplier?

• Which scopes or permissions will the bot request, and why does it need each one?
• Will it work in Slack, Teams or both, and is it one back end?
• Where will our data be stored, including the bot’s own database and logs?
• How is anonymity delivered, and who could trace a report back to its sender?
• What does it log for audit, and how long is that kept?
• Does it use AI? If so, which provider, and is our data used to train their models?
• Who fixes it when Slack or Microsoft change their platform?
• Who owns the code and the app registrations in Slack and Microsoft?

A supplier who can’t answer these in plain English is telling you something.

Where Contic fits

If you want staff to report, request or approve inside Slack or Teams, start with a free first chat. You’ll get guidance and advice on what we’d do, from people who do this all the time. If Workflow Builder or Teams Approvals will do the job, you’ll hear that first. A paid discovery doesn’t have to follow.

Our AI team is AI-augmented, and senior engineers review and own everything that ships. You own the code and IP, and our contract assigns it to your company in writing. We’re registered with the ICO and hold Cyber Essentials Plus. To talk through a specific bot, get in touch.