Think Slackbot is still the only Slack AI feature worth exploring? Think again. Slack has been upgrading the AI features in its platform for some time now, introducing new features and capabilities specially designed for enterprise teams.
In April 2024, the “Slack AI” toolkit became available for all paying Slack users (not just Enterprise-level customers), introducing Gen AI capabilities to companies for a bolt-on price of $10 per month, per user. This toolkit offers access to bots that can summarize conversations, simplify the search for valuable information, and create content.
Plus, Salesforce recently integrated Agentforce into the Slack platform, empowering companies to access and build a range of agentic AI solutions for specific tasks.
Here’s everything you need to know about Slack AI today.
What is Slack AI? The Basics
The Slack AI toolkit bundles a series of generative AI features into a secure, intuitive solution for productive work. It includes guided, one-click solutions such as channel recaps, AI-powered personalized search, thread summaries, and content generation.
It offers similar features to solutions like Microsoft’s Copilot for MS Teams or Google’s Gemini for Workspace. Slack AI isn’t just a new name for the basic “Slackbot”, which users can converse with inside of Slack, asking questions about data or tasks. The suite of tools includes features for intelligent daily or weekly recaps, conversation summaries, and optimized search.
According to Slack and Salesforce, business users save an average of around 97 minutes each week just by using Slack AI to boost productivity and efficiency.
As mentioned above, this solution is now available to all paying users. It used to be open only to Enterprise Slack customers, but now anyone can add the solution to their plan for a price of $10 per month, per user.
What Can Slack AI Actually Do?
Slack AI, like most AI-powered tools for unified communication and collaboration apps, is constantly evolving. The core features are designed to help business users spend less time digging through messages and more time on valuable tasks. For instance, you can:
Summarize Threads and Channels Instantly
One of the major features of Slack AI is “channel recaps.” This feature allows users to generate key highlights from any Slack channel with a single click. The AI bot will give you a quick rundown of everything happening in your channel. Plus, you can filter through information by focusing on unread messages, specific dates, and more.
While recaps reduce the work of digging through channels, thread summaries give you the key points from a conversation in a click. You can instantly request summaries that help you amplify the data from conversations that are most important to you. You can even create customizable, automated recaps for any channel you want to monitor.
Ask Slackbot Questions
Just as you can “speak” to tools like Microsoft Copilot in Teams and other Microsoft apps, you can also converse with your Slack bot. You can ask your bot questions about a conversation using natural prompts, and the bot will even cite its sources for you.
This could be ideal if you’re looking for a quick way to get a run-down on the latest sales numbers reported by your team or track down information about a recent meeting. Although, from what I can tell, you can’t ask Slack to generate responses to messages, at least not yet.
Simplify and Personalize Search
If you’ve ever struggled with finding the information you need in a river of Slack threads and channels, Slack AI has the answer. Just click on the AI diamond button within the app, and you can ask Slack anything you like.
For instance, you might ask, “What’s the latest on the Q3 product launch?” Slack AI will return a clear answer based on messages, files, and content from your workspace. It’s powered by large language models (LLMs) but is fully aware of Slack’s context.
Implement Custom AI Tools
Notably, artificial intelligence isn’t just built natively into the Slack platform. The tech vendor says its customers already use over 13,400 AI custom internal Slack apps within the platform. Plus, the company’s partner ecosystem is designing and offering its own AI-driven Slack apps.
Numerous Slack integrations can enhance your AI-powered workflows. For instance, teams can connect their platform with Notion to view AI summaries when links are shared in Slack. You can also use PagerDuty Advance in Slack to surface insights, address incident response requirements, and access suggested remediation paths.
How Slack AI Works Behind the Scenes
You don’t need to be a machine learning expert to use Slack AI, but it’s still worth understanding a bit about how it works. Unlike standalone AI tools, Slack AI is built directly into the platform’s infrastructure using a system called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
This means that when you ask a question or request a summary, Slack pulls relevant messages, documents, and context from your workspace and uses a large language model to generate a response based on that information.
Another bonus for businesses is that Slack and Salesforce emphasizing security and privacy. Notably, Slack says its AI solutions run on its existing trusted infrastructure, adhering to the same consistent compliance standards. The company also promises not to share any data you input into the system with large language model providers and doesn’t use your data to train its own bots.
