Slack jumps on the GPT AI trend

Slack's upcoming AI-ready platform can be integrated with various major language models, including ChatGPT.

During its World Tour NYC event, Salesforce showcased Slack GPT, which it describes as a three-pronged vision that integrates AI capabilities into the business email application. Slack GPT includes AI-powered features built natively into the app, a new AI-ready platform recently made available to developers, and the availability of Einstein GPT in the app that will allow it to generate instantly information and summaries. Einstein GPT was developed by Salesforce as a generative AI for customer relationship management (CRM) and could help companies with sales-related tasks.

Built-in AI features will give users access to a workflow builder that doesn't require them to know how to code. In it, they can automatically create or update a canvas, which is Slack's tool for collaboration. Users can also invoke Einstein GPT to summarize Huddle calls and create canvases from those calls, simply by clicking a button. That said, companies don't have to stick to using Einstein GPT only. They can integrate large language models of their choice into the new AI-ready Slack platform, including OpenAI. In fact, a Claude (Anthropic) app is now available for Slack, while the ChatGPT app for the messaging service is currently in beta. Salesforce assures customers that Anthropic and OpenAI will not take data from their Slack apps to train their language models.

Salesforce said Slack GPT is being developed to increase user productivity and gave several examples of using its features. For sales, teams could use these features to automatically generate account channel summaries, create investor canvases, and create client referrals. Customer service agents can use AI-generated solutions and responses to quickly resolve issues and automatically generate case summaries. Developers can use the features to research channel activity and summarize root cause analysis when identifying solutions to their software issues. AI tools could also automatically generate images and copy for blogs, email campaigns, and social media posts for marketers. At this time, Slack GPT's native AI capabilities, new AI-ready platform, and Einstein GPT app for Slack are still in development, and it's unclear when they'll be rolling out.

In addition to Slack GPT, Salesforce also announced plans to collaborate with Accenture “to accelerate the deployment of generative AI for CRM.” The companies apparently plan to provide businesses and organizations with the technology and help they need to be able to adopt Einstein GPT to increase productivity and improve customer experience.