Slack is officially joining the artificial intelligence bandwagon. Back in February, the company began rolling out three new AI features for its popular work app as paid add-ons for its Enterprise membership. However, starting Thursday, Slack is expanding the optional AI add-on to all paid Slack plans. This means that whether you use Slack for work or pay for it yourself, you'll be able to take advantage of these new AI capabilities right away—for an additional fee.
Slack’s new AI features
Before this update, searching in Slack was pretty standard: You entered the keywords you wanted to find (perhaps with a specific user or channel in mind), then browsed through related results until you (hopefully) found what you were looking for. Look for. In a new update, Slack has added an AI bot for search. When you submit a question, the bot will generate a complete reply for you based on your Slack history, including your channel and DMs.
Slack says its new AI search is great for things like catching up on new projects at work; learning about company policies; finding subject matter experts in your company; learning from past conversations that may have touched on similar issues you're working on; and Decipher unfamiliar acronyms so you don't have to pester colleagues to define work terms.
Then there are recaps and summaries: Channel recaps give you a summary of the conversations within the channel. You can set the date range for your review and choose whether to receive summaries for the past 24 hours or the past 7 days. Thread summaries provide a similar solution for threads. If you don't have the time (or energy) to read longer conversations, you can try letting Slack's AI summarize them for you.
I think these summaries will be useful when coming back from a long vacation and when jumping into a new project or job. Every time someone adds you to a busy Slack channel (or your workplace as a whole), you're probably spending a lot of time trying to figure out what's going on, so if this AI works as advertised, it could be a huge time saver .
Search, channel recaps, and topic summaries are the AI features currently available, but Slack plans to offer more AI features in the future. You can already integrate AI tools from other applications such as Notion, PagerDuty, and Perplexity. But in particular, Slack highlighted plans to generate snippets from channels you don't need to view immediately but may want to review later. It's also working on integrating Salesforce CRM's conversational AI assistant Einstein Copilot, which will provide a ChatGPT-like experience directly within Slack.
Slack also insists its AI runs on LLMs trained and run in-house. This means your data will not be sent to third-party AI companies such as OpenAI or Google. Of course, that doesn't mean big tech companies are no longer involved with your data (Slack is owned by Salesforce, after all), but at least data collection and processing remains in the family.
How to try Slack’s new AI feature
While these features are available on more Slack plans than ever, you may not see them in the Slack app just yet. This is because it is available as an add-on, so you or your company will need to choose to add it to your plan.
The company isn't entirely clear how much this AI plan will actually cost: Slack's instructions for adding it to your plan say you'll need to purchase the AI add-on, but don't provide any numbers. However, the Economic Times reports that Slack AI costs $10 per user, so it's not necessarily cheap.
