Slack's generative AI push: Message summaries, writing assistance and more

Customers will be able to sharpen their Slack messages or adjust the tone among others.

Workplace communication app Slack is doubling down on its efforts to integrate generative AI capabilities into its platform, amid a heightened buzz around the latest AI advancements that have gripped technology giants and startups across the world.

The Salesforce-owned platform announced on May 4 that it is introducing SlackGPT, a new conversational AI experience that is natively integrated into the platform with an aim to make the company's productivity capabilities more powerful.

This includes AI-powered conversation summaries, wherein people will be able to catch up on unread messages on Slack in a single click or provide summaries of audio chats on its Huddle feature. It will also provide writing assistance wherein customers will be able to sharpen their messaging or adjust the tone among others.

That said, these features are still in development with no specific information on when they will become available to customers.

"The real power of this technology (Generative AI) is when AI can analyze and act on the most valuable data from a company's most trusted resource — its own internal knowledge," said Slack CEO Lidiane Jones. "Slack GPT is the conversational AI platform of the future, helping organizations easily tap into their trusted customer data and essential employee knowledge so they can work smarter and make smarter decisions faster."

In March 2023, Salesforce had partnered with Microsoft-backed OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to Slack, in order to help customers interact with the chatbot within the application. Slack subsequently integrated Claude, a ChatGPT rival from Google-backed Anthropic, into its platform. Slack termed these moves as the first step of a much broader vision for AI on the platform.

Ali Rayl, Slack’s senior vice president of product, said the company has a unique advantage when it comes to generative AI. "We hold a lot of the institutional knowledge on every topic, team, work item and project is already in Slack through the messages, the files and the clips that are shared every day," she said.

In the future, Slack stated that it plans to enable customers to integrate large language AI models of their choice, including those funded by Salesforce Venture’s generative AI fund, and Salesforce’s proprietary large language models (LLMs).

The company however noted that none of the customer data is being stored or shared with these companies to train their respective large language models.

A new Einstein GPT app for Slack, which is still in development, will soon help various teams tap into employee knowledge and real-time customer data with generative AI, thereby enhancing the understanding of their customers.

Apart from this, Slack stated that customers will also be able to use its recently updated developer platform to include AI actions in their workflows, which can automate work across the workplace communication app and its ecosystem of software tools. This capability is expected to be available later this year.