Save Time on Tedious Tasks: How Generative AI Summarizes Chat Threads and Quickly Gathers Insights
From summarizing channels to AI-driven searches, Slack AI's user-friendly tools help teams work more efficiently.
After a long day of meetings, you find yourself facing hundreds of messages. Is it a brewing crisis, an important announcement, or just an enthusiastic company potluck chat? Sorting through them could take 30 minutes, but who has the time?
What if you could cut through the clutter in seconds?
Slack believes they have the solution.
Since February, Slack has introduced Slack AI, an innovative platform powered by generative artificial intelligence to help businesses quickly and effortlessly find the information they need.
Being able to choose the day, week, or month I want to catch up on with Slack AI has been incredibly impactful,” says Jason Morita, product owner at ProService Hawaii. Conversation summaries save the day after meeting marathons: I use them to stay informed on what I missed while I handle other tasks.
Jason Morita is among the early users who have already benefited from Slack AI's intuitive features, simplifying the integration of AI in the workplace.
Find Answers Quickly to Make Swift Decisions at Work
Sharing the vision of AI for businesses, Slack’s Vice President of Product Management, Jackie Rocca, explains: “For the past 10 years, Slack has become a hub for our clients’ projects, data, and information. This creates an incredible collection of knowledge, but it can be challenging to extract the most important nuggets.”
“We designed Slack AI to help our customers unlock the most value from their knowledge and find information quickly.”
With Slack AI, users can generate summaries of chat threads and entire channels, enabling employees to get up to speed quickly without lengthy meetings. Slack found that this can save users an average of 97 minutes per week.
Another feature is the integration of Slack AI into search queries. Whether through keyword-based or natural language queries, Slack AI provides personalized and contextual results, making it easier to find what you need.
Early users of Slack AI have reported positive experiences with the AI-powered search function, shares Jackie Rocca. For example, during a virtual meeting, a sales representative needed to answer a customer's question about a compliance-related feature. Normally, she would ask the customer to wait while consulting with subject-matter experts.
However, with Slack AI's search capabilities, the sales representative found the answer in a channel discussion within seconds, allowing her to continue the conversation with the customer immediately.
“This is a real business benefit that Slack AI delivers for our users,” says Rocca.
Stay on Top of Projects Without Information Overload
Slack AI also helps employees stay updated on work developments more efficiently. In April, Slack AI introduced a new recap feature—a newsletter-like tool that automatically summarizes selected channels.
This “digital morning digest,” as Jackie Rocca calls it, is perfect for managers or adjacent teams who need to keep track of a project without diving into granular details.
The Recap feature summarizes the most important developments daily, eliminating the need for subscribers to sift through long message threads. This allows users to stay updated on multiple projects without feeling overwhelmed by details.
Humans at the Helm of Company Data
Despite the integration of AI in many businesses, human control remains central to Slack’s feature design philosophy.
In a podcast episode discussing Slack features, Jackie Rocca says: “We are focused first on really keeping the human in the loop and making sure that you are always in control.”
Slack AI is designed to build trust and emphasize human control over the data accessed and actions taken by the AI.
Combining AI capabilities with human judgment, Slack AI ensures effectiveness and reliability. All answers provided by Slack AI are drawn from existing company information, not external sources, and come with citations so users can verify the context.
This approach ensures users receive accurate information while saving time to focus on more meaningful and valuable work.
Moreover, Slack users play a crucial role in enhancing Slack AI. Users can rate responses and provide feedback to the development team for every generated answer or summary.
Slack AI adheres to the same enterprise-grade data security and compliance standards as the Slack app. Its self-hosted model ensures that customer data is not used for other clients or to train AI models.
Easily Incorporate AI into Your Daily Workflow
As AI becomes more prevalent in the workplace, Slack helps its users harness its potential as an accessible technology for everyone. “Some AI tools require you to be a prompt engineer to use them effectively,” notes Jackie Rocca.
“We designed Slack AI for everyday users, making it accessible and easy to integrate into your daily workflow.”
For example, search queries are automatically enhanced with AI, so users only need to enter their query in the existing search box. Thread and channel summaries are accessible with one click on the Slack AI icon within the app. Users can customize their search range from the last seven days or set a custom date range.
Slack’s native AI builds on a collection of over 13,000 third-party AI-powered apps compatible with the Slack ecosystem.
“We want to include all other tools and ensure you can integrate them into Slack,” says Rocca.
These tools include the writing tool Notion and the conversational chatbot search engine Perplexity, which help automate repetitive tasks. Slack is also developing a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a conversational AI assistant for Salesforce’s Customer Relationship Management software.
Slack AI is available as a paid add-on for Slack Pro, Business+, and Enterprise subscribers. Find out more about Slack AI here.
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