Salesforce Launches Trusted Generative AI for Customers in Slack

Why it matters: Nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to efficiently do their jobs, according to Gartner. This, paired with an increasing number of tools and ways to exchange ideas, adds to workers’ cognitive load and makes it difficult to catch up quickly and feel on top of the work day. AI holds enormous potential to make internal knowledge more contextual, relevant, and easier to find and prioritise.

The Slack CEO perspective: “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.”

Innovation in action: Starting today, Slack AI’s search and summarisation capabilities can help customers easily find and consume large volumes of information quickly. These features are trustworthy, easy to use, and require no training. Users initiate them through guided, contextual interactions, ensuring they don’t have to learn brand new skills to enjoy the benefits. And each output is secure, cited, and personalised to the user. With Slack AI, customers can access:

• AI-powered search that delivers personalised, intelligent responses to any question: Users can ask a question conversationally and get a concise answer based on relevant Slack messages. Users can find what they need faster, whether they want to learn about a new marketing campaign, get up to speed on company policies, glean insights about past decisions from historical context, or define unfamiliar acronyms.
• Channel recaps that generate key highlights from accessible channels: Users can catch up on unread messages, summarise the last seven days, or set a custom date range to summarise. Users can quickly catch up after time away from work, get up to speed on a new project, or jump in quickly to help resolve time-sensitive issues.
• Thread summaries that catch users up on long conversations: Users can get the gist of a long conversation in one click, and clear sources are included in each summary, allowing users to dive deeper into a highlight. Users can instantly summarise key decisions and next steps from a thread with a lot of back and forth, get up to speed on a customer support ticket, or catch up on a team stand-up to get a bird’s eye view of priorities.

Sales spotlight: Sales teams are under pressure to streamline their operations and maximize team effectiveness. With Slack AI, sales reps can”

• Easily identify and bring in the right subject matter expert when a customer has a specific question or concern during a deal cycle.
• Summarise an account channel and get the context they need to prepare for a customer meeting more effectively.
• Generate key takeaways from a long discussion about deal progress to help keep the team on track.

Engineering spotlight: The incident management process can be time consuming and complex. With Slack AI, engineering teams can:

• Find answers in past incident channels to uncover potential solutions and apply learnings.
• Get the right information they need so they can quickly get situated and jump in to help find a resolution.
• Recap an incident channel and use it as a starting point to draft a root-cause analysis faster.

Slack’s trusted and secure AI experience: Trust is the number one value at Salesforce, and Slack is committed to building AI products safely, responsibly, and ethically.

• Slack AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure and upholds the same security practices and compliance standards that customers expect.
• 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.
• Customer data remains siloed and will not be used to serve other clients, directly or indirectly.
• Slack AI does not use customer data for LLM training purposes.

The future of native generative AI in Slack: More features that help users summarise and prioritise information are on the horizon. Soon, Slack AI will create digests summarising key highlights from channels that users want to stay informed on but may not require immediate attention, enabling them to stay up to speed on what they could otherwise miss while focusing on their top priorities. Additionally, Slack is building a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM, that will provide answers to questions directly in Slack that are grounded in trusted customer data.

These new search and summarisation features are just the beginning of how Slack will enable people to work smarter and faster. In the future, Slack will be the command center for work and the conversational interface for generative AI.

Slack’s AI-ready platform: In addition to these native AI capabilities, partners are bringing additional AI functionality into their Slack apps. Available today, upgraded AI-powered apps from Slack’s partner ecosystem allow users to ask PagerDuty Copilot for help resolving incidents, automatically summarise Notion documents in link previews, and more. And coming soon, a brand new AI integration with Perplexity will allow users to subscribe to AI-powered insights and pipe them into Slack.

What they’re saying:

• “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.” – Kate Earle Jensen, Head of Sales and Partnerships, Anthropic
• “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.” – Zach Hyman, Co-CEO, SpotOn
• “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.” – Aravind Srinivas, CEO, Perplexity
• “Slack AI helps users unlock the full potential of company knowledge in Slack, all while supporting existing security, privacy, and compliance controls.” — Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy