How AI is reshaping Slack

Over the last decade, Slack has amassed millions of users. The average user has Slack open 10 hours a day and actively uses it a couple of hours daily.

A lot of enterprise knowledge flows through channels, direct messages, and meetings. Extensive new generative AI (genAI) features added in recent years assist in even better communication and collaboration. 

Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, hopes genAI will make its software a “work operating system” where digital labor can also communicate and orchestrate business processes. Some of the newer features include enterprise search, summaries, meeting notes, and translations.

And there’s more cooking. Rob Seaman, chief product officer at Slack, gave Computerworld a glimpse of the company’s thinking and experiments. (This interview was edited for length.)

Slack

How are you balancing genAI integration with people’s conventional Slack habits?  “We think of AI in two forms — embedded AI and open-ended AI. Embedded AI helps within our existing interface. We automatically summarize PDFs so people don’t have to open files. In our activity feed, we’re scanning activity and extracting action items so you don’t read everything chronologically. 

“We can put assistants on the right-hand side, but I don’t think that’s how it’s going to end up. I don’t think we’ve figured it out yet.

“I don’t think today’s interfaces will hold with AI. You’re seeing search and assistants blend in consumer apps, and that may happen in Slack and enterprise software.

“The question is: how do you seamlessly go from AI search and assistant experiences to colleague communication without jarring context switches? We haven’t figured it out yet, but we’re prototyping internally.”

Can you share other examples of experiments? “I’ll give an example — I don’t know that we’ll ship it, but you could come into Slack and have a prompt bar and not see your sidebar with all channels. That’s a hyperbolic experiment we’ve got. 

“The comments, feedback, and reviews are mixed internally. We’ll do these [experiments] sometimes — and it’s like a pretty big change for some of our staunch users within our employee base.

“You might imagine coming into Slack without your sidebar, just an open-ended prompt that can search, communicate with colleagues, and handle agent tasks. That’s a big change from today.”

Are you thinking about alternatives to text-based chat? “We’re actively working on a feature that turns all your unread messages into a podcast of your chosen length and format. You can listen on your ride back home.

“We’ve done work to reduce meeting overload through asynchronous video and audio clip sharing. Summaries can help, so you don’t have to listen to everything.

“We’re looking at alternative content consumption forms and doing exciting work in text-to-speech.

Are you seeing any hesitation around AI adoption? “A lot depends on the trust the software builds. One is creating value, two is conveying trust. That’s where we spend tons of time. 

“Company adoption follows industry risk curves. Their data isn’t used to train, or it’s not going outside the firewall. Their data is their data.

“We’re working on ‘profile summaries.’ At large companies like Salesforce, I get DMs from people I don’t know. I mouse over — just name and title, which doesn’t help. We added a ‘Tell me more about person’ button. It’ll go off and we’ve prompted it to be positive and look at public channels. It writes a positive CV about their recent work and accomplishments.

“It’s not looking at direct messages and builds trust in the system. That’s what we’re working on — discovery in context of how you already use Slack, but also trust building.

Slack

Do you see Slack as a communication layer for agents to talk and collaborate? “Absolutely. I think we have a continued role as a communication layer, but the emerging role for Slack is as the agent command center for users within teams and companies. Tasks are orchestrated and executed by agents on behalf of users.

“I look at AI-native companies for inspiration — Cursor, ElevenLabs, Vercel — they’re putting their agents in Slack because it makes sense. It’s a natural place.

“MCP and agent protocols are very exciting. I think Slack can be an MCP server and an MCP client. We’re working on the server part, but we could be an MCP client for other MCP servers on the desktop or in the browser.”

How do you get users to adopt and understand new AI features in Slack? “I’ll speak openly about what’s been a challenge for us, which is discovery. It’s something we’re spending time on — myself and Ethan [Eismann], our head of design.

“As we add more to Slack, we do not want to mess up the core communication experience. We need users to discover these things in their normal workflow in a non-distractive way that creates value, builds trust, then kicks out to deeper use.

“Gemini does this well — they make recommendations within the product, you try it, then kick out to dedicated Gemini experiences. You discover it, then go into a more dedicated experience.”

Any other cool features coming soon? “There’s one, AI Explain. As a product person, I get pulled into incident channels all the time. When something’s wrong with Slack, there’ll be an incident commander, engineers. I literally don’t know what they’re talking about.

“When I look at messages with acronyms I don’t know, if I mouse over a message, we now have little stars on it. If I click it, it takes that message, all the ones around it, smartly breaks it apart into searches, executes searches, and comes back with an explanation for me.

“That would have been like 10 searches from my past. That’s a great candidate for launching into an agentic experience. I got an explanation, now let’s say I want to take a next logical turn. That’s where we can train users that Slack’s a lot more than just communication.”