Hot on the heels of Slack Sales Elevate and Slack GPT, Salesforce Inc. today announced yet more artificial intelligence capabilities in its collaboration tool with Slack AI, Workflow Builder and Slack Lists.

Announced a week ahead of Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2023 conference in San Francisco, Slack AI adds generative AI-powered summaries, recaps and search capabilities to the Slack conversational interface. Workflow Builder makes it simple to connect various third-party tools in a few simple clicks. Slack Lists provides a way for users to track their work, triage requests and manage projects within their communications workflow.

In a release, Slack explained that Slack AI is built natively into Slack, and makes it easier for users to access the knowledge hosted within what is one of the most widely used enterprise communication platforms. It promises to make life much easier for anyone who uses Slack on a day-to-day basis, with channel recaps instantly delivering highlights from any Slack channel, meaning they can quickly find the important details of their collaborative conversations. They also help users to save time on tedious tasks like drafting status reports based on what has been said in Slack.

Slack AI (pictured), which will be available in pilot by winter, further introduces thread summaries that allow users to get an instant summary on what has been said in each thread with a single click. It provides an overview of all the important details from long discussions, which could be about responding to incidents, brainstorming ideas and so on.

Meanwhile, the new search feature makes it simple to ask questions about any channel and return all of the most important messages, files and also an AI-generated summary. “[Users] can get the answers they need in seconds, whether they want to learn about a project or topic, find internal experts, understand team process and more,” Slack detailed in a blog post.

As for the new Workflow Builder, it’s all about automating work within Slack. Users can use connectors from partners including Google LLC, Atlassian Corp. Plc., Asana Inc. and others to integrate multiple tools with Slack in a single workflow with minimal clicks. It extends to Salesforce Flow too, giving users a way to customize Slack workflows with admin-approved Salesforce automations, Slack said. Custom applications can be built and deployed within Slack workflows, integrating with internal systems and eliminating the infrastructure overheads while ensuring all data is stored securely. Business logic from these custom apps can then be extended to Workflow Builder, where other users can discover them within a new “Automation Hub” and apply them with their own automations.

The good thing about Workflow Builder is that users don’t need to wait, as Slack said it’s generally available now to paid users.

Finally, Slack Lists is aimed at helping users track and manage their work within the flow of their communications. For instance, they can keep track of new products or marketing campaigns being developed inside Slack, assigning owners and tasks, updating statuses and more. With a dedicated thread for each project, it becomes much easier for teams to hash out the important details, Slack said.

Then, teams can use Slack Lists to manage launches more easily by tracking dependencies and monitoring progress from within the platform. Whenever teammates are mentioned on a list, they’ll be alerted in the same way as usual, ensuring they’re informed about important updates.

Just as with Slack AI, Slack Lists will launch in pilot in the winter, ahead of general availability planned for next year.

Slack is following the same path as its parent company Salesforce, which is also heavily invested in a future that’s built around generative AI technologies. The new capabilities in Slack build on the launch of Slack Sales Elevate, which was announced last month. That feature integrates Slack much more closely with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, enabling teams to create a personalized sales home that centralizes information, simplifies processes, and automates administrative tasks in the place sales where they already collaborate with their peers, partners and customers.

Earlier this year, Slack announced its very first generative AI capabilities with Slack GPT. They provide a way for Slack users to easily access data held in systems such as Customer 360 and Data Cloud by asking a digital assistant to dig things up.

Slack said the latest capabilities further its mission of making people’s working lives simpler and more productive. It said there is big demand for that, citing its upcoming Generative AI Snapshot Research report, which found that more than 50% of those who have already used the technology are quickly becoming masters of it. These people are keen to use generative AI to automate additional work-related tasks, Slack said, while two-thirds said they also want to use it to distill complex ideas and summarize key information.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said AI has already proven its ability to make people more productive, so it’s good to see Slack, one of the top business collaboration platforms around, embrace the technology to help users extract insights from their collaborative chats. “What could be even more transformative are the new automation capabilities offered by Slack Workflow Builder, which will enable users to own their automation destinies,” he said.

Slack Chief Product Officer Noah Desai Weiss said the company is building an “intelligent productivity platform” centered around its collaboration tools. “We are focused on providing customers with a simpler, more delightful and efficient set of tools so every person can do the best work of their lives,” he said.

The future of work is rapidly evolving and will be highly reliant on people’s ability to adopt new productivity technologies like the ones announced by Slack, said International Data Corp. analyst Wayne Kurtzman. Clearly, he believes Slack’s new features have a lot of potential. “Slack continues to evolve with new, more intelligent tools and ways of working that drive alignment, streamline efficiency and boost productivity for teams across the business,” he said.

Images: Slack