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Slack's New AI Feature Will Catch You Up on Work Conversations

New artificial intelligence features will help you work smarter on Slack.

Kourtnee Jackson Senior Editor
Kourtnee covers TV streaming services and home entertainment news and reviews at CNET. She previously worked as an entertainment reporter at Showbiz Cheat Sheet where she wrote about film, television, music, celebrities, and streaming platforms.
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Kourtnee Jackson
2 min read
Slack

With its AI tools, Slack aims to make your workflow simpler and more efficient.

 Sarah Tew/CNET

Artificial intelligence continues to creep into your work apps, with Slack integrating an AI tool that'll summarize work discussions you might have missed.

After sharing plans in spring to introduce chatbot technology to its messaging platform, Slack is about to roll out a set of features powered by AI. The company unveiled Slack AI on Wednesday, along with Slack Lists. Slack is testing both functions this winter before releasing them on a larger scale. 

With Slack AI, in-app capabilities will include channel recaps that provide key highlights and one-click thread summaries that give you the gist of a thread. Another feature will be search answers, a question-and-answer feature that returns related messages, files, channels and an AI-generated summary. 

purple slack display showing summaries of messages

Here's a glance at a new Slack AI feature for summaries of conversations.

 Slack

With Slack Lists, you'll be able to track and prioritize work tasks while collaborating with colleagues. According to the company, you can use it to "assign owners, update status and discuss the task details all in one place" on designated threads. If someone is mentioned in a list, they'll receive an alert. Slack Lists will also offer the ability to manage requests and approvals while connected to Workflow Builder, Slack's customizable tool that helps teams automate routine tasks.

Slack also announced upgrades to Workflow Builder. The newly refreshed version includes a designated hub and is available for users with paid plans.

Work video-calling platform Zoom also unveiled a similar AI feature this week that'll summarize meetings to latecomers.

Editors' note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.