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Salesforce has announced new Slack product innovations that bring powerful artificial intelligence, automation, and knowledge sharing into its intelligent productivity platform:

• Slack AI is built natively into Slack on its trusted foundation, grounded in a company’s collective knowledge found in Slack, and easy to access in the flow of work.
• New automation capabilities empower everyone to automate. An improved Workflow Builder enables users to connect tools in a few clicks and provides a hub for easier access to workflows. Developers can easily build and deploy custom apps, hosting them in Slack.
• Slack Lists is a brand new capability to track work, triage requests, and manage cross-functional projects in the flow of communication.

Why These Matter

Slack is dedicated to making people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. And productivity is all about empowering everyone to do their best work with the right tools and technologies. 

According to Salesforce’s Generative AI Snapshot Research, those that report using generative AI are eager to step up their game on how they use it:

• Nearly 6 in 10 of generative AI users believe they are on their way to mastering the technology with these people most interested in using it to automate tasks at work (75%) and distilling complex ideas or summarizing information (74%).
• In addition, 49% of people report they would use generative AI more if it was integrated into technology they already use.

Go Deeper

Slack is the intelligent productivity platform that offers powerful new capabilities and ways of working that accelerate productivity and efficiency.

Slack AI Capabilities

Anyone can work smarter and save time with AI built right into Slack’s conversational interface.

• Channel recaps instantly deliver highlights on any channel, so users can cut straight to what’s most important. Each recap can also be used to save time on tedious work, so users can draft status reports from project channels, extract key themes from feedback channels, and more.
• Thread summaries enable users to get up to speed on any thread in just one click. They can quickly catch up on long discussions, whether their team is swarming on an incident, going back and forth on next steps, or brainstorming ideas.
• Search answers help customers get the most out of their conversational data and all the context it holds from expertise and experiences across the organization. Users can simply ask a question and search will not only return results with relevant messages, files, and channels, but share an AI-generated summary too. They can get the answers they need in seconds, whether they want to learn about a project or topic, find internal experts, understand team processes, and more.

All of these Slack AI capabilities are built on Slack’s trusted foundation, offering the same security and compliance that customers have come to expect from their productivity platform. Importantly, these features do not use customer data for model training while ensuring that there is no data sharing between customers.

Slack Automation

Users can save time by automating work with Workflow Builder.

• Empower anyone to automate without code using a new and improved Workflow Builder. With connectors from companies like Google Workspace, Atlassian, and Asana, users can integrate multiple tools in a single workflow using a few clicks. Workflow Builder also extends to Salesforce Flow, offering an IT-approved way for users to customize their Slack workflows with admin-approved Salesforce automations.
• Build and deploy custom apps, hosted in Slack. The next generation platform makes it easier for developers to build custom Slack apps that integrate internal systems or enable more advanced custom business logic. Slack will take care of hosting, eliminating infrastructure overhead and ensuring data is stored securely in Slack. Developers can extend business logic from their custom apps to Workflow Builder, where users can discover and use them in their own automations.

Find and Access Automation in One Place 

With a new dedicated hub, customers can get started quickly with templates, easily access recently run workflows, and explore workflows being used across their organisation. They can repurpose automations used by other teams too, easily making a copy of the workflow and customising the rest in Workflow Builder.

Slack Lists

Customers can manage, track, and triage work while in the flow of communication.

• Track projects such as developing new products or marketing campaigns. Users can assign owners, update status, and discuss the task details all in one place. A dedicated thread for each project item makes it easy to hash out the details and follow along the conversation.
• Manage launches with ease by tracking dependencies and monitoring progress all in Slack. When teammates are mentioned in a list, they will be alerted the same way they receive all Slack activity, making collaboration quick and easy.
• Review approvals and requests with the help of Workflow Builder. As requests come in, users can assign them, discuss with the requestor, and close them out when they’re finished.

The Slack Perspective

“At Slack, we’re taking a collaboration-first approach to delivering an intelligent productivity platform in the age of AI and automation,” said Noah Desai Weiss, Chief Product Officer at Slack. “We are focused on providing customers with a simpler, more delightful, and more efficient set of tools so every person can do the best work of their lives.”

Availability

• Slack AI will be in pilot this winter.
• Slack lists will be in pilot this winter, and generally available in 2024.
• The new Workflow Builder is generally available now on paid plans and is subject to platform pricing.
• The new automation hub will be available later this month.

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