Having announced plans in May to build generative AI into its collaboration application, Slack now expects to make its the new features available to select customers as part of a pilot this winter, with a full rollout next year.
The company has been experimenting with the genAI internally for several months to identify the best ways of integrating the technology for collaboration purposes. The initial focus is on three main use cases designed to save users time by automating certain processes.
One is the ability to summarize conversations that take place in Slack channels and threads.
“People end up having these super long conversations in threads; hundreds of messages,” said Ali Rayl, senior vice president of product management at Slack. “The idea is you click a button, AI runs through the thread and says, ‘Here’s what happened in the last five hours.’ And instead of reading the whole thread, you get a nice little summary.”
Another similar feature is a planned channel “recap,” providing a user with a quick summary of conversations within a particular team channel. If a user has been away for a couple of weeks — or even just a day or two — and doesn’t want to trawl through a barrage of messages that may or may not be relevant, the AI tool can provide an overview of what’s been discussed.
Finally, Slack wants to use genAI to generate better answers when users search for information in the app. “Slack has always had search — we do our best to surface messages and files related to your search,” said Rayl. “But using generative AI, we can take this one step further — you can ask a question and we can go through all the information that your company has in Slack and give you an answer to that exact question.”
A user could, for example, ask Slack for the rollout date for a product and immediately receive a specific date, rather than having to scroll through a list of related posts and links to documents in search results to find the information.
Slack
Slack is adding generative AI tools that can be used to more quickly summarize team chats, huddles, and even documents to surface needed information quickly.
GenAI could make collaboration more productive
The ability to access genAI functions directly from a collaboration application should save users time, said Kim Herrington, a senior analyst at Forrester.
“Typically, you want to be able to leverage genAI in the places and spaces where people are already working and communicating to maximize user adoption,” said Herrington. This can help a user more quickly move “from knowledge seeker to insights” — and ultimately to action, she said.
Slack isn’t alone in weaving AI into its software. Google and Microsoft, which also sell team collaboration applications, have been pushing ahead with their own genAI pilot projects with customers, for instance, and, in the case of Google, already bringing the technology to market.
These moves…
2023-09-13 00:48:03
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