After a fierce lawsuit that ended with Microsoft separating Teams from its Office suite and the announcement of Zoom AI Companion, it was expected that Slack, another major player in digital communication, would respond. Naturally, Slack doesn’t want to lag behind in the race for the market share opened up by this innovative technology. Therefore, Slack is preparing an artificial intelligence-based tool that, without the need to leave the application, will be capable of summarizing threads, recapping the most important parts of a conversation, and searching for answers in your own messages. Testing of this new functionality is set to begin, according to Slack’s update on Wednesday, this winter.
A tough competition for Companion and Copilot
Through its new integrated artificial intelligence features, Slack aims to offer the ability to generate message summaries, filtering out chat noise to help users access important conversations or ones that may have been overlooked. As for searching for answers within one’s messages, this tool can be used to quickly review Slack chats, files, and channels by simply asking it a question. The tool will then create a topic outline, creating a link to the conversation where it was being discussed.
This isn’t just a challenge to Zoom and Microsoft’s AI, but also to many task managers like Asana and Trello. Being able to track projects among all team members using the application and, most importantly, not having to leave it to keep your schedule up to date or find out who’s responsible for a task, could potentially reshape how we view and use task managers.
This is just one of the AI-powered offerings that Slack is proposing. In early 2023, it introduced a ChatGPT-based bot that helps in composing responses to colleagues who send you a message. Meanwhile, all the new AI-based features of the application will begin testing in the winter of this year. If you want to try it, you can sign up for their waiting list at this link.
