Slack: The AI-Powered Platform for Work

Slack was developed by Slack Technologies and is now owned by Salesforce and was founded in 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia and focuses on developing and publishing real-time collaboration applications and platforms. It also offers engineering, sales, marketing, IT, project management and human resources solutions. The company was created by Daniel Stewart Butterfield, Bradley J. Horowitz, Eric Costello, Callum James Henderson-Begg, and Serguei Mourachov.

In June 2019, Slack Technologies went public on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2020, Salesforce announced the acquisition for $27.7 billion, which was completed in July 2021.

What is Slack?

Slack is a cloud-based team communication platform developed by Slack Technologies and is owned by Salesforce since 2020. It is available as a freemium and paid subscription service, and offers text messaging, file and media sharing, voice and video calls, and group chat for business collaboration among teams.

History

Slack began as an internal communication tool used within the start-up Tiny Speck, which was Stewart Butterfield’s (the co-founder of the photo sharing site Flickr) company while they were working on the development of online game Glitch. It was initially built around the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol and used scripts to automate and organise file exchanges. By October 2012, Stewart Butterfield decided to change the direction of the company after he realised that Glitch was not a profitable product. He repurposed the communication tools they had developed and renamed the new product as “Slack” in 2012.

As he explained, the word slack stood for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge,” and replaced the codename “linefeed.”

In August 2013, Slack was launched and remained compatible with IRC. The platform could also be used with XMPP messaging protocols. In 2018, both gateways were terminated due to the limitations within the protocols.

In July 2018, Slack bought HipChat and Stride from Atlassian, which it closed in 2019, and moved the users to Slack. In June 2019 went public through a direct public offering which reached a market value of US$19.5 billion. In July 2020, Slack purchased Rimeto whose functionality was launched as an extra feature named Slack Atlas in June 2021.

On 5 December 2022, Stewart Butterfield left the company and he was replaced by Lidiane Jones, an executive vice president at Salesforce. In November 2023, Salesforce executive Denise Dresser replaced Jones, who in turn replaced Whitney Wolfe Herd as Bumble CEO.

Prestaciones

Slack offers many IRC-style features, such as chat rooms known as channels, organised by topic, and private groups and direct messaging. From files to conversations, and people, everything is searchable within Slack. Users can use emojis to express feelings in messages. Communities, groups, or teams can join a “workspace” via a specific URL or invitation sent by a team admin.

Users can have private one-to-one messages or group conversations of up to 9 participants. Group direct message can be changed into a private channel.

Slack can integrate with third-party services and supports Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Box, Heroku, IBM Bluemix, Crashlytics, GitHub, Runscope, Zendesk, and Zapier.

In March 2018, Slack partnered with Workday, and as a result employees can access co-worker information, organisational charts, feedback, and time-off requests within Slack.

In March 2022, introduced Huddles, a new voice conference feature where users can mute or unmute themselves, share their screens, draw on a shared screen, and invite others to the call.

In March 2023, Salesforce announced that it would launch a ChatGPT integration for Slack to help users summarise conversations, answer questions, or draft replies.

Growth

By 2019, Slack had more than 10 million daily active users from more than 600,000 organisations, across more than 150 countries. From 2013 to 2019 the amount of time spent on work email had deteriorated due to the use of Slack and such competitors as Workplace (2016), Microsoft Teams (2017) and Google Hangouts Chat and Meet (2018).

In 2017, Slack was awarded the title of the best startup of the year at the Crunchies Awards.

Slack AI tools for smarter working

Slack has introduced AI capabilities to increase productivity for its worker userbase.  A suite of built-in AI features will help deliver summaries of threads and channel recaps and allow users to ask questions about what’s been happening at work. Slack started testing Slack AI last year, but now it’s launching it as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise users. A user can use AI to get a full summary of a particular conversation or get a recap of the chatter that has taken place in the various channels.  

Users will also have the opportunity to create channel recaps, like topic jumps within conversations, and thread summaries to update workers on what they may have missed on threads.

Users can ask Slack’s AI questions and search through chats based on conversational data. After a pilot test, Slack estimates that workers can save up to 97 minutes per week, with the help of AI. Further

AI capabilities will also be added on the app in the near future

Slack’s VP of product Jackie Rocca stated that “We’re bringing AI into Slack to make work more productive and better for everyone. As teams work in Slack, knowledge across people, data, and tools compounds over time – from historical context on past projects, real-time context on present work, subject matter expertise from people, and more.”

Rocca explained that Slack AI’s ability to search within chat data will help workers find information very quickly and easy. And that the goal is to add further AI features to make it easier for everyone to use and “unlock significant productivity for our customers.”

Research and analysis company GlobalData forecast in its 2023 executive briefing on AI, that the global AI market will soon be worth $909 billion by 2030, accomplishing a CAGR of 35% between 2022 and 2030. GlobalData also believe that generative AI tools will grow rapidly in the workplace throughout 2024 as generative AI becomes more precise and consistent. Slack is definitely investing in the technology of the future as it recognises that the future of work is also enmeshed with generative AI. As Slack has transformed the modern workspace, it will continue to evolve alongside other technologies and remain current and adaptable for future generations.

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