Slack introduced its AI tools after releasing them to all paying users select a subset of customers earlier this year. It was a company has been teasing these features since last year and now they are here.
AI automatically generates channel summaries to give people the highlights they miss away from their keyboard or smartphone, catch up on important work and office banter. Slack says the algorithm that generates these summaries is smart enough to extract content from the various topics discussed in the channel. That means you’ll get a paragraph in the conference room about how plans are going for Jenny’s cake party and sales trends or whatever.
There is something similar for topics that are smaller conversations between one or more people. The tool will summarize any of these topics into a short paragraph. Customers can also choose a daily summary for any channel or topic delivered every morning.
Another interesting feature is conversational search. The various Slack channels take forever, and it can be difficult to find the right conversation when you need it. It allows people to ask questions using natural language, with the algorithm performing the actual search.
These tools aren’t just for English speakers, as Slack AI now offers support for Japanese and Spanish. Slack said it will soon integrate some of its most-used third-party apps into its AI ecosystem. To that end, integration with Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot is coming in the near future.
It remains to be seen if these tools will actually be useful or if they will just be more of an excuse to put the letters “AI” in promotional materials. I’ve been on Slack for a long time and haven’t come across many scenarios where I’d need a set of auto-generated summaries, as longer conversations are usually split into one-on-one meetings, emails, or video streams. . However, perhaps it will change the way people use the service.
