You Can Try Slack’s New AI Tools Today (If Your Company Pays for Them)
Slack has officially joined the AI bandwagon. Starting today, the company is rolling out three new AI features to its popular work app as a paid add-on for Enterprise members. These features sound promising, but as with any artificial intelligence, we need to see them in action before judging their merits.
New Slack AI Features
The first new AI feature concerns search. Searching in Slack used to be pretty standard: you entered the keywords you wanted to find, perhaps with a specific user or channel in mind, and scrolled through the related results until you (hopefully) found what you were looking for. . In a new update, Slack is adding an artificial intelligence bot for search. When you post a question, the bot will generate a complete answer for you based on your Slack history, including your channels and your direct messages.
Slack says its new AI-powered search is great for things like working on a new project at work; studying company policy; search for subject matter experts in your company; learning from past conversations that may have touched on a similar issue you are working on; and deciphering unfamiliar acronyms so you don’t have to pester your co-workers to define work jargon.
And then there are reviews and summaries: channel reviews give you a summary of conversations within channels. You can set a date range for the summary to choose whether to receive the summary for the last 24 hours or the last seven days. Thread summaries offer a similar solution for threads. If you don’t have the time (or energy) to read a long conversation, you can try letting Slack’s AI summarize it for you.
I believe these summaries will be very useful when returning from a long vacation, as well as when moving on to a new project or job. Whenever someone adds you to a busy Slack channel (or an entire workplace), most of your time is probably spent trying to figure out what’s going on, so if this AI works as advertised, it’s can save a lot of time.
Search, channel reviews, and topic summaries are AI features being rolled out today, but Slack has plans to add more AI features in the future. You can already integrate AI tools from other applications such as Notion, PagerDuty and Perplexity. But in particular, the announcement highlighted plans to create summaries for channels that you don’t need to see right away, but might need to watch later. It’s also working on integrating Einstein Copilot , Salesforce CRM’s conversational AI assistant that should offer ChatGPT-like capabilities directly into Slack.
Slack is also adamant that its AI is powered by experts trained and employed in-house. This means your data is not sent to third party artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI or Google. Of course, that doesn’t mean big tech isn’t still involved in your data here ( Slack is owned by Salesforce, after all), but at least data collection and processing stays in the family.
How to Try Slack’s New AI Features
While these features are rolling out today, you may not see them in your company’s Slack app just yet. This is because it is available as a paid add-on, so your company will have to pay for AI in the future. There’s also a waiting list for new features, so you might not be able to sign up right away even if you wanted to.
If you’re interested in your company joining the Slack AI train, you can contact us using this form .