Salesforce today announced the launch of Slack AI, bringing intuitive generative AI capabilities directly into the popular work collaboration platform. With new AI-powered conversational search, channel summaries, and thread recaps, Slack aims to help users efficiently find information, catch up on conversations, and ultimately be more productive within their digital workspace.
Slack says the new AI features run natively in the platform and leverages each company's deep well of unstructured data buried in conversations already occurring daily across millions of users.
"For the past decade, Slack has revolutionized the way we work by bringing teams together," said Slack CEO Denise Dresser. "With Slack AI, we're taking it to the next level, enabling customers to tap into their own collective knowledge so they can work smarter and focus on innovation."
At the core of Slack AI are features that cater to the urgent need for information management and retrieval. The ones available now include:
- AI-Powered Search: Users can ask questions conversationally and get personalized answers quickly citing relevant Slack messages. This helps users learn about projects, policies, find experts, and more.
- Channel Recaps: Summarize key highlights from any accessible channel over custom date ranges. This is designed to help users catch up on missed conversations, channel recaps provide summaries of recent or specified periods, enhancing team alignment.
- Thread Summaries: For those daunting, lengthy threads, Slack AI can provide concise summaries to extract key decisions and action items, saving valuable time. Helpful for decisions or issues with lots of back and forth.
The combination of AI search and summaries provides users a way to efficiently find and consume information - something that can be ironically remarkably difficult in most modern digital workplaces.
Salesforce ran a pilot of Slack AI with thousands of users across firms like SpotOn, Uber, and Anthropic, and saw average reported time saving of 97 minutes per week. This not only underscores the feature's potential to streamline workflow but also hints at the broader implications for business operations across various sectors.
With data privacy and responsible AI being top of mind for many organizations, like most AI offerings today, Slack is emphasizing the security and data privacy measures they took when building these capabilities.
For example, Slack AI models runs on Slack's own infrastructure and those adheres to their internal security standards. No customer data is shared with third-parties or use it to train models.
Slack AI is just the beginning of Salesforce's ambition to revolutionize workplace collaboration. While starting with search and summaries, the company hinted at more AI capabilities on the horizon like automatically generated channel digests to stay updated on topics of interest. They are also building integrations with Einstein Copilot for Salesforce CRM and other partners to bring AI directly into business workflows. The vision is for Slack to be the central interface connecting users, data, and AI across an organization.
Unfortunately, for now, Slack AI is only available as a paid add-on for Enterprise plans (and initially only in English). The company says additional plans and languages are coming soon.