New AI tools from Slack are now available for testing, but only if your company pays for them.

AI can describe what you look for and what you say.

The AI bandwagon has been officially joined by Slack. As of today, the company is adding three new AI features to its famous work app as an extra for Enterprise users who pay extra. These features sound good, but like all AI, we need to see them in action before we decide if they're useful.

The new AI features in Slack

The first new AI tool has to do with searching. Before, finding in Slack worked pretty normally: You'd type in the buzzwords you want to find, maybe with a certain person or channel in mind, and then look through the results until you (hopefully) find what you're looking for. With the latest update, Slack's search now has an AI bot. The bot will give you a full answer to your question based on your Slack past, which includes both your groups and direct messages.

Slack says its new AI search is great for things like getting caught up on a new project at work, learning about company policies, finding subject matter experts at your company, learning from past conversations that may have dealt with a similar issue to the one you're working on, and decoding acronyms so you don't have to ask your coworkers to explain work language.



Then there are highlights and recaps: Channel reviews tell you what people have been talking about in channels. To get a summary of the last 24 hours or the last seven days, you can choose the date range for the report. The same thing can be done with thread recaps. Maybe you don't have the time or energy to read a long chat. You can ask Slack's AI to summarize it for you.

These summaries look like they will be very helpful when coming back from a long holiday or starting a new job or project. When someone adds you to a busy Slack channel (or an entire workplace), you probably spend a lot of time getting caught up on what's going on. This AI could save you a lot of time if it works as promised.



AI features are being added to Slack today, such as search, channel recaps, and thread highlights. More AI features will be added in the future, though. It's already possible to add AI tools from other apps, like Notion, PagerDuty, and Perplexity. The announcement, however, focused on plans to make summaries of stations that you might need to watch later but don't need to see right away. It's also working on adding Einstein Copilot, the conversational AI helper from Salesforce CRM, which should make Slack feel like ChatGPT.

Slack is also adamant that its AI is powered by LLMs that were taught and are run by people from Slack. That means that your information isn't sent to OpenAI, Google, or any other AI company. But since Slack is owned by Salesforce, that doesn't mean that big tech isn't still working with your data. At least the data collection and handling stays in the family.

How to use Slack's brand-new AI tools

These changes are going live today, but you may not see them in the Slack app for your business yet. Which is why it's an add-on that costs money. Going forward, your company will have to decide whether to pay for AI. There's also a line for the new features, so even if you want to sign up right away, you might not be able to.

Use this form to get in touch with Slack if you want your company to join its AI train.