UNITED STATES: Lidiane Jones, CEO of Slack, the widely embraced workplace messaging platform, revealed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the platform’s capabilities, just nine months into her tenure.
Jones assumed leadership after the departure of co-founder Stewart Butterfield, following Salesforce’s $27.7 billion acquisition of the San Francisco-based enterprise software giant.
Navigating post-acquisition waters presented challenges, prompting the appointment of Jones, a former Microsoft executive known for her rapid ascent at Salesforce, to stabilize the platform. Since her appointment in January, Slack has embarked on a dynamic trajectory, ensuring it stays competitive, particularly against rival Microsoft.
Jones marvelled at the transformative potential of AI, which gained prominence with the introduction of ChatGPT a few weeks before her appointment.
During a visit to San Francisco for Salesforce’s annual “Dreamforce” event, AI emerged as a central topic. Many anticipate that tools like Slack are poised for a significant overhaul with generative AI, capable of producing texts, images, and sounds in everyday language.
Originally tailored for teamwork and internal communication, Slack, alongside counterparts like Microsoft’s Teams, swiftly rolled out AI-powered versions, effectively functioning as online assistants.
Unlike Microsoft, Slack users can directly engage with generative AI chatbots from various providers, further enhancing its versatility.
With 300 million monthly users, Microsoft’s app surpasses Slack in terms of daily active users, but Jones emphasized Slack’s strength lies in its open platform approach.
While Slack currently has no immediate plans to develop its language model, Jones hinted at potential future ventures into specialized models.
Looking further ahead, highly personalized AI agents that function like digital secretaries may be in Slack’s future, though Jones acknowledged that building trust in such systems will take time.
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