Slack has become the central hub for workplace communications and information sharing. But accessing and surfacing relevant institutional knowledge from years of messages can prove challenging. To address this, Slack now incorporates the latest AI to power intelligent search and summarization.
These new capabilities, announced February 21st, leverage generative language models fine-tuned specifically for Slack’s unique data. The features enable employees to more easily discover, catch up on, and extract key insights from volumes of conversations and content.
Advanced Search Surfaces Relevant Answers
Slack’s new AI-enhanced search allows querying information in conversational language just as with ChatGPT. Employees can simply ask questions like “What is Project Gizmo?” and AI will serve up an answer summarizing details sourced from relevant Slack messages and files.
Each response also includes references that increase transparency into how conclusions were drawn. Employees can further drill down on any part to view the full context if additional background is needed.
Smart Summarization Distills Key Topics
In addition, Slack now provides auto-generated summaries of topics and discussions occurring across public channels. This helps employees quickly get up to speed when returning from time off or pivoting to new projects.
The summarization highlights salient points and main themes from channel history. It also links back to the related messages that contributed to each summary element. This allows verifying or learning more about what the AI deemed important.
Continuous Tuning for Quality and Trust
Slack specifically configured its natural language models to analyze patterns from billions of real-world Slack conversations. This custom tuning aims to boost relevance for workplace collaboration use cases.
The company also built in guardrails so AI responses meet fidelity and quality standards. All search answers and summaries provide transparency on the content sources used. Users can also give feedback on whether output was good, bad or neutral to further refine performance.
Pricing and Availability
The new AI search and summarization capabilities come at an additional charge on top of enterprise Slack licenses. While specific pricing details remain undisclosed, the features are available starting today in the US and UK in English only initially. Expanded language support is planned soon.
tl;dr
- New AI features enhance search and provide summarization of Slack channel contents
- Designed to surface hidden knowledge and insights from years of messages
- Fine-tuned language models analyze patterns from billions of Slack conversations
- Employees can query info just as with ChatGPT and AI responds with answers sourced from messages
- Summaries auto-generate key topics to quickly catch up on public channel histories
- Transparency shows what content was used for each generated response
- Continuously measures quality of output to further improve relevance
With powerful AI now unleashed, Slack aims to unlock previously trapped value from all the informal digital communications occurring within organizations daily. This has potential to greatly bolster workplace productivity, knowledge sharing, and collaborative decision making.