The proliferation of artificial intelligence and its adoption by businesses and companies all around the world has brought hopes that workers’ productivity levels will be boosted as a result of this new technology. But there are so many well-regarded tools that it can be a bit daunting to find the best ones for you.
One platform that is spearheading this trend is Slack, the popular instant messaging platform used by millions of companies nowadays to help workers communicate and get things done.
Earlier this year, Slack launched a new AI tool that helps users summarize the endless stream of content that they get on the app’s channels and this has apparently resulted in pretty incredible time savings.
In fact, it seems to save so much time that both workers and companies are now struggling to determine what they should do with this spare time.
How Slack’s AI Feature Works
Slack AI was launched in February this year and it is designed to streamline communications and enhance workers’ productivity by removing some of the most time-consuming aspects of today’s digital workplace interaction.
The Thread Summarization feature produces a summary of all conversations that happen within a specific thread – a parallel conversation within a channel that is typically used to discuss a specific task or topic – so the worker can rapidly catch up with what was discussed, the most relevant actionable items, and any mentions of the person during the conversation.
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The tool produces a comprehensive excerpt that highlights the key topics and actionable items mentioned in the discussion. For those who have engaged with Slack channels during their work routines, it can be overwhelming to keep track of what everyone is discussing and this can become a job in itself. Thread Summarization is Slack’s AI-powered solution to that issue.
Meanwhile, the Channel Summarization feature takes things to a new level as it provides instant synopses of the discussion that took place within a specific channel during a specific timeframe – for example, in the past 7 days.
Employees benefit from this feature if they were, for example, on vacation during that time, sick, or otherwise absent for any particular reason. They can quickly get up to speed with the most relevant topics, situations, and discussions that occurred during the time they were not paying attention to the channel so they don’t have to be briefed by a colleague on what’s going on.
Finally, Slack also developed an AI-powered search tool that enhances the platform’s search functionality so it is easier to find specific content within the channels, threads, and other elements of the instant messaging app.
The new AI-powered Search feature can be used to find the meaning of a specific acronym, when a specific project was first mentioned, who was the person made responsible for a specific task, and when or what was the deadline for a certain assignment.
The message history is browsed by the software quickly to identify and locate the most relevant results for the user.
Slack AI Saves Workers Around 90 Minutes Per Week
Slack AI has already produced promising results when it comes to time savings as recent studies from companies like SpotON, Uber Technologies (UBER), and Anthropic revealed that workers saved an average of 1.5 hours (90 minutes) per week by using the tool. Across entire companies with dozens or hundreds of employees, that adds up massively.
This represented a substantial boost to productivity but also posed a challenge to organizations as they now have to find tasks and assignments that fill up this unexpected batch of spare time.
The Chief Executive Officer of Slack, a company owned by the CRM giant Salesforce, has acknowledged the power of AI to increase productivity levels and transform workplace communications.
She emphasized that users across Europe are finding the tool quite useful for different purposes. For example, she mentioned that workers in the United Kingdom are primarily leveraging Slack AI’s writing assistant feature while users in France are engaging primarily with the summarization tool.
However, she found that workers were still highly focused on what she refers to as the “work of work”, which are the time-consuming mechanical tasks that tend to reduce productivity and produce little value to businesses.
Hence, although Slack AI is freeing up a significant amount of time for workers, organizations are still struggling to use the software to transition their workloads to more valuable activities.
AI Tools Can Radically Reshape the Job Market
Tools like Slack AI are reshaping productivity in the workplace and assisting organizations to enhance time management for workers. By taking over repetitive tasks, these tools allow employees to focus on more strategic, creative, or complex tasks.
By providing quick access to relevant information and summarizing the most relevant aspects of certain discussions, they can quickly get up to speed with what’s going on in their departments without taking their colleagues’ time to be briefed.
Experts argue that the widespread adoption of these tools could lead to more productive discussions on the debate about shortening work weeks, negotiating more flexible working arrangements, helping workers improve their life-work balance, and even resizing organizations in light of these time savings.
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Companies are challenged to rethink their operational models to fully leverage the benefits of AI-driven productivity gains. This could potentially lead to restructured workflows and new workplace dynamics.
As AI takes over certain tasks, workers may need to learn new skills in areas where human creativity, interaction, and input are necessary and possibly irreplaceable by technology. The result: Most jobs could evolve and be reshaped by the AI revolution over time.
“I personally think it’s going to be one of the single biggest augmenters to human productivity that we’ve seen, and I think that it’s going to really unlock human productivity,” Dresser comments on the potential of AI technology in the workplace.
“It will probably create more jobs. We may end up with new jobs, and I think that’s going to be exciting,” she added.
Case Studies and Success Stories Are Already Surfacing
At United Parks and Resorts, the company that owns the popular SeaWorld and Busch Gardens parks, artificial intelligence is already being used to help marketers create campaigns more efficiently.
AI tools are used to write copy, suggest approaches and ideas for creative elements, and refine the audiences that will be targeted with different types of content.
“We’re a passion- and lifestyle-based marketer, so based upon the passions that are sparking, our engine triggers an alert and links back to ads it would recommend that we’ve already got loaded. It can use generative AI to adapt and personalize. And then the marketer within 15 minutes can check everything, launch the campaign and go,” the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Marisa Thalberg, told Digiday recently.
According to a study from Gartner, three-quarters of businesses will be using generative AI solutions in the future to create synthetic audiences in the next two years. This represents a 5% increase compared to the same study’s findings a year ago.
Meanwhile, analysts at Vanguard believe that the “transformative” power of AI will truly hit the United States economy in the second half of the 2020 decade. According to Joseph Davis, the asset management giant’s Chief Economist, AI could save the majority of workers at least 20% of the time they currently use to get their jobs done.
Safeguards Need to be in Place to Prevent Critical Data from Being Leaked
Companies like Slack are facing challenges in gaining the trust of prospective customers for their AI tools as the largest businesses in the world are worried that the data that is shared within these platforms – most of which is sensitive and confidential – is used to train these AI models.
Last month, the company was at the center of controversy as reports surfaced that businesses and users were not aware that they had to opt out of having their data used for AI training via email.
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The company clarified that the data is being used to train its “global models” which are the ones that come up with emojis and other interface-level recommendations, not the intelligent modules that are able to generate summaries and more complex content.
“We do not build or train these models in such a way that they could learn, memorize or be able to reproduce some part of customer data,” a Slack spokesperson told TechCrunch to clarify the issue.
In any case, the whole AI training issue went viral and prompted businesses, developers, and users to take a second look at Slack’s terms of use and privacy policy.
Moving forward, customers will probably scrutinize in detail what they are agreeing to when they sign up for these AI-powered tools to make sure that their data and private information are safe from being exploited for AI training or other purposes.
The AI-Driven Productivity Boom is Just Getting Started
These early findings about how Slack AI is improving workers’ productivity are exciting for the company and businesses that can use the app to host their workplace communications as they are starting to see the immediate benefit of implementing the technology.
However, new challenges have also surfaced including how organizational structures could be impacted and job descriptions may be redefined now that the AI revolution is helping workers focus their time on activities that create the most value.
AI adoption and use in the workplace is just getting started and the road ahead will probably bring with it significant changes to how businesses – both large and small – will operate.