Slack has finally launched its generative AI companion. The AI technology will initially answer work-related questions, provide key highlights to conversations, and summarize long threads to keep users updated.
Slack began testing the AI technology last year, and now it is launching the product. According to an internal analysis of the pilot, the company found out that users spent about 97 minutes every week finding answers and coming up with ideas on Slack.
Slack, thus, developed Slack AI that could address these queries through its generative AI capabilities.
In its blog post, Slack explained that with Slack AI, users can search for results like the goals of a project and the stakeholders involved, among other details. This information will be based on users’ conversations and the company’s disclosures.
The company added that Search answers can help:
- Learn about a new marketing campaign or project
- Get up to speed on company policies, such as the deal approval process
- Find internal subject-matter experts to resolve an engineering incident
- Glean insights about past decisions from a historical context
- Define unfamiliar acronyms
Apart from this, Slack AI is bringing “channel recaps” for users. The capability would summarize whatever has been shared in the Slack channel in the past week or a selected date range. Additionally, with Thread summaries, individuals can access the crux of conversations and find important messages alongside their sources.
Some important uses for these summaries include being able to “extract themes from design feedback channels”, “outline a root cause analysis,” or catching up after time off from work.
Since the AI can access information and summarize it to users, there are concerns about data privacy. However, the company explained that it does not use consumer data to train its large language models (LLM) and that all LLMs are within Slack.
Hence, no intelligence is shared outside Slack with LLM providers, for example.
Lastly, Slack has added AI-powered platforms such as Notion, Perplexity, and Pagerduty.
These apps can be integrated within Slack for users to get updates on the content being shared on them.
Individuals can get content summaries whenever links to Notion AI are shared. With Perplexity, users can follow desired topics and receive updates in Slack channels to aid conversations. While integrating PagerDuty Copilot into Slack can allow users to receive important insights and guidance on different tasks.
The company also mentioned some under-development features. These include channel digests, which would allow users to pick and choose which channels they want to be summarized. Slack AI will also get a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot by Salesforce, a conversational AI assistant built for CRM applications.
Slack AI is now available in English but will have to be purchased as an add-on. For now, only Enterprise plans can access it.