Salesforce launches Trusted Generative AI for customers in Slack

Salesforce is rolling out Slack AI, a trusted and intuitive generative AI experience available natively in Slack, where work happens. Customers can easily tap into the collective knowledge shared in Slack through guided experiences for AI-powered search, channel recaps, thread summaries, and soon, a digests feature. These capabilities will enable customers to find answers, distill knowledge, and spark ideas faster.

Why it matters: Nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to efficiently do their jobs, according to Gartner. This, paired with an increasing number of tools and ways to exchange ideas, adds to workers’ cognitive load and makes it difficult to catch up quickly and feel on top of the work day. AI holds enormous potential to make internal knowledge more contextual, relevant, and easier to find and prioritize.

The Slack CEO perspective: “For the past decade, Slack has revolutionized the way we work, bringing people, apps, and systems together in one place,” said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack. “With Slack AI, we're excited to take this transformation to the next level. 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. In the era of generative AI, Slack is the trusted, conversational platform that connects every part of a business to supercharge team productivity.”

Innovation in action: Starting today, Slack AI’s search and summarization capabilities can help customers easily find and consume large volumes of information quickly. These features are trustworthy, easy to use, and require no training. Users initiate them through guided, contextual interactions, ensuring they don’t have to learn brand new skills to enjoy the benefits. And each output is secure, cited, and personalized to the user. With Slack AI, customers can access:

• AI-powered search that delivers personalized, intelligent responses to any question: Users can ask a question conversationally and get a concise answer based on relevant Slack messages. Users can find what they need faster, whether they want to learn about a new marketing campaign, get up to speed on company policies, glean insights about past decisions from historical context, or define unfamiliar acronyms.

• Channel recaps that generate key highlights from accessible channels: Users can catch up on unread messages, summarize the last seven days, or set a custom date range to summarize. Users can quickly catch up after time away from work, get up to speed on a new project, or jump in quickly to help resolve time-sensitive issues.

• Thread summaries that catch users up on long conversations: Users can get the gist of a long conversation in one click, and clear sources are included in each summary, allowing users to dive deeper into a highlight. Users can instantly summarize key decisions and next steps from a thread with a lot of back and forth, get up to speed on a customer support ticket, or catch up on a team stand-up to get a bird’s eye view of priorities.

Sales spotlight: Sales teams are under pressure to streamline their operations and maximize team effectiveness. With Slack AI, sales reps can:

• Easily identify and bring in the right subject matter expert when a customer has a specific question or concern during a deal cycle.

• Summarize an account channel and get the context they need to prepare for a customer meeting more effectively.

• Generate key takeaways from a long discussion about deal progress to help keep the team on track.

Engineering spotlight: The incident management process can be time consuming and complex. With Slack AI, engineering teams can:

• Find answers in past incident channels to uncover potential solutions and apply learnings.

• Get the right information they need so they can quickly get situated and jump in to help find a resolution.

• Recap an incident channel and use it as a starting point to draft a root cause analysis faster.

Slack’s trusted and secure AI experience: Trust is the number one value at Salesforce, and Slack is committed to building AI products safely, responsibly, and ethically.

• Slack AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure and upholds the same security practices and compliance standards that customers expect.

• Slack AI’s large language models (LLMs) are hosted directly within Slack, ensuring customer data remains in-house and exclusively for that organization’s use. Customer data remains siloed and will not be used to serve other clients, directly or indirectly.

• Slack AI does not use customer data for LLM training purposes.

The future of native generative AI in Slack: More features that help users summarize and prioritize information are on the horizon. Soon, Slack AI will create digests summarizing key highlights from channels that users want to stay informed on but may not require immediate attention, enabling them to stay up to speed on what they could otherwise miss while focusing on their top priorities. Additionally, Slack is building a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM, that will provide answers to questions directly in Slack that are grounded in trusted customer data.

These new search and summarization features are just the beginning of how Slack will enable people to work smarter and faster. In the future, Slack will be the command center for work and the conversational interface for generative AI.

Slack’s AI-ready platform: In addition to these native AI capabilities, partners are bringing additional AI functionality into their Slack apps. Available today, upgraded AI-powered apps from Slack’s partner ecosystem allow users to ask PagerDuty Copilot for help resolving incidents, automatically summarize Notion documents in link previews, and more. And coming soon, a brand new AI integration with Perplexity will allow users to subscribe to AI-powered insights and pipe them into Slack.