From PC World: Slack will soon begin rolling out what it calls “Slack AI” to its customers, featuring smart search, channel recaps, and summaries — and a number of caveats, too.
Slack has been trying to integrate AI into its conversational interface for about a year now, and some of this sounds pretty familiar. Slack was talking about a “Slack GPT” app last spring, with the eventual rollout of a sales-based AI, Einstein GPT, to leverage parent Salesforce’s CRM technology. That’s part of the message that Slack is reiterating today.
Some of what Slack is talking about makes sense. For one, Slack plans to launch an AI-powered “smart search” that hopefully solves one of the problems that Slack, Teams, and other chat apps introduce: finding that one critical piece of information that was communicated in one of the dozens of channels, group chats, and direct messages. Like Slack’s other features, those results will be footnoted with links to the actual chats where Slack sourced its information.
The company is also reiterating what it said last year regarding chat summaries, AI-powered synopses of what people were talking about while your attention was diverted elsewhere or away. And thread summaries will do something similar, rolling up a prolonged conversation with the salient points. But there’s a catch: Slack AI can only index conversations and threads. Documents uploaded to the system will not be queried. Neither will Slack’s Huddles. You’ll have to trust that the critical detail you’re hoping Slack AI will catch doesn’t live in either category.
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