As speculation about Salesforce potentially acquiring Informatica grows, the company, led by Marc Benioff, continues to focus on enhancing its product offerings. Recently, Salesforce launched an update for Slack, introducing new generative AI features.
These enhancements build on the Slack AI capabilities announced in February, delivering concise summaries that help users stay informed about daily work interactions.
Salesforce is also expanding Slack AI to support more languages and is exploring additional data sources for future improvements. This initiative represents Salesforce's commitment to making generative AI accessible at all staff levels. As organizations increasingly rely on AI-driven tools to boost productivity and revenues, a significant gap remains, with only 25% of desk workers having experience using AI tools, even as 94% of executives view AI integration as a top priority.
Enhancements to Slack AI
In February, Salesforce introduced native Slack AI features focusing on two main areas: AI-powered search and conversation summaries.
AI Search: The updated search bar offers a Q&A experience, allowing users to ask work-related questions—from project updates to policy inquiries— and receive precise, citation-supported answers.
Summaries: This feature generates instant highlights from channels and threads, helping users catch up on unread messages or review conversations from specific periods, such as a week or month.
Now, Salesforce has introduced Recap, a new feature that provides users with a daily digest of discussions in their selected channels, all generated by AI.
Using Slack AI Recap
To access Recap, users simply click the Recap button in Slack’s home section and choose the channels they want to monitor. Slack will suggest relevant channels based on activity, but users can customize their selections.
Once set up, the Recap page displays activity from chosen channels, complete with AI-generated summaries and citations, allowing users to quickly catch up on discussions without manually reviewing each thread.
Salesforce utilizes third-party large language models (LLMs) within its secure infrastructure to generate these summaries, ensuring customer data stays protected. However, the company has not revealed the specific LLM providers yet, citing the rapid evolution of AI technologies.
New Language Support and Future Features
Previously, Slack AI was available only in U.S. and U.K. English for Enterprise plan subscribers. Now, Salesforce has made these features available as a paid add-on for all users and is expanding language support to include Japanese and Spanish, with plans for additional languages in the future.
Moreover, Salesforce aims to leverage more enterprise data—including files, apps, and interactions within Slack—to enhance AI capabilities. This will also encompass LLM-based analysis of audio and video Huddle interactions, generating summaries of key points and action items for seamless transitions from discussions to next steps.
While Microsoft has integrated similar AI features into Teams through Copilot, Salesforce is taking a more measured approach, rolling out each Slack AI feature individually and assessing its impact on users.
“We’ve conducted a successful pilot program, and now clients such as Uber, Wayfair, and others are actively using Slack AI,” a company spokesperson noted. Internal research indicates that customers save an average of 97 minutes per user each week by using Slack AI for answering queries, consolidating knowledge, and generating ideas.
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