Slack, the cloud‑based team messaging juggernaut, is charging ahead with further integration of AI into users’ day‑to‑day experience. The company is introducing a series of tools aimed at improving productivity and improving team communication.
AI writing assistance has been built directly into Slack Canvas, allowing users to create assets like project briefs as well as refine the content they create using natural‑language prompts. Writing assistance can also be used to generate and assign action items, refine raw meeting notes, create FAQs and more. AI writing assistance seems to be in vogue, as Google has also been developing AI writing assistance tools integrated into Google Workspace, and Apple offers similar tools via Apple Intelligence.
AI message context will help users understand the lingo of their organization and help ensure they don’t get lost in long threads by pulling surrounding context to explain a message when a user hovers over it. This tool will provide explanations for project names, internal tools or team‑specific shorthand. This will presumably help new team members get up to speed more quickly while they learn whatever random acronyms their company uses. AI‑generated channel recaps and thread summaries will similarly help users catch up when joining an ongoing project or conversation.
If you’re heads down working on a high‑priority task, Slack will use AI action items to understand what you’re working on and only interrupt your workflow if something provides a meaningful update or is more important than what you’re working on at the time.
The company also said it will be widening the availability of AI translation, which allows teammates to read and contribute in their preferred language, as well as Enterprise Search, which surfaces information across connected apps, data and conversations from the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive and more.
Slack has been rapidly incorporating AI tools into the platform recently. This should come as no surprise since Slack has been owned by Salesforce since 2021. The software company is among the most bullish on the future of AI and its applications in the workplace. We know that Slack has been using data from your chats to train its machine‑learning models, and recently Salesforce moved to ensure that rival software firms were not using or accessing the same data.
These tools and more are available to users with a paid Slack plan, though not every new AI tool is included at the lower price tiers. The higher the subscription tier, the more of these tools are included. Slack says that Enterprise Search, channel recaps, AI meeting notes and translations are available now. In contrast, AI‑assisted message explanations, action items, writing assistance in Canvas and profile summaries are coming soon and may be released throughout the year.