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Slack unveils AI tool promising to save users time at work

The logo of Instant Messaging Service Slack is shown on the display of a smartphone on April 22, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

(NewsNation) — Slack, a popular work-chatting, productivity and gossip app, is introducing a number of new AI-based features it says will make your workdays easier.

These new features include an AI-powered search Slack says will allow users to “get clear, concise, personalized answers with direct citations to relevant Slack messages” as well as “channel recaps” and “thread summaries” that will help workers “catch up on unread messages,” especially when they’ve been out of the office for an extended time.


As The Verge’s Emma Roth writes, “Slack is also working on a native integration of Einstein Copilot, its AI chatbot that can write messages to colleagues for you.”

Slack says analysis during pilot testing showed these new AI features saved an average of 97 minutes per user each week.

The company is promising to keep users’ data safe by pledging not to use it to train AIs and by directly hosting the large language models (LLMs) that allow the AI to generate human language text.

Slack AI is available today as a paid add-on for Enterprise users. While the AI features only currently support English, the company plans to add other languages soon.