Slack unveils 3 AI tools to transform work experience

Tech companies are taking the power of Artificial Intelligence very seriously. With ChatGPT becoming the go-to AI chatbot for many, other tech giants like Microsoft and Samsung are now following suit by integrating AI into their brands.

In a recent announcement, the popular communication platform, Slack, revealed its partnership with OpenAI to introduce ChatGPT to its users. Rob Seaman, the company’s product manager, disclosed this exciting development at the Salesforce World Tour event in New York City.

The company is further evolving its platform by putting AI at the forefront of its user experience. This will make it easier for users to communicate, access information, and build workflows.

Next time you’re wondering how to respond to a colleague on Slack, you may be able to ask ChatGPT for help.

With this new development, it will no longer just be a pure communication platform. Companies can now link directly to enterprise applications without wasting time switching between tasks. This integration of AI is set to revolutionize how we work and communicate, making it more efficient and productive than ever before.

It’s worth noting that while the announcement regarding its latest feature integration into OpenAI was made on May 4th, 2023, most of the features are not yet available.

Read also: Salesforce is Set to Take on Microsoft with $27.7bn Acquisition of Slack

Slack GPT; Generative AI, built natively in Slack

Rob Seaman pointed out that the communication platform has a unique advantage in generative AI because companies use it to transmit messages; hence a wealth of institutional knowledge is already present. This information includes messages, files, and clips shared daily, making it an excellent foundation for building AI models.

Firstly, the platform will bring AI natively into the user experience with Slack GPT. This integration will help customers work more efficiently, communicate better, and learn faster. For example, AI-powered conversation summaries and writing assistance for composition will be directly available.

“We think Slack has a unique advantage when it comes to generative AI. 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,” he said.

“For starters, Slack is going to bring AI natively into the user experience with SlackGPT to help customers work faster, communicate better, learn faster, etc. And an example of that is AI-powered conversation summaries and writing assistance for composition that’s going to be directly available in Slack,” he said.

Another feature is AI-generated content for its linked applications. This could make it easier to create content for Slack Canvas, which is a useful tool for businesses. While writing a simple message might be easy, this feature will be especially helpful for creating automated messages that are part of a workflow.

Developers will also be able to utilize the AI integration and build it into their workflows. This will allow them to connect with external applications and large language models to create customized generative AI experiences.

“Just last week, the company made its updated developer experience generally available, which should make it easier to incorporate generative AI into the platform in customized ways, Seaman says.

“So this gives us the foundation to give users choice and flexibility to bring AI into their work in their business whenever they’re ready, and however they like. We’ve got 2600 apps in the ecosystem right now, which includes a lot of the leading LLMs, and we see a lot of customers already choosing to integrate generative AI into Slack themselves.”

The third feature of Slack’s AI integration is the addition of EinsteinGPT, which is Salesforce’s version of generative AI announced in March. This feature will allow employees to directly ask questions about Salesforce content within Slack, such as which users are most likely to churn or which accounts are most likely to buy.

“Slack is really becoming the conversational interface for Salesforce. So that’s bringing those EinsteinGPT-powered insights from the real time customer data that exists in Salesforce into Slack to enrich every team’s understanding of the customer,” Rob said.

While developers can build custom integrations with a range of LLMs, the Workflow Builder with SlackGPT AI connectors will be available this summer, allowing customers to easily connect ChatGPT or Claude to a workflow or build their custom connectors.

Read also: Zoho launches 13 AI extensions as it integrates ChatGPT into Zia