Slack is about to TL;DR your lengthy work threads

It seems like every tech platform is rushing to jump on the AI bandwagon. From Yelp to Amazon, the artificial intelligence-based announcements are pouring in weekly.

Next up: Slack. The professional messaging platform has just unveiled its set of generative AI tools. The initial Slack AI experience includes generative capabilities to do with search answers, recaps, and summaries.

The new features will deliver key highlights, personalized answers, and — perhaps most useful — thread summaries. The latter will help workers catch up on long Slack threads. Similarly, channel recaps will provide key highlights on any Slack channel, collating unread messages or summarizing conversations over any given date range.

Meanwhile, the platform's new search feature will help workers get "clear, concise" answers to specific questions, eliminating "wild goose chases using roundabout search terms", according to the company.

"These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth," says CEO Denise Dresser.

AI will soon be integrated into a fleet of Slack partner apps too, like Notion, Box, Asana, and Canva. Notion, for example, already has an AI summary feature.

These features have arrived after an initial pilot program, during which Slack workers found productivity to be improved "firsthand". Now users will get to discover this for themselves.