HubSpot Co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah thinks chatbots are the "biggest wave" of technology innovation in the past two decades. 

At the company's annual INBOUND conference yesterday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center here, he championed the marketing and sales automation provider's GrowthBot.

Shah said the chatbots will connect marketers and sales teams to HubSpot's GrowthBot, which will marry artificial intelligence and machine learning with existing HubSpot's systems like customer relationship management (CRM).

At its Office event in New York City today, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams. Previously known as Skype Teams internally, this is the company’s answer to Slack.

The service — with Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, and web apps — is available as a preview in 181 countries and 18 languages. Microsoft is aiming for general availability in the first quarter of 2017, Office corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer wrote in a blog post. Until then, customers of Office 365 Business Essentials, Business Premium, and Enterprise E1, E3, and E5 tiers can turn on the preview (IT admins can go to the Office 365 admin center, click Settings, Services & Add Ins, and then Microsoft Teams). There are no plans for a free or consumer version.

Microsoft Teams is a web-based chat service aimed at businesses and schools that have multiple teams working on various projects at once. It features channels/groups, private messages, Skype video and audio calls, Office 365 integration (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files), OneDrive support, Power BI and Planner integrations, as well as emoji, Giphy images, memes, and so on. Threaded conversations, which Slack sorely lacks, are included in Microsoft Teams.