Working and communicating as a team online has become tough. With so many messages and different places to chat, it's crucial to ensure everyone can collaborate effectively and efficiently. As we receive more messages, it becomes increasingly complex to find important information. Therefore, using innovative tools to help sort and improve our chats is essential.

Slack AI is a big help in this area, making it easier for teams to communicate, work together, and come up with new ideas by making sure messages are clear and relevant, which helps everyone do their jobs better than ever. In this guide, we will explore the benefits and capabilities of Slack AI, a powerful tool that can change the way you communicate with your customers.

‍

What Is Slack AI?

Slack AI is a suite of built-in tools that use artificial intelligence to improve productivity in Slack. It includes intelligent search, conversation summaries, and recaps, allowing users to find and prioritize important information quickly. These features adapt to each organization’s data to deliver a secure and seamless experience.

‍

What Are the Benefits of Implementing Slack AI?

Using Slack AI offers several compelling advantages, which can significantly benefit organizations by improving efficiency, decision-making, and collaboration.

1. Instant access to organizational knowledge: It searches across your organization's projects, teams, and topics in Slack to quickly find the information you need, even if you ask in your own words. This is especially valuable for CXOs and support leaders who need to stay informed in many areas.
2. Conversation summaries: Slack AI can instantly summarize channels and threads with one click, saving time and allowing you to catch up quickly. This is great for staying on top of meaningful conversations you may have missed.

3. Faster answers and incident resolution: Support teams can use Slack AI to find answers faster and make customers happier, all without leaving Slack. For example, during incidents, solutions from across the organization can be surfaced to resolve issues quickly.

4. Customizable daily recaps: Slack AI can provide a daily recap of essential messages you may have missed, helping you stay informed on key channels and projects. This declutters your day and frees up time for high-priority work.
5. Teaming Up with Other Apps: Slack AI can connect and work with other apps you might use, like Salesforce to manage customer relationships, PagerDuty to handle alerts, or Notion to organize notes and projects. When Slack AI is combined with these apps, it gets even more thoughtful and more helpful, making your work easier and more valuable.
   ‍

How Much Does Slack AI Cost?

Slack AI is priced at $10 per user per month as an add-on for Slack Pro and Business+ plans. This cost is in addition to the base subscription fees for those Slack plans. Slack also mandates that the AI add-on be purchased for all users in the organization, not just select individuals.

‍

Where Can Slack AI Be Used?

Here are some key use cases for Slack AI that can help boost productivity across teams:

1. Project Onboarding: When you're added to an ongoing project, Slack AI can quickly get you up to speed by summarizing past conversations, identifying key subject matter experts, and providing relevant context from previous discussions.
2. Sales Productivity: For sales teams, Slack AI helps reps ramp up on new accounts by providing historical context, identifying past deal wins, and connecting with the right experts to move deals forward. Conversation summaries allow reps to catch up on key discussions and next steps, ensuring that customers receive timely and personalized support.
3. Incident Management: During fast-moving incidents, Slack AI helps teams get up to speed on the latest status, find potential fixes faster, and capture learnings for root cause analysis by summarizing long conversations and surfacing relevant past incidents.
4. Customer Success: Slack AI helps teams respond more quickly and better understand customer needs. It can look at customer questions and recommend the best answers using information from the past. It also helps track customer interactions and alerts teams to potential problems based on customer sentiment. This kind of active help keeps customers happy and more likely to stay, making the service more personalized and attentive.
   ‍

What Are the Disadvantages of Slack AI?

Implementing Slack AI in an organization can involve various challenges, some of which include:

1. Missing Out on External Enterprise Knowledge: Slack's AI primarily operates based on the information within Slack itself. This means it analyzes and learns from the conversations, files, and data shared directly on the platform. However, a noticeable limitation is that Slack's AI doesn't automatically tap into external sources of information like Google Docs, Notion, Confluence, etc., where a significant portion of a company's knowledge and data might be stored.
2. Inflexible Pricing Model: The primary challenge is the pricing structure of Slack's new AI features. The features are offered as a $10/month add-on per user. This one-size-fits-all approach is problematic for companies where not all team members would use or need these AI capabilities. The lack of a more flexible payment option, such as purchasing a minimum number of licenses for those who will use the AI features, poses a significant barrier to adoption.
3. Prediction Accuracy: Slack AI often leverages predictive modeling and taps into various data sources like files, apps, canvases, clips, and more to enhance its capabilities and user experience. However, ensuring high levels of accuracy, especially in such a dynamic system like Slack, can be challenging and requires constant refinement.
4. Data Privacy and Security: With AI often processing and analyzing extensive amounts of data, ensuring user privacy and maintaining data security is a significant challenge. Slack will need to handle sensitive information responsibly and transparently to maintain user trust.

‍Is There a Better Alternative to Slack AI?

Slack AI is great for summarizing threads and answering simple questions based on Slack content. But what if your data lives outside of Slack, and your goal isn’t just productivity, but also faster support, fewer tickets, and better internal knowledge access?

That’s where ClearFeed’s AI-Powered Virtual Agent stands out.

Built specifically for support, success, and IT teams who work in Slack, ClearFeed combines the power of GPT with enterprise-ready features that go far beyond Slack’s native assistant.

Here’s why ClearFeed is the more intelligent choice:

1. Answers from All Your Data and Documentation

ClearFeed doesn’t just respond based on messages inside Slack. It can also answer questions using information from:

• Notion, Confluence, Google Drive, SharePoint
• Public help centers and internal wikis
• Product docs, onboarding material, and more

So that your team doesn’t have to spend time copying content into Slack or manually searching across tools.

2. Built for Support Teams in Slack

Unlike Slack AI, which is general-purpose, ClearFeed’s AI Agent is designed to reduce ticket volumes by:

• Instantly responding to FAQs and common issues in support or IT channels
• Detecting when an issue still needs human help and seamlessly routing it to the right agent via integrations with tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Jira, and more
• Working inside existing Slack threads, preserving context and continuity

3. Answers With Trusted Sources

ClearFeed provides citations and document references for every AI response. This builds user trust, improves transparency, and helps your team trace knowledge gaps when an answer isn’t helpful.

4. Granular Privacy Controls

Control what content is visible to whom, at a workspace or channel level:

• Use public docs for customer-facing answers
• Use internal docs to assist agents without exposing sensitive info
• Choose which sources the AI uses in each context

Which means ClearFeed adapts to your privacy needs.

5. Transparent Reporting for Smarter Docs

ClearFeed gives you insights into:

• How often were AI answers shown
• Which ones were helpful (or not)
• Where answers  couldn’t be generated at all

Use this data to improve your documentation and increase answer accuracy over time.

Slack AI is beneficial. But ClearFeed is purpose-built for support, success, and internal help desks operating in Slack. It deflects tickets, speeds up issue resolution, and turns your knowledge base into an AI-powered teammate. Try it out for free for 14 days or book a personalized demo to see it in action.

‍