Slack has recently made its AI capabilities available to all its premium users, following an initial release to a limited group of clients earlier this year. The firm has been hinting at these functionalities since the previous year, and they have finally arrived.
The AI is designed to create summaries of channel activities, providing users with the main points of what they missed while not being active on their devices, helping them stay updated with crucial work-related matters and office humor. According to Slack, the algorithm responsible for creating these summaries is intelligent enough to extract content from the various subjects discussed in the channel. This implies that users will receive a section on the progress of Jenny’s cake party in the meeting room and another on sales patterns, among other things.
A similar feature is available for threads, which are more intimate discussions between a few individuals. The tool can condense any of these threads into a brief summary. Users also have the option to receive a daily summary for any channel or thread, which is delivered every morning.
The use of AI in Slack.
Another notable feature is the ability to search conversations. Given the endless nature of Slack channels, finding the appropriate conversation when needed can be challenging. This feature enables users to pose questions in a conversational manner, with the algorithm handling the actual search.
These tools are not exclusive to English-speaking users, as Slack’s AI now supports Japanese and Spanish. Slack plans to incorporate some of its most frequently used third-party applications into the AI infrastructure soon. In line with this, integration with Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot is expected shortly.
The effectiveness of these tools remains to be seen, and it is unclear whether they are merely another reason to include the term “AI” in marketing materials. I have been using Slack for quite some time and have rarely found myself in situations where I would require a series of automatically generated summaries, as lengthier discussions are usually confined to one-on-one meetings, emails, or video calls. However, this could potentially alter the way people utilize the service.
