Many companies rely on Slack for inter-organizational communication. And their employees use the platform to share messages, documents, spreadsheets and more. In order to optimize the user experience on the application, Slack is finally making its generative AI functionalities available on the platform.
On Wednesday, Salesforce, which owns Slack, announced the deployment of Slack AI, a generative AI that includes a search tool, channel summaries and thread summaries.
“These new features give our customers access to the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, and spend their time on things that drive real innovation and growth,” said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack. CEO of Slack.
Relieving a somewhat complicated search
If you’ve ever tried to search for something specific on Slack, you’ve probably found the current search tool to be a bit disappointing. Which makes it difficult to find the content you are looking for among the large volume of information. The new AI-powered search feature is here to solve this problem.
Now, instead of being limited to searching for a specific term and hoping to be directed to the right results, you can ask a question conversationally. And receive a concise, generated response, based on the content of relevant Slack messages.
This feature is also useful if you want to catch up on an event you missed or need to find information on a specific topic, such as campaigns, company policies and terms, etc. The demo images show that Slack AI’s response also includes footnotes, which direct you to the original source of the content, so you can verify its validity or verify the source yourself, as shown the image below.
Slack
Select messages to summarize
The channel summary feature does exactly what its name suggests: it summarizes messages sent in accessible channels. With this feature, you can select messages you want to summarize, including unread messages or custom date ranges.
The Thread Summaries feature, meanwhile, lets you stay up to date on a thread with just one click, providing users with a detailed summary that includes key decisions, next steps, and an overview of priorities, according to the press release.
Slack AI will be integrated into the platform and will therefore have access to confidential company information. The product development team took the time to address privacy and security concerns, saying that trust is the number one value at Salesforce, and that as a result, Slack is “committed to building products of AI in a safe, responsible and ethical manner.
Huge communication from Slak on AI security
Specifically, the company explains in the release that Slack AI follows Slack’s security practices and compliance standards, that its Large Language Models (LLMs) are hosted directly in Slack, ensuring that customer data remains in place. internally, that customer data is siled and will not be used to serve other customers directly or indirectly, and that Slack AI does not use customer data for training LLMs.
Slack plans to continue adding other AI-powered features in the future, such as generating digests that summarize channel highlights and a native Einstein Copilot integration that will provide answers within Slack regarding data client.
Slack AI will be offered as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise subscriptions and will be available in French soon. Slack doesn’t specify how much the add-on costs users, but if you want to know more, you can fill out this form.
Source: “ZDNet.com”