Although I keep repeating myself in news pieces here on Make Tech Easier, it’s still true: artificial intelligence has touched just about every area of tech that you can imagine. AI is now coming to your Slack workspace to help you with your daily tasks for all your projects.
Slack AI to Keep You on Track of Your Workday
With an explanation that statistics show that 47 percent of digital workers aren’t able to easily find necessary information, and 32 percent of employees make the wrong decision because they just aren’t aware, Slack AI was announced.
From the get-go, there is a promise that Slack AI will be secure, trustworthy, and intuitive, and that it will put you ahead during your workday. Slack announced three AI capabilities to start with:
- Search answers for intelligent responses
- Channel recaps with highlighted information
- Thread summaries to get caught up on long conversations
Slack promises that users won’t need any training with the easy-to-use Ai features. They also ensure that you will remain in control of your own data. When Slack began around 10 years ago, it was intended to be the hub for all projects, data, and conversations. Slack AI is intended to help you even more. An internal analysis found that customers, including Uber and Anthropic, could save each worker around 97 minutes each week on average.
FYI: is this not enough to keep you using Slack? Check out these Slack alternatives.
4 Ways Slack AI Can Help You and Your Company
1. Search Answers: all Slack users have been through it – trying to find the conversation where something in particular was asked/answered. With Slack’s new AI-powered search, however, you’ll get personalized answers via Slack messages with information relevant to your conversational question highlighted. You can have a new project summarized, learn more about company policies, find an expert to resolve an issue, learn about past decisions from historical context, etc.
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Unsplash
2. Channel Recaps and Thread Summaries: when you’re on a thread with several coworkers, it’s easy for that thread to get away from you when you just step away for an hour or go on a vacation. You come back to a long thread or several threads, and you don’t know where to start. Channel recaps and thread summaries will tell you only what you need to know. Additionally, someone brought in to solve a situation can get up to speed quickly.
3. Data Control: Slack promises that trust is important to both Slack itself and parent company Salesforce, leading to their promise of building AI features “safely, responsibly, and ethically.” Customer data is not shared with LLM providers, and customer data is not used to train LLMs, either.
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Unsplash
4. Integrated Productivity Apps: several integrated productivity apps that work with AI will help you even more inside Slack AI. These include Asana, Notion, Canva, and box. For instance, if you share your Slack docs and wikis in your Slack conversations, you can view summaries through Notion AI.
Search and summarization are the cornerstone of Slack AI, as the company understands that finding information and making sense of it is critical to how valuable Slack is to you. But they also promise that this is just the beginning. Digests is an upcoming feature – when you want to stay informed, even though the channel doesn’t require you to keep up with it constantly. Einstein Copilot will be an AI chatbot for Salesforce CRM.
The downsides are that Slack AI is available as a paid add-on for Enterprise plans and only in English, though additional plans and languages will be coming soon. If you want more fun out of Slack in the meantime, check out these Slack status suggestions.
Image credit: Unsplash
Laura Tucker –
Staff Writer
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.
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