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As the technology community continues to speculate on the potential acquisition of Informatica by Salesforce, the CRM giant led by Marc Benioff remains unwavering in its product strategies. Today, the company rolled out an update for Slack, bolstering the service with additional generative AI capabilities.
The new features build on the native AI smarts – collectively dubbed Slack AI – announced in February and provide users with easy-to-digest recaps to stay on top of their day-to-day work interactions.
Salesforce also confirmed it is expanding Slack AI to more languages and planning to tap into more data sources to make it even better in the future.
The development marks another step from Salesforce towards democratizing access to gen AI capabilities at the staff level. This is crucial as leaders continue to look at LLM-driven tools and services to make their workforce more productive – and drive up revenues – but most desk workers remain unexposed to the power of AI.
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In a research conducted by Slack itself, as many as 94% of executives said incorporating AI into their organization is an urgent priority, but only 25% of desk workers reported they have had the chance to actually try AI tools at work.
How Slack AI is getting better?
Back in February, when Salesforce introduced native Slack AI features, the focus was on two main areas: AI search and summaries for threads and channels.
With AI search, the company revamped its search bar with a Q&A experience, wherein users could ask anything work-related — from questions about ongoing projects to policies — and get an exact answer with relevant citations.
On the other hand, summaries generated instant highlights from channels and threads, giving an easy way to catch up on unread messages or summarize conversations for a given period, like a week or a month.
Now, building on the summary feature, Salesforce is adding Recap into Slack. The feature allows users to get a daily digest of everything that’s been discussed in the channels they want to keep tabs on, all generated with AI.
To use the feature, all one has to do is head over to the Recap button in the home section of Slack and select the channels they want to follow. Slack will suggest the most relevant channels based on activity but the user can pick their own too.
Once the channels are added, the Recap page will show activity from all these channels with AI-generated summaries and relevant citations. As a result, the user can quickly scroll through and catch up on missed discussions without going into each channel one by one.
Like the original features, Recap also taps the collective knowledge (messages) an organization holds within its Slack instance. Salesforce says it uses third-party large language models to extract relevant information from this knowledge base and turn it into a relevant summary or answer. However, it is yet to share who are the providers of these models.
“Slack AI uses third-party LLMs that are hosted within Slack’s secure infrastructure so customer data never leaves Slack. We are not disclosing the 3rd party LLMs at this time. We plan to explore a range of market-leading models and wouldn’t want customers to make decisions based on what’s currently being used, especially given how fast the AI landscape is evolving,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.
More languages and features on the way
Previously, Slack AI smarts were only available in U.S. and U.K. English to those who had subscribed to the platform’s Enterprise plan.
Now, Salesforce says it is making the features available as a paid add-on for all customers paying for the service and adding support for more languages, starting with Japanese and Spanish. It expects to add more languages in the coming months.
Moreover, the company said it plans to use more data — covering files, apps, canvases and clips — siloed within enterprises’ Slack instances to further strengthen AI capabilities within the platform. This will also include an LLM-based analysis of audio/video Huddle interactions for delivering AI-generated summaries of key takeaways and action items, making it easy to turn live discussions into next steps.
Notably, similar features have already been added to Teams, Slack’s biggest competitor, with the integration of Microsoft Copilot. However, unlike Microsoft, Salesforce appears to be going slowly, taking each Slack AI feature one by one and validating its effectiveness for users.
“We’ve had a successful pilot program, and now customers like Uber, Wayfair, Anthropic, SpotOn, Beyond Better Foods, ProService Hawaii, and others are using Slack AI,” the spokesperson added while noting that the company’s internal research shows customers save an average of 97 minutes per user each week when using Slack AI to find answers, distill knowledge and spark ideas.
