Salesforce has announced the launch of Slack AI, a generative AI experience natively available in Slack. The new AI capabilities include AI-powered search, channel recaps, thread summaries, and a soon-to-be-released digests feature. These features aim to help users find answers, distil knowledge, and spark ideas faster. Slack AI is expected to save users an average of 97 minutes per week.

Thousands of users from companies like SpotOn, Uber, and Anthropic participated in the Slack AI pilot. The AI features are designed to be trustworthy, easy to use, and require no training. Slack AI's large language models (LLMs) are hosted directly within Slack, ensuring customer data remains in-house and exclusively for that organisation’s use. Slack AI does not use customer data for LLM training purposes.

"For the past decade, Slack has revolutionised the way we work, bringing people, apps, and systems together in one place," said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack. "With Slack AI, we're excited to take this transformation to the next level. These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth. In the era of generative AI, Slack is the trusted, conversational platform that connects every part of a business to supercharge team productivity."

According to Kate Earle Jensen, Head of Sales and Partnerships at Anthropic, "Slack AI is not only a huge productivity boost — it's easy to use, right where we already work in Slack. Our team loves how quickly they can find answers, which translates to faster decision-making and a greater focus on work that really drives an impact."

Zach Hyman, Co-CEO of SpotOn, said, "During the pilot program, we experienced firsthand the major productivity gains that Slack AI could drive for our business. Slack AI has helped speed up our employees' work exponentially."

Future plans for Slack AI include the creation of digests summarising key highlights from channels and a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM. Slack's partner ecosystem is also bringing additional AI functionality into their Slack apps, including upgraded AI-powered apps from PagerDuty Copilot and Notion, and a new AI integration with Perplexity.

"At Perplexity, we're building the next generation answer engine, applying the most advanced LLMs to make knowledge instant and accessible. Now with Perplexity Push, we're delivering an enterprise integration that brings AI-powered insights directly into Slack. Teams can easily stay in-the-know on topics they care about where conversations and collaboration already happens," said Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity.