Slack AI is now available for enterprise customers, though pricing details for the generative AI (gene) features have not yet been disclosed. Slack announced plans for its AI assistant app last year, focusing on three areas:
- AI powered search. This provides personalized answers to questions based on an organization’s knowledge base. Slack AI helps users locate subject matter experts, or find information on anything from work projects to understanding unfamiliar acronyms.
- Channel recaps. This highlights key discussion points for a Slack user after a period away from the app, or for those who have recently joined a channel.
- Thread summaries. This feature recaps faster-moving discussions, provides thread summaries, and offers an overview of long conversations, with links to sources in each summary that enable users to check information where necessary.
These features are now available to customers on Slack’s Enterprise Grid payment plan, Slack said Wednesday. Slack AI will also roll out to a wider range of customers “soon,” a Slack spokesperson said, though no date was announced. Slack is one of many digital work app vendors that have added genAI to their products in recent months, with rivals such as Microsoft and Google starting to roll out AI assistance based on large language models (LLMs) during 2023. A key strength of Slack’s AI tools centers on access to the large volumes of conversation data held in the platform, said Jackie Rocca, vice president of product at Slack. Early customer trials of Slack AI resulted in an average saving of 97 minutes each week, she said.
