Slate Summit 2026: Key Upgrades & New Features

Technolutions previewed a substantial pipeline of Slate enhancements at this year’s Summit. Here are the developments we believe enrollment teams should be watching most closely.

Slate Summit 2026 wrapped with a long list of upcoming features, but several themes stood out: a continued investment in user experience, more sophisticated automation, stronger data governance, and an expanding role for native AI.

Some changes are straightforward quality-of-life improvements. Others have the potential to change how institutions build and manage core Slate processes.

Here are the developments that caught our attention, and where we see the greatest potential impact for enrollment teams.

1. Campaigns are becoming more dynamic

One of the more consequential announcements is a new approach to campaigns. Rather than relying solely on rigid population definitions, teams will be able to establish an overarching campaign objective. Slate can then track whether individual records have met that objective and dynamically compress or move them through the communication flow.

That represents more than a new feature. It introduces a different way of thinking about campaign architecture, one built around the outcome you want to achieve rather than only the population you want to reach.

For institutions with large or increasingly complex communication plans, this could create opportunities to simplify campaign structures while making communications more responsive to individual student behavior.

What to consider: As this functionality becomes available, it may be worth revisiting existing campaign architecture rather than simply applying the new capability to processes built around the old model.

2. Query management is getting a governance upgrade

Query Library inheritance may be less visible to everyday Slate users, but it could be one of the most valuable changes for teams responsible for maintaining complex databases.

The ability to lock or unlock and link or unlink queries means institutions can establish parent queries whose updates flow to child queries, while protecting critical underlying logic from unintended changes.

For institutions managing many related queries, or environments in which numerous users have different levels of Slate expertise, this could provide a much stronger model for standardization and governance.

What to consider: Think beyond convenience. This creates an opportunity to establish clearer standards for query ownership, reusable logic, permissions, and ongoing database maintenance.

3. Workflows continue to expand

Technolutions is continuing to move functionality toward Workflows, including the ability to trigger and build workflows directly from form responses. At the same time, legacy Reader-enabled tools are being deprecated. Importantly, Slate is expected to automate much of that transition by creating modern Workflow versions of existing processes rather than requiring institutions to rebuild them manually.

Automation should reduce the migration burden, but institutions will still want to review the resulting workflows carefully.

What to consider: Treat automated migration as a starting point—not the end of the process. This is also an opportunity to ask whether a legacy process should simply be replicated or redesigned while it is being moved.

4. Native AI is becoming more embedded

AI is appearing in several parts of the Slate ecosystem. An on-demand AI data visualization capability is planned for live reporting, alongside the ability to extract report data into native PowerPoint formats. Slate's chatbot is also becoming more customizable, with conversations recorded and pinned directly to the student timeline. Slate Voice will add AI voice styling for custom voicemail greetings.

Taken together, these developments point toward AI becoming less of a standalone tool and more of an embedded capability within everyday Slate activity.

What to consider: The opportunity isn't simply to “use AI.” Institutions should identify where these capabilities can meaningfully improve staff productivity, student experience, reporting, or decision-making—and establish appropriate governance as adoption grows.

5. The everyday Slate experience is getting easier

Not every meaningful improvement requires rethinking a process. A series of interface changes should make Slate easier to navigate and manage. The next-generation homepage builder will support tabs, easier reordering, and embedded portals. Subtabs will provide additional ways to organize record information with separate read/write permissions.

Configuration tools are also being reorganized, modal windows can be maximized and minimized, and databases will be able to align tables to a specified local time zone at the configuration-key level. Even badge printing is getting attention, with support for universal badge sizes and formats rather than dependence on a single proprietary printer model.

Individually, these may seem incremental. Collectively, they can remove friction from the daily experience of staff who spend significant time working in Slate.

6. Tracking and communications are becoming more connected

Several additional features should help institutions connect communications and student activity more effectively.

Enhanced Ping tracking will improve UTM persistence and mapping back to Slate records. Review communications can be sent directly from Reader forms without creating a separate Deliver campaign. Staff will also be able to receive notifications when specified guests check in for events.

Entity permissions are becoming more granular as well, with separate view and write access and support for entity-scoped materials.

These improvements give institutions additional ways to connect engagement data, communications, permissions, and operational workflows within Slate.

What should Slate teams do now?

Many of these capabilities are expected to arrive in phases, so there is no need to redesign processes before the functionality reaches your environment. But there is value in preparing.

For the more consequential changes, particularly Campaigns, Query Library inheritance, Workflows, and native AI, teams should begin identifying the processes that could be affected. Document how they work today, where friction exists, and who needs to be involved in decisions about changing them.

The goal shouldn't be to adopt every new capability. It should be to determine which capabilities can make your Slate environment simpler, stronger, and more effective.

For the complete list of announced enhancements, see Technolutions’ Slate Summit 2026 Executive Summary.