Slack New Generative AI Features Help Navigate Endless Message Flood

Collaboration platform Slack has begun releasing new generative AI features to help users catch up and understand all of the messages they may have missed. The Slack AI toolkit can summarize long threads and recap events in a channel, pulling key moments out for users to see. The AI can also perform personalized searches and even answer questions using the information in a Slack hub. Notably, the Slack AI launch is happening the same week that Otter introduced several generative AI features to its own business and productivity platform.

Slack AI

The main selling point for Slack’s generative AI search tool is that it offers tailored responses to questions posed in conversational language. For example, employees can ask about goals for a new project and key stakeholders involved or quickly define unfamiliar industry acronyms. The AI generates clear, concise answers pulled from relevant Slack messages and the user’s own conversations. The idea is to cut down on time spent hunting for information.

The other two main new features are centered on cutting away the wheat from the chaff in messages. Channel recaps provide highlights of recent activity on any channel over custom date ranges, while thread summaries condense long, winding conversations into easily digestible overviews. Direct citations allow users to dig deeper into anything of interest. Slack sees these conversation summarization tools as a way to boost critical information so that people can get up to speed on projects, stay updated on accounts, and speed up response time.

“For the past decade, Slack has revolutionized the way we work, bringing people, apps and systems together in one place. With Slack AI, we’re excited to take this transformation to the next level,” Slack CEO Denise Dresser said. 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. In the era of generative AI, Slack is the trusted, conversational platform that connects every part of a business to supercharge team productivity.”

All of the new Slack AI features leverage Slack’s repository of proprietary data and conversations to provide insights. An internal Slack pilot test found the tools could save users nearly 100 minutes per week on average. The company emphasized its AI runs fully on Slack’s own infrastructure, upholding its security standards. Customer data is not shared with any external AI providers or used to train third-party models.

Third-Party Slack AI

In addition to its native AI tools, Slack is working with customers to incorporate their generative AI apps into Slack. The company claims there are more than 13,400 custom internal Slack apps that leverage generative AI. That list includes the ChatGPT app for Slack, but the company also highlighted PagerDuty Copilot and its incident responses, along with Notion AI making summaries visible in chats when a link is shared in a Slack channel. Generative AI developer Perplexity also has a Slack integration, which will automatically post updates into Slack on topics users subscribe to.

“At Perplexity, we’re building the next generation answer engine, applying the most advanced LLMs to make knowledge instant and accessible,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said. “Now with Perplexity Push, we’re delivering an enterprise integration that brings AI-powered insights directly into Slack. Teams can easily stay in-the-know on topics they care about where conversations and collaboration already happens.”

Slack teased some upcoming capabilities, including channel digests that summarize busy channels that do not need immediate attention. Slack is also building Einstein Copilot integration for conversational customer relationship insights. The new features released are available as a paid add-on for Enterprise plans, initially only in English. More plans and languages are slated to follow. With its launch, Slack aims to augment productivity via AI handling everyday tasks. The goal is to let users focus on meaningful work while AI addresses more tedious labor.

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