Slack's highly anticipated AI features are finally here, including channel recaps, thread summaries, and more
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.
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"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, which makes it difficult to find the content you're looking for among the high volume of information on the app. The new AI-powered search feature is here to tackle that issue.
Now, instead of being limited to searching for a specific term and hoping you're directed to the right results, you can ask a question conversationally and receive a concise, generated answer that's based on the content of relevant Slack messages.
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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, as seen in the image below.
The Channel Recaps feature does exactly what the name implies -- it summarizes the messages sent in accessible channels. With this feature, you can select what messages you want to be summarized, including unread messages or custom date ranges.
The Thread Summaries feature, meanwhile, 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, according to the press release.
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Slack AI will be integrated into the platform and, therefore, 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 that Slack AI upholds Slack's security practices and compliance standards, its large language models (LLMs) are hosted directly within Slack, ensuring customer data remains in-house, customer data is siloed and will not be used to serve other clients directly or indirectly, and Slack AI does not use customer data for LLM training.
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.
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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. Slack doesn't disclose how much the add-on will cost users in the release, but if you are interested in learning more, you can fill out a form.