Many companies rely on Slack for cross-organization communication and their employees use the platform to share messages, documents, team plans, spreadsheets, and more. To optimize user experience on the app, Slack is finally making its generative AI features available on the platform.
On Wednesday, Salesforce, which owns Slack, announced the rollout of Slack AI, a generative AI experience that includes AI-powered search, channel recaps, and thread summaries.
“These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth,” said Denise Dresser, Slack CEO.
If you’ve ever tried searching for something specific on Slack, you’ve probably found that its current search tool is a bit disappointing. The new AI-powered search feature is here to tackle that issue.
This feature is also helpful if you want to catch up on something you missed, or if you need to find information on a specific topic, such as company campaigns, policies, terms, or more. The demo images show that the response from Slack AI also includes footnotes, which direct you to the original source of the content, so that you can verify its validity or check out the source for yourself.
The Channel Recaps feature summarizes the messages sent in accessible channels, while the Thread Summaries feature lets you get up to date on a message thread with a single click, providing users with a detailed summary that includes key decisions, next steps, and a birds-eye view of priorities.
Slack AI will be integrated into the platform and have access to confidential enterprise information. The development team behind the product has taken time to address privacy and security concerns, claiming trust is the number one value at Salesforce, and as a result, Slack is “committed to building AI products safely, responsibly, and ethically.” Specifically, the company explains in the release the security practices and compliance standards that Slack AI upholds.
Slack has plans to continue adding more AI-powered features in the future, such as generating digests that summarize key highlights from channels and a native integration of Einstein Copilot that will provide answers in Slack regarding customer data.
Slack AI will be offered as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise plans and is available now in English in the US and UK, with more plans and language support coming soon. If you are interested in learning more, you can fill out a form.
