Slack has evolved from a pure communication platform to one that allows businesses to connect directly to enterprise apps without having to resort to the dreaded task switching. Today at the Salesforce World Tour event in New York, the company announced the next step in its platform evolution where it will put AI at the forefront of user experience, making it easier to obtaining information and creating workflows.
It is important to note that these are announcements and many of these features are not yet available.
Rob Seaman says that instead of slapping an AI blanket, they’re trying to incorporate it in different ways on the platform. It started last month with a small step, a partnership with OpenAI to integrate a ChatGPT app into Slack, the first piece of a much larger vision for AI on the platform. This part is in beta at the moment.
Today’s announcement involves several new integrations, including SlackGPT, the company’s own version of generative AI, built on the Slack platform, which users and developers can draw on to create experiences based on on AI. Slack content provides a starting point for creating platform-related templates.
“We believe Slack has a unique advantage when it comes to generative AI. Much of the institutional knowledge about every topic, team, work item, and project is already in Slack through the messages, files, and clips that are shared every day,” he said.
When you combine this with Slack’s ecosystem and partner platform, customers have plenty of options for integrating AI into their workflows. He says Slack is currently thinking about it in three ways.
“To begin, Slack will natively integrate AI into the user experience with SlackGPT to help customers work faster, communicate better, learn faster, and more. be directly available in Slack,” he said.
The former could, for example, help employees navigate through a long thread without having to read each message to understand the gist of what was being discussed. The latter could help generate Slack messages or content for linked Slack apps. This is a slightly less obvious use case. It’s probably easier to write a Slack message yourself unless it’s an automated message that’s part of a workflow, but if you’re creating content for Slack Canvas, you can leave generative AI will help you.
Developers can get in on the action too, integrating AI steps into workflows, giving them the ability to leverage external applications and large language models to create AI experiences themselves. generative. Just last week, the company made its updated developer experience generally available, which should make it easier to integrate generative AI into the platform in a custom way, Seaman says.
“So this gives us the foundation to give users the choice and flexibility to integrate AI into their work in their business when they’re ready and how they want. We currently have 2,600 applications in the ecosystem, which include a lot of the top LLMs, and we’re seeing a lot of customers already choosing to integrate generative AI into Slack themselves,” he said.
Finally, EinsteinGPT, the Salesforce version of generative AI announced in March, will also be integrated with Slack, allowing employees to directly ask questions about Salesforce content, such as which users are most likely to unsubscribe or which accounts are most likely to buy, etc. It’s really about integrating Salesforce content more directly into Slack, the company Salesforce paid $27 billion a few years ago.
“Slack is becoming the conversational interface of Salesforce. So it brings that EinsteinGPT-powered insights from the real-time customer data that exists in Salesforce into Slack to enrich every team’s understanding of the customer,” he said.
As with most generative AI tools we’ve seen added to enterprise software, Slack is announcing these features long before we release them, but this should give customers an idea of what’s to come and how. how AI could transform Slack into the future. The SlackGPT and EinsteinGPT integration is still in development, but today developers can create custom integrations with a variety of LLMs. Workflow Builder with SlackGPT AI connectors (which will allow customers to instantly connect ChatGPT or Claude to a workflow or create custom connectors that connect their own LLMs) will be available this summer.
