AI-infused Slack is set to have 30 new features to increase productivity

The workplace messaging app Slack is getting a major AI upgrade. The company has unveiled 30 new features and promised they’ll change how employees interact with the app, particularly through its AI assistant, Slackbot. The top changes will require the bot to go through employees’ messages.

The list of updates comes from Salesforce, the cloud software giant that purchased Slack in 2021. The company has been increasingly embedding AI across its products, including Slack. The goal is to transform the app from a place where employees come to message each other to a place where they do their work – an online hub for business tasks.

As the company puts it, the new AI assistant, Slackbot, is designed to act as a “teammate” rather than a tool people use individually. The new Slackbot should integrate across channels, conversations, files, and workflows.

Parker Harris, Co-Founder & CTO at Salesforce, calls the bot one “whose status is always green” and “the front door for the Agentic Enterprise.”

The majority of the apps’ upgrades rely on the fact that companies that use Slack will grant permission for employees’ conversations to be read and for access to emails, calendars, and other platforms.

Three key Slack updates: reusable AI skills, meeting summaries, and customer relationship management

• Reusable AI skills: Although this feature’s title refers to “skills,” it’s more of a prompt memory feature. It allows users to teach the Slackbot to do a task once, and then use the know-how again. For example, users can type in a simple prompt, such as ”draft a finance report.”

This should signal the bot to collect relevant information from Slack channels, connected apps, and generate a report. This also means that if someone on a team creates a “skill,” everyone on the team can use it. Furthermore, the Slackbot can run the “skill” whenever it notices a request that matches the task it was created to do. The AI then hands in a report (or anything else) immediately.

• Meeting transcriptions and summaries: Slackbot is set to act as a personal meeting assistant. This feature will transcribe and summarize meetings, producing recaps with action points for those who may have zoned out and missed some details. The bot will also be able to review employees’ calendars, emails, and ongoing projects to help draft follow-up messages.

“That context travels with the bot. No new access to set up. No new policies to configure. The governance and permissions your organization has already established in Slack come with it automatically,” the company claims.

• Native customer relationship management: Slackbot is now able to act as a mini sales assistant for small and medium businesses. It reads conversations in channels, tracks deals, adds new contacts, and schedules follow-up meetings automatically.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, presented the updates and claimed that with the new updates being on the way, AI doesn’t serve as a helping tool but is proactive in finishing people’s day-to-day tasks. Speaking at Salesforce’s event in San Francisco, he claimed that Slack updates will make employees’ conversations more productive and provide extra time to work on tasks.

These new features should become available in the coming months.

Unlock more exclusive Cybernews content on YouTube.