Slack is reworking its Slackbot right into a ‘customized AI companion’

I have been utilizing Slack for like a decade and the platform’s proprietary chatbot, Slackbot, has at all times been a bit underwhelming. It may ship reminders and notifications and, nicely, that is about it. That might change within the close to future, because the platform is testing a redesigned Slackbot that’s chock full of AI.

The brand new Slackbot is mainly an AI chatbot like all the remaining, however this one has been purpose-built to assist with frequent work duties. Of us can use pure language to converse with the bot and it may well do stuff like whip up mission plans, flag every day priorities and analyze studies. It may additionally assist individuals discover data once they solely bear in mind just a few scant particulars. The corporate says it should “give each worker AI superpowers” to allow them to “drive productiveness at AI velocity.”

To that finish, the brand new Slackbot integrates with instruments like Google Drive, Salesforce and One Drive. It may present “clear insights” by analyzing these different platforms. Slack additionally says that the chatbot will proceed to develop and evolve, ultimately with the ability to “take motion in your behalf and construct brokers at your request, all with no code required.”

The Verge got a look at the new Slackbot in action and famous that it helped create a social media marketing campaign utilizing a model’s tone and arranged a product’s launch plan. The publication did not point out if the social media marketing campaign and product launch plan had been any good.

The redesigned and AI-centric Slackbot is at the moment obtainable as a beta to 70,000 customers, however Slack has plans for a broad rollout by the tip of the yr. Corporations will have the ability to flip off the function, however all of us particular person employee bees will not have that luxurious.

That is simply the latest AI injection by Slack. In any case, father or mother firm Salesforce absolutely loves the technology. Slack lately added AI writing help to its Canvas document-sharing area and launched AI‑generated channel recaps and thread summaries. It additionally lately got here out that the corporate has been using people’s chats to train its AI models by default, with corporations being compelled to particularly request an opt-out.