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The oral sex of Slack , Denise Dresser , tells TechCrunch she is shift the business chat political platform into a “ work operating system , ” specifically by make Slack a hub for AI applications from Salesforce , Adobe , and Anthropic . The company ’s chief executive officer take care Slack as more than a place to visit with your coworkers , but do drug user need that ? And if they do , will they give a premium for it ?
Salesforcepurchased Slackin 2021 , in brief after the messaging political program became a staple of remote work for millions of masses . Three year later , Salesforce is pivoting severely to AI agents — evidently so intemperate that their democratic electronic messaging help is doing it too . Slack CEO Denise Dresser read the chopine will take on a key role in the transformation , since it ’s a natural position to interact with AI agents , because the great unwashed are already chatting there throughout the work day .
“ AI is testify us a new direction to receive technology which is very organic to Slack : it ’s colloquial , you ’re turn up information , and you ’re require action correctly in the stream of work , ” said Dresser , who take over as Slack ’s chief executive 10 month ago , in an audience . “ There ’s probably not a better topographic point and product than Slack to admit you to do that . ”
But why does Slack need AI ? Ever since ChatGPT plunge in 2022 , a lot of companies have introduced AI features as a way to appear “ dilute edge ” even if the integration does n’t make much sense to the marrow product . quagmire adding AI broker to its messaging avail does n’t seem to be an obvious exception .
Dresser ’s justification for AI agents is that Slack is not simply a piece of work messaging program , but rather a digital workplace or piece of work O that “ brings all your masses and processes together . ”
The head of Slack tells TechCrunch that every CEO is asking for AI lineament , such as ways to quickly see up on team discussions or putz to come up information bury in some database . These are some small way Slack is trying to bring companies into the AI era , she explain .
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One of Slack ’s fresh broker , Agentforce , will allow Salesforce customers to execute on - demand analysis of stage business data like a shot in Slack . Cohere and Anthropic ’s Slack agent will bid similar services , as long as you ’re devote for their enterprise AI service .
Perplexity is also releasing an agent for Slack that will let you explore the web . Adobe Express ’s Slack agent will let you make branded contentedness from text command prompt within the message service .
Klarna ’s chief operating officer made headlines last month when he announced plans todrop Salesforce and Workdayas software system providers and substitute them with internally built AI pecker . Andreessen Horowitz spouse published ablog postin July prognosticate changes like this , where business would pitch forth from the costly CRM services in favor of in - house AI solutions . Salesforce chief operating officer Marc Benioff is sceptical of Klarna ’s AI solutions andwants to see some proofthe companionship is really doing it .
That trust was test earlier this year when Slack came under fire for develop arecommender system of rules on customer data by nonremittal , according to part of its secrecy policy found by developers on Hacker News . It was later reveal that Slack was using customer information to power emoji recommendations and was not using it to prepare its tumid language models underlie Slack AI . But still , the concealment insurance claimed that Slack required substance abuser to send an email to the company if they did n’t need their message to be part of Slack ’s training data .
Slack claimed to not use client data to train Slack AI then and go on to today .
“ No LLM are cultivate on Slack datum , period , ” said chief product officer Rob Seaman in an interview with TechCrunch . “ Honestly , there was a hiccough and an update to a policy on our web site that we could have handled better . Especially in this old age of AI and heighten awareness of how your data is being used , that turned into a thing we wish had n’t . ”
These head around privateness only become more prevalent as Slack tip further into AI . The overhaul is exchange from stringently messaging into one where AI tools are pulling data in and out of the political platform . user have good reason to be skeptical as AI becomes just another tool in the box .
