Slack is the latest company to jam a set of artificial intelligence aids into its product, launching a series of tools intended to make users more productive. How far we’ve come as an industrial society.
The messaging app is getting AI writing assistance, allowing users to side-step the thinking process and get on with putting out those briefs in record speed. It’ll also have a natural language component for tweaking written work that was selfishly created without asking a computer to do the initial work.
Less Slack-ing
Slack’s writing assistant will also perform other, largely trivial, functions for human beings. Creating and assigning “action items”, creating FAQs that you definitely won’t need to check*, and sorting out meeting notes are a few of the listed capabilities.
The new system will also assume workers are idiots translate corporate-speak into something newbies can understand, and provide context summaries for messages. Anyone who doesn’t bother to pay attention to the thread until they’re specifically mentioned might benefit here. Everyone else will probably get used to the reduced cognitive overhead. Entire channels and threads can also be automatically summarised.
Read More: Nobody is building AI for you
AI translation, AI-powered updates on a task you may have missed or whose parameters have changed, and something called Enterprise Search are also included in the update. The latter integrates apps from Microsoft, Google Drive, and Slack’s owner, Salesforce, among others, but it’s not immediately clear why this is beneficial. Somebody in management probably thinks it is.
The good news? The AI ‘upgrade’ is tucked behind Slack’s paywall, meaning your company needs to pay for a subscription to use any of them. The more they pay, the more ‘assistance’ is available, the presumption being that AI integration in a team messaging platform is worth the cost. Only Enterprise Search (which, again, doesn’t seem to do anything more than exist), channel recaps, message context explanations, and translation are available now, with the other features coming to Slack before the end of the year.
*You’ll need to check.
