As Salesforce heads into its annual Dreamforce 2023 conference, the company has announced new AI enhancements for Slack that focus on facilitating smart teamwork and individual productivity. The developments signal a growing alignment between collaboration tools and AI capabilities.
Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2020, rapidly gained popularity as an intuitive messaging platform that made team communication simple. Today, Salesforce aspires to evolve it beyond a messaging app into the central nervous system powering team collaboration. AI is a big part of that strategy. Salesforce's approach underscores a broader trend in the industry, where AI serves not just as a specialized tool but as an integrated feature enhancing overall productivity.
The new Slack AI capabilities focus on three key areas:
- Channel Recaps: This feature generates summaries of channel activities, providing quick insights that enable informed, customer-centric decisions.
- Thread Summaries: By creating condensed overviews of long discussions, this tool helps experts quickly catch up and contribute to ongoing conversations.
- Search Answers: By querying Slack's database, users can obtain concise and relevant information about projects or topics, which is essential for rapid onboarding or quick decision-making.
"Productivity is all about empowering everyone to do their best work. Slack makes this possible by connecting teams, customers, partners, apps, data and systems in one intelligent productivity platform," said Noah Desai Weiss, Slack's Chief Product Officer.
The Slack AI rollout aims to tap into the platform's wealth of data and conversations to surface helpful information proactively. It leverages Slack's architecture to keep data secured and avoid mixing customer data for training.
This announcement comes as businesses increasingly look to intelligent technologies like AI to boost efficiency. Salesforce's own research found 75% of AI users want more automation to simplify tasks. Additionally, 49% of respondents indicated they would use generative AI more frequently if integrated into existing technology. These statistics highlight not only the readiness of the market for AI-integrated productivity tools but also the potential for high user adoption rates for Slack AI.
The Slack AI pilot will launch this winter. It represents Slack's ongoing evolution as Salesforce continues advancing its intelligent productivity platform. The goal is to keep making teamwork and collaboration smarter, ultimately driving gains in speed and alignment across organizations.