Slack is a widely used messaging platform in the workplace
San Francisco:
Artificial intelligence is transforming Slack, the widely used workplace messaging platform, its CEO told AFP, just nine months after taking one of the most high-profile jobs in Silicon Valley. Lidiane Jones took charge of Slack following the departure of co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, who left two years after his company was acquired by Salesforce, the San Francisco-based software giant.
Life at Slack after the blockbuster $27.7 billion transaction hasn’t always been smooth sailing, and Jones, a former Microsoft executive who rose to the top of Salesforce in just a few years, was named CEO to bring stability .
Jones took the job in January, just a few weeks after the launch of ChatGPT made the world aware of AI’s superpowers, and Slack has moved quickly to avoid being left behind, especially against its archrival Microsoft.
“It’s amazing what has happened to the world,” Jones said of this AI moment that captured the imagination of Silicon Valley and the world.
“We’ve launched more features in the last nine months than in previous years.”
Jones, a native of Brazil and living in the Boston area, was in San Francisco for “Dreamforce,” Salesforce’s big annual event to plug its new products, and AI was on everyone’s minds.
Many believe that tools like Slack are first in line to be deeply transformed by generative AI, which can produce texts, images and sounds in everyday language on demand.
Originally designed to facilitate teamwork and internal communication, Slack, along with its equivalents like Microsoft’s Teams, has rushed out new versions powered by AI to act as something close to an online assistant.
“When I got back from my two-week vacation this summer, I had mountains of messages from clients and colleagues to catch up on,” Jones said.
“I asked ‘Slack AI’ to summarize everything and within two hours I was up to date, instead of taking a whole day or even a week.”
She said this use of new AI tools works for summarizing all types of content or fully automating complex administrative tasks, such as approving expenses or connecting users with internal expertise.
Unlike Microsoft, users can also speak directly within Slack with generative AI chatbots from various providers, such as Claude from start-up Anthropic, and soon ChatGPT, from OpenAI.
This availability of a wide range of third-party apps and tools “is our strength,” Jones said.
“We are very different from Teams… We are first and foremost a very open platform.”
The comparison with Teams is sensitive. In 2020, then still a startup, Slack filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft for bundling Teams into its hugely popular Office Suite.
With some 300 million monthly users, Microsoft’s conversation and videoconferencing app surpasses Slack with its 12 million daily active users, according to data from 2019, the last time it was made public.
Microsoft has agreed to many of Slack’s demands in Europe, but the EU investigation continues and the Windows giant could face further consequences from European regulators.
But thanks to its major investments in OpenAI, Microsoft has gained an edge in the field of generative AI.
But Jones emphasized that Slack is equally suited to excel in AI thanks to the quality of its data, the key ingredient in the technology’s magic formula.
“We have all the knowledge of a company on the platform…the workforce is working together across departments, all that unstructured data is there,” she said.
“That’s what makes our AI capabilities so powerful, because it has so much context,” she added.
For now, Slack has no plans to develop its own language model, the systems that are at the core of generative AI and have made OpenAI a household name.
“We don’t feel like we have to reinvent the wheel,” Jones joked, reserving the possibility of one day designing a more specialized model.
On the even more distant horizon, Slack could one day develop highly personalized AI agents, a kind of digital secretaries that know users in their most personal details.
“It’s definitely a plausible future. And look, I have a family, I work, it’s very busy… Isn’t it amazing to think that a system can track everything in one place?”
“But it will take time” to get people comfortable doing that, she said.
“I think there is a possibility and a desire, but it will take a while before we reach the confidence line.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)