Agents That Watch: Event-Driven Detection and Response at Slack

[ Abstract ]

Inside the event-driven agentic detection and response system Slack's SecOps team has run in production since April 2026, told through a no-notice red team exercise it caught, correlated and mapped end to end before an analyst was notified.

Slack's Security Operations team has built an event-driven, agentic detection and response system, in production since April 2026. An event router creates observer agents that each watch one slice of the environment (an alert rule, a repository, a service), learn what normal looks like there, and emit structured signals. Watchdog agents read across those signals, correlate what no single observer can see, and autonomously launch agentic security investigations, which are surfaced to human analysts in Slack for real-time collaboration. Every agent action is recorded in a searchable event stream, so the team can audit and analyse agent behaviour. This talk tells the story through a real, no-notice red team exercise: an adversary simulation caught, correlated, and mapped end to end before an analyst was notified. It draws out the design principle behind it: don't model the attack, model the environment, and give it a memory.