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Slack AI is now available to all paid users. Here's what these features can do for your team
Given that communication is key to any team's success, cross-organization communication platforms like Slack have become central components to many team interactions. To further optimize such teamwork, Slack is adding a slew of AI updates.
On Thursday, Salesforce, Slack's parent company, made its Slack AI paid add-on -- with expanded language support -- available to all paid Slack users, giving them access to generative AI features natively infused throughout the platform. Previously, Slack AI was only available for Enterprise plans.
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The Slack AI features address pain points users typically experience on the platform, such as being bombarded with messages, having trouble locating important materials, and keeping track of different channels.
For example, the recap feature gives users the opportunity to receive daily morning digests with summaries of channels they want to follow but can't commit to due to bandwidth constraints. Slack AI can even help users determine which channels to add to their recap based on Slack activity.
With Slack AI, users can also access an AI-powered search tool that answers content-related conversational questions and cites relevant Slack messages so users can continue to do some digging of their own. Lastly, the conversation summaries feature lets users get up-to-date on message threads and channels with a single click, providing them with detailed summaries that include important details such as action items, highlights, and more.
To address security concerns that may arise from letting a chatbot access all of your work conversations and data, Slack reassured users that the company does not use customer data to train large language models (LLMs) or serve other clients. Additionally, the company shared that Slack's LLMs are hosted in Slack's own virtual private cloud, "ensuring customer data remains in-house and exclusively for that organization's use."
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The Slack AI paid add-on is available for all paid Slack plans, and is priced at $10 per user per month for Slack Pro and Business+ plans. Currently, Slack AI supports English, Spanish, and Japanese, with more languages coming soon, according to the release.
Slack said that Slack AI will continue to get smarter. Next up, the company is developing search and summarization capabilities for more data sources such as files and clips -- and even huddles.