What just happened? Communication is key for any team, but it can be hard to keep track of everything. That's why Slack has announced a major generative AI upgrade to reduce meeting meltdowns and make it easier to access all those need-to-know details that end up getting buried in endless message threads.
Slack has jumped on the generative artificial intelligence bandwagon, with an AI search bot that promises easier access to important details that can get lost in all your messages. The new tool will help users sift through conversations, summarize threads, and answer questions.
If you've used AI chatbots (who hasn't?), the search tool's functionality will feel familiar. You can ask questions in plain language and the bot will attempt to provide helpful answers by digging into the history of team conversations.
According to Slack, you can quiz the search bot on things like project details, who is working on what, past decisions or company policies, as well as the meaning of obscure acronyms thrown around by coworkers.
In addition to the souped-up search, Slack now auto-generates recaps of ongoing channel conversations and thread summaries. This should prove to be super helpful for employees whenever they wish to get up to speed with the latest updates after being out of office for a while or joining a new team.
Slack says it's already observed time savings for workers in an internal analysis during pilot testing. "Customers, such as SpotOn, Uber and Anthropic could save an average of 97 minutes per user each week using Slack AI to find answers, distill knowledge and spark ideas," states the press release.
On the security front, Slack emphasizes all customer data remains private and no chats will be used to train the company's proprietary models. The AI also runs exclusively on Slack's own infrastructure instead of third-party cloud servers, the company says.
The AI enhancements are now available as a paid add-on exclusively for Enterprise-tier customers using the English language. Additional languages and pricing plans are slated to follow.
For teams preferring a best-of-breed approach, Slack still enables easy integrations with other apps like Notion, PagerDuty and novel AI search tools such as Perplexity. These can incorporate complementary machine learning capabilities tailored to specific use cases.
Going forward, Slack wants to add more AI features to its chat app, such as using Salesforce's Einstein Copilot assistant, a new AI helper for Salesforce CRM. This, the company says, will help workers perform their tasks quicker by giving them answers to questions right in the app that are based on reliable customer data.