Slack, an expert in collaborative software, is set to enhance its customer engagement and productivity. The company has officially announced the roll-out of its native generative AI capabilities. The new functionality offers users the ability to tap into their shared collective knowledge within the platform, enhancing collaboration and review across people, data, and apps. New personalised TLDR summaries of channels that may not warrant daily checks but require monitoring have also been implemented. Channel recaps, thread summaries, and a more intuitive search function are amongst the new features.

In partnership with its extensive ecosystem, Slack has also introduced an array of AI features within its partner apps. This roll-out aims for a more engaging user experience by making it more efficient and easier to make sense of the data available. Users can expect key insights and highlights generated for channels, thread summaries to bring context quickly, and a search function that provides concise answers based on relevant conversational data.

These enhancements coincide with the 10th anniversary of Slack's first public release. According to Denise Dresser, the CEO of Slack, the goals for these enhancements are to inspire innovation and growth. Speaking on the AI's new capabilities, she said: "These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth."

Numerous users from globally recognised companies such as Uber, SpotOn, and Anthropic participated in the pilot program leading up to the official release. According to Gartner, about half of the digital workforce struggles with locating required information quickly and efficiently. Slack believes that the potential for AI to contextualise and prioritise internal knowledge is enormous.

Several features are being introduced to help summarise and prioritise information. This includes 'AI-powered search', 'channel recaps', and 'thread summaries'. Users will also have access to 'Sales spotlight', which aims to streamline operations for sales teams. Additionally, 'Engineering Spotlight' will assist engineering teams in incident management, uncovering potential solutions and applying past learnings. Slack's AI assistant will provide answers to critical questions in the near future. Users will also have the option to use additional AI functionality from Slack partner apps.

Slack upholds that keeping customer data secure and trust at the forefront of their services is their top priority. They assure that their AI will run on Slack's infrastructure and will comply with the same security practices and standards that customers expect. Each output is secure, cited, and personalised to the user. Slack also guarantees that customer data will remain in-house and exclusive to that organisation's use. Moreover, the company confirmed they do not use customer data for large language model (LLM) training purposes.

Slack AI is currently available as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise plans in U.S. and UK English. Additional plans and language support will be introduced soon. With the introduction of these new AI capabilities, Slack aims to revolutionise the way we work and make internal knowledge more accessible and easier to find.