Later this year, Salesforce will begin executing on earlier promises to add AI-powered capabilities to the collaboration platform Slack which it acquired just over two years ago.
The headline announcement, Slack AI, will be in pilot this winter. Salesforce also announced Slack Lists and Slack Workflow Builder.
The artificial intelligence piece. Slack AI will offer generative AI capabilities directly within the Slack workflow. Based on user prompts, Slack AI will generate not only relevant messages and channels but also create a summary of the information they contain. The capability will also generate recaps of channel highlights and create summaries of threads.
These capabilities do not use customer data for model training, nor share data between customers, Salesforce said in a release.
Why we care. Those of us who are Slack users might find use in summaries and recaps, if — and this is always the qualification — they are sufficiently accurate. AI can miss contexts if the contexts are not evident in the data; it can certainly miss nuances (after all, humans can too). It will be a case of try it and see.
The other offerings:
- Workflow Builderwill empower users to create automated workflows through drop-and-click with no code required. The next iteration of Slack will not only make it easier for developers to build custom apps hosted on Slack, but will allow users to discover them and use them in their own automations.
- A new automation hub will gather templates, pre-existing workflows and other automations in one place for easy access.
- Slack Lists is a work management tool that will allow assignment and tracking of tasks, monitoring of progress and the review of requests and approvals.
The workflow capabilities come with paid Slack plans. It’s not yet clear whether there will be a charge for the AI tool.
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