Slack Revolutionizes Workplace Productivity with AI-Powered Slackbot Upgrade

Slack is turning Slackbot into an AI assistant

Slack is testing an update for Slackbot that transforms it into an AI assistant. Presently, it operates as a tool for delivering reminders and notifications. With the update, Slackbot can create custom plans tailored to your workspace, sift through a mountain of messages, gather information from a range of Slack channels, and more. "Slackbot today is fairly rudimentary," Rob Seaman, Slack's senior vice president of enterprise product, tells The Verge. "But what we've done is we've actually rebuilt it from the ground up as a personalized AI companion." As part of the pilot, Slackbot will appear as an icon next to the search bar at the top of the workspace. Clicking into it will open a DM-like panel on the right side of the screen where you can enter prompts like "What are my priorities for today?" or "Find the latest updates on a project." The new Slackbot will draw from your conversations, files, and workspace to provide personalized assistance. In a demo seen by The Verge, Slack showed how the AI-upgraded Slackbot can perform more complex tasks, such as organizing a product's launch plan inside a Canvas by gathering information across different Slack channels, as well as help create a social media campaign using a brand's tone. But what seems even more helpful is the new Slackbot's ability to search through a workspace using natural language. That means if you're looking for a document but can't nail down the specific keyword it was attached to, you can ask Slackbot something like "Find me the document that Jay shared in our last meeting." It can also tap into Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar to coordinate and schedule meetings with colleagues. This adds to the other AI-powered features Slack has integrated into the platform, which can already summarize threads and channels as well as decode company jargon. "We'll keep putting those little touches there where they make sense, to save users a click," Seaman said when asked about the future of these features. Slackbot's existing features -- like its automated messages or custom functions in response to commands -- will remain available as well. Companies can choose to opt out of using an AI Slackbot, but individuals in the workspace can't. Slack's AI features operate through Amazon Web Services' virtual private cloud, "meaning that no data leaves the firewall, no data is used in the training of the models at all," according to Seaman. The upgraded Slackbot is already available for 70,000 employees at Salesforce (Slack's parent company), and now the company is testing it with other customers as well. It plans to introduce the new feature to everyone at the end of the year.

Your Slack chatbot is about to get a huge AI upgrade - what's new

The assistant will be able to handle complex tasks and queries If you use Slack for work, you're about to get a new assistant to help you through your day. First reported by The Verge, Slack is apparently working on turning Slackbot into a fully personalized AI companion. At present, Slackbot handles pretty basic tasks like sending reminders, notifying someone if they're mentioned in a channel they're not part of, and sending custom responses to other users. Also: Your team can chat with Anthropic's Claude directly in Slack now - what it can do Slack is hoping to ramp up the bot's usefulness with an AI injection that lets it handle complex tasks like compiling information across multiple channels, getting the latest updates on a project, creating personalized plans, and more. The Verge says the new Slackbot AI will appear as a small icon next to your search bar. Click on it, and you'll see a new panel where you can enter prompts. You can ask basic questions like "Where is that document that was shared in my last meeting?" or more complex ones. A screenshot showed a user asking Slackbot to do some research in two specific channels and create a launch plan and competitive positioning, and Slackbot chirping back that it was working on that task. Also: I love Slack's new Lists feature so much I wish it was a standalone app The new Slackbot can gather data from all your channels, files, and workspaces, and can even learn your specific brand's tone to help create marketing campaigns, the report says. Slack introduced several other AI features over the summer, including channel recaps and thread summaries for team members who join mid-thread, meeting notes after team huddles with action items and deadlines, and real-time translations (a lot like what Zoom introduced earlier this year). According to The Verge, 70,000 employees at Salesforce already have the new Slackbot AI (Salesforce owns Slack), and it's testing the feature for other companies with plans to roll it out to everyone by the end of this year. Also: 6 Slack tips I swear by to turn a chaotic workspace into a well-oiled machine I've reached out to Slack to confirm details. Get the morning's top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Slack is transforming its Slackbot into a 'personalized AI companion'

I've been using Slack for like a decade and the platform's proprietary chatbot, Slackbot, has always been a bit underwhelming. It can deliver reminders and notifications and, well, that's about it. That could change in the near future, as the platform is testing a redesigned Slackbot that's chock full of AI. The new Slackbot is basically an AI chatbot like all the rest, but this one has been purpose-built to help with common work tasks. Folks can use natural language to converse with the bot and it can do stuff like whip up project plans, flag daily priorities and analyze reports. It can also help people find information when they only remember a few scant details. The company says it will "give every employee AI superpowers" so they can "drive productivity at AI speed." To that end, the new Slackbot integrates with tools like Google Drive, Salesforce and One Drive. It can provide "clear insights" by analyzing those other platforms. Slack also says that the chatbot will continue to grow and evolve, eventually being able to "take action on your behalf and build agents at your request, all with no code required." The Verge got a look at the new Slackbot in action and noted that it helped create a social media campaign using a brand's tone and organized a product's launch plan. The publication didn't indicate if the social media campaign and product launch plan were any good. The redesigned and AI-centric Slackbot is currently available as a beta to 70,000 users, but Slack has plans for a broad rollout by the end of the year. Companies will be able to turn off the feature, but all of us individual worker bees won't have that luxury. This is just the latest AI injection by Slack. After all, parent company Salesforce absolutely loves the technology. Slack recently added AI writing assistance to its Canvas document-sharing space and introduced AI‑generated channel recaps and thread summaries. It also recently came out that the company has been using people's chats to train its AI models by default, with companies being forced to specifically request an opt-out.