Slack, a popular work-friendly communication platform, is now joining the AI hype train. Slack AI has finally dropped, and from the look of it, Copilot on Microsoft Teams may be getting a new competitor in town.
The AI, as described by the company, can deliver answers that you search for, recap channels by generating key highlights, and create summaries for long threads to help you catch up – just like on Teams and even a thread summarizer on Outlook.
And it looks promising, too, as seen in its demo. If you’re working on a project and you’re out of the loop with the conversation, you can simply type “What is project x,” and then Slack AI will search through the channel’s conversation and pull out a simplified answer.
As for the thread summarizer feature, an AI button will appear in the top right corner, allowing you to summarize unread messages, messages from the past week, or custom date ranges.
But it’s not free. Slack AI is currently rolling out for Enterprise users as a paid add-on and it’s only available in English. Supports for other languages and other plans will be announced in the future.
Copilot for Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, also does not come for free. It’s included in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 plan, which costs $30 per user per month. This plan grants access to the AI features not only in Teams but also in other applications like Word and Excel.