Slack’s getting an A.I. chatbot that can summarize messages, take notes and more

Buzzy chatbot technology is coming to Slack in a new way: Slack GPT, an in-app tool that allows users to shorten and adjust message tone, summarize missed messages in channels, assist with writing, take notes on calls or “huddles,” and more. 

For example, you might ask the chatbot to take note of everything that was said on a Slack group call. Slack GPT can also summarize the dozens of messages you’ve missed in a specific chat group while you were out of the office.

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Salesforce, which owns the workplace messaging app, announced the news Thursday.

Ali Rayl, Slack’s senior vice president of product, told CNBC she estimates that the AI chatbot tools will be rolled out within the next year but declined to give more specifics on the features’ rollout timeline.  

“We’ve seen a ton of interest, honestly … We have so much information [that] we have a unique advantage here,” Rayl told CNBC. “All the messages your company has sent in all of your channels – that’s valuable … How can we take generative AI and make that more valuable to a company?”

Rayl added, “We are interested in going into this territory, but also the market is pulling us there regardless.” 

The news follows Salesforce’s decision in March to greenlight two chatbots, ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, as external apps for use on Slack, but they’re limited in capacity compared with the native features announced Thursday.

Salesforce also announced no-code features it will offer to professionals starting this summer. These include tools for customer service workers, such as AI-generated responses to customers and case summaries; tools for developers and IT workers, such as automating incident management to determine the root cause of an issue; and tools for marketers, such as auto-generating campaign copy and images. 

Customer chats and information won’t be stored or used as training data for the AI tools, Rayl said. 

“[We don’t want to] just toss something out and say, ‘Yeah, the AI hallucinates sometimes, sorry,'” Rayl said. “We’re doing some really thoughtful product design.” 

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