Talking and working together as a team online has gotten really tough. With so many messages and different places to chat, it's super important to make sure everyone can work together well and easily. As we get more and more messages and it gets harder to find important information, using smart tools to help sort and improve our chats is really important.

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.

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What Is Slack AI?

Slack AI offers a collection of tools that use artificial intelligence to improve user experience and increase productivity within Slack. It features capabilities like smart search, quick conversation summaries, and brief recaps, which help users swiftly find and prioritize important information. These built-in tools are designed to provide a smooth and safe customer experience by adapting to your organization's specific needs and data.

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The Upsides 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 important conversations you may have missed.

“Conversation summaries save the day after meeting marathons: I use them to stay informed on what I missed while I take care of something else.”

• Jason Morita, Product Owner, ProService Hawaii

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.

“As Wayfair scales globally, we want to find information quickly so people can spend less time catching up and more time delivering. With Slack AI’s compelling features, we’re empowered to do just that.”

• Asad Rahman, Director of Employee Tech, Wayfair

4. Customizable daily recaps: Slack AI can provide a daily recap of important 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 smarter 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 the AI add-on be purchased for all users in the organization, not just select individuals.

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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 is helpful for making teams quicker to respond and better at figuring out what customers want. It can look at customer questions and recommend the best answers using information from past times. It also helps keep track of all the interactions with customers and lets teams know if there might be a problem based on how customers are feeling. This kind of active help keeps customers happy and more likely to stay, making the service more personalized and attentive.

The Roadblocks 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 actually 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.

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So, Is There Any Alternative to Slack’s AI Assistant?

While Slack's AI Assistant is a popular option for enhancing productivity and collaboration within teams, ClearFeed is an alternative that offers a range of features that might better suit your needs or preferences. Here are the key benefits of ClearFeed's GPT-Powered-Answers - a Virtual Agent for Slack.

1. AI Over All Your Data - Not Just Slack: While Slack is great at providing AI over data in Slack, the reality is that much of the data in the enterprise lives outside Slack. ClearFeed’s AI assistants can leverage data beyond Slack like that living in Wikis, Documentation, KBs, Notion, Google Docs, Sharepoint, and more.
2. Built for Support Channels: ClearFeed’s Virtual Agent operates within Slack to provide immediate, AI-generated responses to common customer queries. This capability is designed to deflect tickets and is integrated with ticketing flows so only unanswered queries are routed to the service teams.
3. Accurate Answers with Citations: Using the advanced capabilities of GPT, it delivers accurate and relevant answers. Each response not only addresses the query but also includes references to the documents used to construct the answer, offering transparency and further resources to users.

4. Full Control over Privacy: Users can use different data sets in different contexts and have full control over what corporate data is exposed in which context. For example, public documentation and forums can be used to answer questions directly for customers, while private wikis can be used to generate assisted answers for agents.
5. Pricing Based on Usage, Not Agents: ClearFeed allows businesses to pay for what they truly need and use, ensuring that small teams or those with varying usage levels aren't forced into overpaying. Whether you're a large corporation dealing with thousands of customer interactions or a small business that handles a modest number of requests, you can choose a plan that precisely caters to your demand.

4. Detailed Reporting for Knowledge-Driven Support: ClearFeed also provides detailed insights into the number of answers generated, where answers were generated, where they were not, and where answers were downvoted. These insights enable support teams to continuously improve the quality of their documentation to improve the automated answering system.

Interested to know more about ClearFeed’s Virtual Agent? Check out our live demo here or lock in a demo with our team here.