Slack is turning Slackbot into an AI assistant
Slack is testing an update for Slackbot that turns it into an AI assistant. Currently, it works as a tool to send reminders and notifications. With the update, Slackbot can create custom plans tailored to your workspace, sift through a mountain of messages, collect information from a range of Slack channels, and much more.
“Today, Slackbot is pretty bare-bones,” says Rob Seaman, Slack’s senior vice president of enterprise products. The edge. “But what we did was we rebuilt it from the ground up to make it a personalized AI companion.”
As part of the pilot, Slackbot will appear as an icon next to the search bar at the top of the workspace. Clicking on it will open a DM-like panel on the right side of the screen where you can enter prompts like “What are my priorities for today?” » or “Find the latest updates on a project.” The new Slackbot will leverage your conversations, files, and workspace to provide personalized support.
In a demo seen by The edgeSlack showed how the AI-enhanced Slackbot can perform more complex tasks, such as organizing a product launch plan into a canvas by collecting information across different Slack channels, as well as helping to create a social media campaign using a brand’s tone of voice.
But what seems even more useful is the new Slackbot’s ability to search a workspace using natural language. This means that if you’re looking for a document but can’t identify the specific keyword it was attached to, you can ask Slackbot something like “Find me the document Jay shared in our last meeting.” It can also leverage Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar to coordinate and schedule meetings with colleagues.
This is in addition to other AI-based features that Slack has built into the platform, which can already summarize threads and channels as well as decode company jargon. “We’ll continue to put these little touches where they make sense, to save users a click,” Seaman said when asked about the future of these features. Existing Slackbot features, such as its automated messages or personalized functions in response to commands, will also remain available.
Companies can choose to opt out of using an AI Slackbot, but not individuals in the workspace. Slack’s AI features work through Amazon Web Services’ virtual private cloud, “which means no data leaves the firewall, no data is used in training the models,” according to Seaman.
The upgraded Slackbot is already available to 70,000 employees at Salesforce (Slack’s parent company), and the company is now testing it with other customers as well. He plans to introduce the new feature to everyone at the end of the year.
