Slack adds AI to save you time, summarize conversations for you

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Messaging platform Slack has announced the addition of several new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to its platform in an effort to boost productivity and streamline workplace communication for its millions of users.

The new AI-powered features utilize advanced natural language processing to auto-summarize key points from long messages, recognize action items, schedule reminders, and prioritize notifications.

“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,”

Denise Dresser, Slack CEO

They allow users to quickly grasp the core content from conversations instead of having to read through extensive message histories.

AI – The time saver for Slack-ing off

According to Slack, early tests showed the features helped reduce time spent reading messages by an average of 20 percent.

The company claims this saves users nearly an hour each work week that can be reallocated to focus on more substantive work.

However, some privacy advocates have raised concerns about the increased reliance on AI, questioning how much access the systems have to users’ conversations and how secure the underlying data is.

Slack maintains it has implemented rigorous protections for customer data.

The rollout of the new capabilities aligns with Slack’s recent push into more advanced integrations of automation and AI amid heightened competition in the workplace collaboration software space from the likes of Microsoft, Facebook, and Google.

While promising more productivity, the technology does mean users give up a degree of data and privacy.

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